While listening to Sarko's news conference the other day, I did ask myself if he had lost his concentration. It seemed uncharacteristically maladroit of him to defend his failure to enhance the purchasing power of the French by asking the press the rhetorical question, "What do you want me to do? The coffers are empty. Do you want me to give orders to private firms, which I have no power to do?" A confession of
powerlessness from the
voluntarist president, whose slogan was, "Together, everything becomes possible!" And then to compound the blunder by saying that this year would mark the end of the 35-hour week, when so much of his economic policy had been built around the idea of offering incentives to firms and workers to
voluntarily exceed the legal limit (he has since backtracked on this statement, saying he has no intention of changing the duration of the legal work week).
It was a puzzle. The always-on-message president had gone way off. What was going on? Now we
have an answer--of sorts. It seems that François Fillon is worried that the Omnipresident has been distracted by Carla Bruni, who has moved into the Élysée, where she has been assigned a room for her songwriting. He skips meetings, he doesn't pay attention when people talk to him. He's laughing again and telling jokes--dirty jokes. For those who like their psychohistory
lite, we have a new story line for the Sarko saga: the man who wanted the presidency to fulfill his adolescent fantasies, who felt left out as a boy and so insisted on being the center of attention as a man, now has every boy's dream, a live-in supermodel and singer-songwriter, and he is mooning away after her while his ministers drone on about such tiresome matters as inflation, GDP, and other such rot. Let Edgar Morin and Amartya Sen sort it all out while Nicolas draws hearts around the name "Carla" on the covers of all those forbiddingly thick dossiers.