The Minister of Everything: Nicolas Sarkozy’s Rotten Spring

John Vinocur on Nicolas Sarkozy:

The polls are awful these days, while commentaries range largely from the impatient and disappointed to the cruel and vicious. Mr. Sarkozy’s seemingly raucous, self-absorbed personal style is a constant target, while his campaign promises to vitalize and reform French politics and economic performance are increasingly mocked as substanceless.

[Both Jacques Chirac and] his predecessor, François Mitterrand, had worse poll results than Mr. Sarkozy, and even more obvious political setbacks, each losing his parliamentary majority in mid-mandate elections.

…But both men, who ruled into their 70s, projected a kind of presidential serenity that Mr. Sarkozy, 20 years younger, has not. They kept a fairly regal distance from daily domestic policy making and politics — in contrast to their successor’s hands-on-everything approach.

…A Gaullist colleague of the president … said, “Sarkozy literally personalized every aspect of government and became the minister of everything. He thought he could move from agriculture to labor to immigration fast enough to stay a moving target. As it turned out, he became the target of every constituency imaginable.”

Roger Cohen joins in with Reading Sarkozy’s Mind:

And Iran. Ooh la la! All these advisers telling me Khamenei is not Ahmadinejad and Ahmadinejad is not Larijani. C’est du baloney! Du pur baloney! They’re all the same band of liars playing with us like a cat with a ball of wool.