Sego-Sarko
I missed the debate broadcast live but have enjoyed YouTube's offerings. Since watching parts of it I have struggled with my feelings about it. Oliver Kamm has managed to find exactly a large part of what bothered me.
I'm a Europhile left-winger prepared to be well disposed to Mme Royal, and I'm fairly certain I know how any responsible politician of the democratic Left would have answered this interviewer. The exchange is extraordinary. To found your electoral claim on stoking fears of violent opposition should your opponent win surely crosses the line dividing prediction from incitement. It's beyond negative campaigning: it's actively inflammatory, and I hope Mme Royal's standing suffers appropriately.
What bothers me is the things that what I would like to have thought of as my left will do today. And maybe they always did it. Certainly they sign up to support totalitarian creeps at the drop of a hat.
But the debate was an interesting thing to watch, to evaluate strategies and messages. Sarkozy had clearly been brilliantly prepared, not to erupt, to stick to facts, to engage the audience, always to speak calmly about issues, and to fight the image Royal has been pushing that he is a brutal maniac.
Royal clearly thought her role was to attack him personally as well as politically and play the role of the morally outraged. The trick was to find something causing moral outrage, and there she seemed to me to fail badly.
The sequence around the policewomen raped on their ways home was extremely enlightening. Royal had the stupidest possible policy suggestion to address the larger problem, which was to have all functionaries (civil servants in Anglo-speak, I think) escorted home form their jobs (by whom?). Sarkozy scored on this by suggesting that maybe there were French people who were not functionaries, who needed protection as well. (Maybe my French is not right, but that seems to be what I got.) And maybe the problem was the rapists.
When Sego goes bonkers over handicapped education she loses it completely and looks like an idiot. Sarkozy carefully tries to address the issue and what policies might help.
I noticed it right after the run-off, when Sarkozy asked for a respectful campaign. Royal has chosen not to engage in one and made that clear in her speech later in the day and this seems so typical of the current Western self-appointed 'left'. It is a great disappointment but when you have run out of arguments all that is left is demonizing your opponent (in Canada it is the 'hidden agenda', in France, the 'brutality').
I hope she loses badly and France can help the Western left start to re-examine their premises.
UPDATE: Roger Simon sees more of the lack of any reasonable morality in campaigning.
posted by Alan Adamson @ 11:38 AM
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