March of the Sycophants

It looks like political wash-up Ségolène Royal said she would turn up in Washington DC for the inauguration. Le Parisien:

Ségolène Royal announced on Monday in Poitiers that she's going to Washington to attend the inauguration ceremony that will install Barack Obama as the 44th U.S. president on Tuesday 20 January at the White House. « I will visit the United States to attend the inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama.»

« I will leave on Saturday (January 17) and return the following Thursday,» said Ségolène Royal, on the sidelines of the wishes to the press, the regional council.

She will stay with « a family » and "has no program even arrested. But should meet with the team of economists of the new U.S. president, she said. « When I look at what Barack Obama on preparing the plan to relaunch his country, I see at the forefront of his plan: education, training, innovation, the environment, the key levers to overcome the crisis, » said the President of the region. Issues that we offer in that area, those things we believe in , these are the real tools of a new development model, » she concluded.

Gee, thanks, but I though it was “the Danish model” you were trying to peddle in France, if memory serves.

Never mind that it sounds like she wasn’t invited and was gate crashing, just get a look at the foregone conclusions swimming around in the vocabulary and conception of leadership as power: it’s “his” country, he’s “relaunching” it, Obama is being “installed” of all things. The tools of the “new model” you see, are a bunch of things that we’re instructed to worry about, and fight “the man” – whoever it is we’re told is “the man”.


Ségolène Royal political deathwatch update: one can’t stress enough how much her trip to Washington is so much like her desperate campaign attempt to have an International affairs cred by going to China. She recently got her block knocked off of as her party’s chief starving proletarian by someone far to her left. From her blog we see that she’s out-and-about in DC free of the burden of anyone politically useful paying attention to her.

From her blog, we find that she’s more than willing to bow and scrape to Mr. Obama if it can get her back on the good side of her own party by comparing him to a pantheon of Presidents, civil rights leaders , and tries to tell us that her new hero is fulfilling the life work of any American the French happen to respect. In this rather sad opportunity she’s taking to get herself onto her potential voters’ radar, we discover a rather loony notion she has that the White House has the levers over what she thinks is a simple, 2 dimensional command economy.

This reconciliation has also expanded political and economic determinants in the current crisis. Barack Obama gave to political legitimacy, which between Reagan and Bush had too often been denied. He may thus be supported by the central government to boost and regulate the U.S. economy. Admittedly, there's Lincoln and Martin Luther King in Obama, but also of Franklin Roosevelt.

Yes, her supporters are in large part stupid enough to believe all of that. Especially the part where there was no 8 year Clinton presidency between Reagan and Georges Boosh.

According to the shallow in Europe, which in France includes a large number of her supporters, the dint and trope of American black men is somehow part of the civil rights movement in some roundabout, tropish sort of way. Even if they weren’t even alive at the time, and they don’t take into account what the actual person being compared is saying or doing. It could just as well be your accountant, and the thought would come to mind with most European socialists.

Sooner or later, she has to get back on the campaign bus, of course:

For France, I draw from two perspectives. First, take the initiative of European integration. On the other hand, diversify our friendships. We must open a constructive dialogue with South America, Africa, India, China, the Middle East. On my way to Chile, the Middle East and China during the presidential campaign, on my way from Argentina, India and Morocco, I have tried my position, to show that concern.

This, despite that fact thatshe wont make any distinction between governments IN the Middle East (Lebanon or Syria?), South America (Venezuela or Columbia?), and Africa (Sudan or Chad?), which makes it, like this trip to DC a picture tour to energize her supporters back home. Both of them.
From her weekend plans we discover that she’s going to museums, memorials, and:

A working meeting with associations involved in community leadership and the organization of communities (community organizing).

Inspired by the action and method of Saul Alinsky, this form of social intervention aimed at strengthening the capacity of the residents of neighborhoods to act on their lives and become master of their destiny. It deeply influenced Barack Obama, who was himself community organizer in a black neighborhood of Chicago and Hillary Clinton, who wrote a dissertation on the work of Alinsky.

Yes, that underhanded Gramscian bait-and-switch artist Saul Alinsky.