BACKPAGE STORY: JACK SACKS JACK
Write When You Get Work
While the rest of the planet staggers from news of Jack's exit, we have looked long and hard for American comment on the most important European passing since the third or fourth or fifth retirement of Gérard Depardieu. While Jack looms large among Europeans because of his penchant for bullying (and here) and banjaxing (and here and here) Europa, America barely remarked his political guttering.
There was this:
BUSH WISHES CHIRAC 'ALL THE BEST'
BOGOTA March 11, 2007 (AFP)
And there were these:
March 12, 2007 (NY Sun) - The announcement by President Chirac that he will not seek a third term sent us to that famous first paragraph of DeGaulle's memoirs, the paragraph that begins with the line about how all his life he has thought of France in a certain way. DeGaulle wrote that instinctively he had the feeling that Providence had created France either for "complete success or for exemplary misfortunes." If in spite of this, DeGaulle wrote, "mediocrity shows in her acts and deeds, it strikes me as an absurd anomaly, to be imputed to the faults of Frenchmen, not to the genius of the land." It would be a charitable way to describe Mr. Chirac, who, though heir to the Gaullist tradition, blundered badly and left nearly all Americans disappointed.... One of the salient issues in the upcoming election in France is the failure of the country to assimilate its large and rapidly growing Muslim population. The inability of Mr. Chirac to endorse a pro-growth economic policy in France no doubt has made this a crisis. It would be wrong to suggest that this crisis is only an economic one; the Islamist war is now seething on French soil. But we have no doubt that the way forward for France has much to do with the economic principles that have been proven in America in the Age of Reagan. It was tragic for Mr. Chirac that he failed to see this, but these ideas of liberty are — as President Bush might point out — universal and await whoever in France will have the courage to seize them.
CHIRAC, PUBLIC EACH SAY 'NON' TO THIRD TERM
March 12, 2007 (G&M) - After 12 years as head of state and 40 years in politics, Jacques Chirac announced his departure from public office yesterday, leaving as the most unpopular French President in the history of the Fifth Republic.A recent poll showed that he would have won an embarrassing 5 per cent of the vote if he had decided to run again in next month's election. Observers had started to remark on his mental "absence" while attending to government business, and a board game that lampooned allegations that he was involved in a corruption scandal while he was mayor of Paris was a popular gift at Christmas.
March 13, 2007 (LAT) - Perhaps the best thing that can be said about whoever ends up winning the French presidency this spring is that it won't be Jacques Chirac. The second best thing is that it won't be anybody from the ossified political establishment that has governed France for more than a quarter of a century, first under the 14-year term of Francois Mitterrand and then the 12-year grind of Chirac.... [French economic] growth has been sluggish, and the French national debt has ballooned. His ferocious opposition to meaningful change in Europe's notoriously wasteful agricultural supports has helped stall progress in global trade liberalization, helping keep the developing world mired in poverty.
... Chirac's lack of discernible foreign policy convictions beyond needling the U.S. "hyper-power" has damaged France's international reputation and hampered critical peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan and Lebanon. Even his major accomplishments — helping with the creation and expansion of the European Union — were besmirched by his political bullying of new Central European members, his insistence on turning Brussels governance into a French patronage system and his resounding failure to persuade his citizens to approve the EU Constitution in 2005.
As former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius said Monday: "In relation to the major problems facing France and Europe, it was a presidency of wasted time."
Screwed-up France under Jack or some other enarch is still screwed-up France. To make an impression, a French president needs do more than sit atop the heap of France and remark the spectacular views.
Americans might take note of a French president were he to put a little shine on France before retiring.
PFFT (What is this?): ZZZzzzzz... 4 | Rayonnement français 0
