Newt Gingrich's admiration for Nicolas Sarkozy

... compares him to Lincoln:.

The only way to keep the White House in G.O.P. hands, Gingrich said, would be to nominate someone who, in essence, runs against Bush, in the style of Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right cabinet minister who just won the French Presidency by making his own President, Jacques Chirac, his virtual opponent. Sarkozy is a transforming figure in French politics, Gingrich said, and he suggested that the only Republican who shared Sarkozy’s “transformative” approach to governing was, at that moment, eating a bowl of oatmeal at the McLean Family Restaurant.

“What’s fascinating about Sarkozy is that you have an incumbent cabinet member of a very unpopular twelve-year Presidency, who over the last three years became the clear advocate of fundamental change, running against an attractive woman”—the Socialist leader Ségolène Royal—“who is the head of the opposition,” Gingrich went on. “In a country that wanted to say, ‘Not them,’ he managed to switch the identity of the ‘them.’ He said, ‘I’m different from Chirac, and she’s not. If you want more of the same, you should vote for her.’ It was a Lincoln-quality strategic decision.”

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[Gab]

Talking about American coverage of the French presidential elections, William Pfaff's piece in this week's New York Review of Books is the best I have read (www.nybooks.com), certainly better than Jane Kramer's paper in the New Yorker from April 23rd, who believes France's "system" is about to "crash" and its competitive economy is limited to "luxury labels and designer clothes".