Roger Cohen: The good American and Monsieur Obama

By Roger Cohen

Published: June 8, 2008

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PARIS: The French have always cherished a class of people called "les bons Américains." These good Americans were those truest to a Gallic idea of what the United States should be, and in recent years those at the furthest remove from the aberrant folk who elected George W. Bush.

In recent decades, good Americans have included John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie (whose elegance betrayed a European sensibility), Woody Allen (of European urbanity and wit), Michael Moore (of European vehemence on the Iraq war) and Al Gore (of European environmentalism).

But right now, in French eyes, there's a single good American: the Democratic Party nominee, Barack Obama. His book, "The Audacity of Hope," is on bestseller lists. His face is everywhere, sometimes in socialist realist images evoking Che Guevara.

An online committee for his election has drawn all-star support, including the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel, the Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Pierre Bergé, the partner of the late Yves Saint-Laurent.

Out in the troubled suburbs, with their large African and Arab populations and broad mistrust of a political system that has produced one black parliamentarian among the 555 representing mainland France, Obama is an urban legend. In France at least, he has high-low appeal.

France is not alone in its Obama fever - German infatuation is scarcely less intense - but I think the French case says something particular about the state of American politics and global expectations.

Four years ago, with post 9/11 nationalist sentiment still running high, John Kerry had to hide the fact he spoke French and had French relatives. Republicans liked to mock the then Democratic candidate by suggesting he began rallies with a "Bonjour."

That anti-Gallic, freedom-fries fever has run its course. It's exhausted, as are many of the jingoistic elements of the conservative, Republican wave that has been the dominant force in U.S. politics since Nixon.

The successful attack on Democrats that began in the 1960s with Nixon's appeal to the "great silent majority of Americans" who abhorred anti-Vietnam agitators, and glided into Bush's vilification of egghead liberals short on Iraq testosterone, has exhausted itself.

As George Packer notes in a must-read New Yorker piece called "The Fall of Conservatism," the politically fruitful Republican-engineered polarization of politics around military might, family values and small government has died with Bush.

"Polls," Packer writes, "reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment."

Or, as the Republican strategist Ed Rollins puts it to Packer, "Today, if you're not rich or Southern or born again, the chances of your being a Republican are not great." No wonder John McCain's campaign is very short on polarizing conservative orthodoxy.

What I think this means for Obama is that French or European adulation for him is no longer a political problem. It cannot be associated by the likes of Karl Rove with wimpy Euro appeasement and "socialism." If anything, Americans are looking to European health care and environmental measures as possible models.

Still, the wave of international good will needs careful handling by the Obama campaign. For the providential "good American" can never be as good as the Gallic and global imagination would like. The silent Americans are still there; they are not as European as the French would wish.

One of the things the French love about Obama is his talk of dialogue, even with the likes of Iran. But what Obama must do domestically in the coming months is prove his toughness on national security. He needs to temper change with resoluteness.

That may well mean the selection of a white, male running mate with military experience and appeal to blue-collar Reagan Democrats - somebody like Senator Jim Webb of Virginia.

It may also mean more hawkish speeches like the one Obama made last week on Israel-Palestine to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He declared that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." He also said "Israel's identity as a Jewish state must be preserved" - a dismissal of the Palestinian "right of return."

How at least the first of these conditions is compatible with any peace is unclear to me. But Obama needs to win Florida, and Jews there remain skeptical of his Israel commitment. Domestic needs trump the idealized French, and global, vision of Obama as peacemaker and friend of the oppressed, Palestinians among them.

Obama is right to play hardball to win. International hopes have been raised so high that disappointments are inevitable. France's imagined America and the real country remain at some remove.