A European friend of mine, a songwriter, once wrote a tune about the obsessive quality of love. Yes, the subject has been broached before by a songwriter or two, but never with what has turned out to be such wild inaccuracy. “People in love,” he wrote, “don’t care about the late-night news.”
Was he ever wrong. In Europe this week, the news — late-night, around the clock, in the papers, first thing in the morning — is all about love. The love of Obama. In the smallest villages you can buy newspapers and magazines filled with Obama love. It’s on radio Alouette, France 2, and even on the BBC. Love is in the air.
In the French tradition, it’s a passionate love, but a proper one. O-love is not the O-love of Pauline Réage. It’s post-kink, trending deeper into obsession. It’s the crazy love Moonies have for that Korean guy, the love middle-aged women have for Maureen Dowd, the love that only your dog can have for you. It’s a spiritual fascination with a devotional kicker — what Le Monde’s blogging logophiliacs, Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart, wryly call “obamalâtrie,” a religious fantasy fed by ubiquitous apparitions of that “Christlike figure on all the front pages in the universe . . . “
The gist here, if I’m not being clear, is that Le Monde, its readers, its bloggers, its coffee-drinking bureaucrats — the entire population of its small cosmos, in fact — are humming with an intensified version of the fervor that fills the tent just before the evangelist jumps to the pulpit. “With the 44th U.S. president, we reach the highest stage of worship, that accorded to God . . . Obama has already entered the pantheon. Soon, no doubt, he will perform miracles.” Soon? Rousseau and Houdart must be kidding — and of course they are. This is meant to be arch humor, but something tells me not everyone gets the joke.
Because Obama’s win has given new life to European leftists, O-love has provoked, as a Le Monde commentary points out, an inflation of superlatives — including quite a few in the pages of Le Monde itself, where the day after the election, an Obama/USA cartoon floated above the paper’s staid banner. And what Le Monde calls the “Obama phenomenon” is not specific to Paris, either. Out here in my corner of France, where the local festivals celebrate beans and sardines (though not at the same time, I’m happy to say), you can still pick up post-election copies of Ouest-France with its special Obama insert.
Obama has become the overnight model for all French politicians. There is a French justice minister of North African descent, Rachida Dati, Rousseau and Houdart’s “fallen idol,” who has, as Le Nouvel Observateur reports, disappointed those who thought her high-level employment might help woo those who are chronically unemployed. Look for the re-emergence of Tariq Ramadan, the cynical Euro-Islamist “scholar” once banished from overt respectability for his anti-Semitism.
But for the most part here, as everywhere in Europe, the search for a political figure who is adorable in the literal sense goes on. In almost every capital, political strategists in opposition parties have spent the last two days staring blankly into space, scanning the web, calling friends, asking each other, “Who do we have?” The answer is nobody. In Germany, the choices are far fewer than in France, even. It’s not like a left-wing Turk is going to replace Angela Merkel any time soon. And the opposition in Britain? Two words: Boris Johnson. As the “Tory Diary” on ConservativeHome.com makes painfully obvious, in trying hard to congratulate Obama, David Cameron, the ultrapink party leader has just turned a whiter shade of pale.
There are only so many ways to say “I love you, Barry,” so naturally a certain amount of contrarianism has already set in. Le Monde, in an editorial called “After the Euphoria,” tried to dial back the rapture a little by wisely observing that in the election, race had been a secondary issue — at least for white voters — since Obama had been very careful during the campaign not to become “the candidate of blacks.” Mostly because he didn’t have to, but that’s a salient point, since if he had run a campaign based on entitlement, he would have lost — just as the “entitlement” of war heroes always backfires on Republicans.
Le Monde seems to have wisely realized that the entire Obama campaign may have created a sky-high set of expectations that may result in “regrettable disappointments” — especially, the paper warns, if Obama is serious about adding troops to Iraq, or if he puts Europe in an “awkward” situation with Russia by helping Ukraine and Georgia join NATO, or if he slips into protectionism as an economic strategy — and that those who sing his praises loudest now may be howling loudest later.
Le Figaro was even drippier, chiding Obama for talking about change, then recreating Battleship Clinton by making Rahm Emanuel, a man the paper calls an “attack dog” (20 Minutes called him Obama’s “bad cop” — put them together, and Emanuel becomes a bad cop attack dog), his first appointment.
Ivan Rioufol, Figaro‘s blogging editorialist, even has a few kind words for the guy in the election who wasn’t Obama. “John McCain,” he writes, “lost with honor.” The criticism of his campaign, Rioufol notes, should be tempered by an understanding that McCain had been outspent two-to-one (especially once Obama broke his campaign-finance promise) and had to run not only against a formidable candidate but also against a frivolous and biased press. Meanwhile, Rioufol writes, among Obama’s cheering fans is a “clique of Islamist despots and autocrats,” and that can’t be all good. The piece ends with a few pointed observations about the significance of Obama’s victory to France’s black and Arab population. It’s worth reading the whole thing.
But Rioufol is so serious — the intellectual in the corner talking quietly while everyone else is dancing to Green Day.
Americans, especially those on the Left, love to be loved, and there hasn’t been this much of the stuff aimed at the U.S.A. for a long time — just over seven years in fact. The last time Europe erupted in a clamor of amour it was because terrorists were flying airplanes into the World Trade Center. That bout of affection lasted about 48 hours. This love is made to last for weeks, maybe even months, but probably not years. Still, by the standards of the trans-Atlantic marriage, that’s an eternity.
— Denis Boyles is the author, most recently, of Superior Nebraska. He directs the Brouzils Seminars and is completing a book on early twentieth-century publishing for Knopf.
