The American Spectator

At Large

Class Act

By Roger Kaplan on 9.23.08 @ 12:08AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Sarkozy himself takes a kind of in-your-face pleasure in acting like a slob, openly text-messaging during an audience with Pope Benedict and saying out loud that one term in the presidency is enough because the money's elsewhere. You almost want to think he is practicing a perverse humor by way of showing the French they take themselves too seriously. At the same time, he has laid out a reform program as ambitious as anything since de Gaulle's time, and there is an element of self-inflicted wounding (somewhat like Nixon) that gets in the way of assessing the president's aims on their own merits.

Like her boss, Rachida Dati appears to carry into public life the attitude of "Our turn, you SOB's, and we'll remember who crosses us." Or more simply, she, like him, has an attitude.

This sort of combativeness, like her loyalty, is understandable. But one readily recognizes the risks of her situation. She wants to live one of these complicated elite French lives (as does the president), but at the same time she wants to shake up these complicated French elites and the contradictions that have led France into a complicated multicultural mess from which they must extract themselves.

Rachida Dati is, no doubt, perfectly right to say that motherhood is good. And she is quite within her rights to say that in this case fatherhood is no one's business other than -- maybe -- a certain Monsieur Mystere. Though she reacts with a brutal temper to the slightest hint of condescension even when it is really closer to ordinary courtesy, she allowed her entourage to let the press know that at 42 she felt she was running out of time and there were unspecified hints of tragic accidents in the family way in the past.

She knows single motherhood is not exactly applauded in the Muslim community. (Truth be told, it will create additional headaches for her security detail.) Jealously guarding her private life, she cannot help but set an example. Without suggesting to others, including girls born into the Muslim community, that this is what modern society expects, the way she is handling it is nonetheless a way of insisting that this is what modern society accepts. And she, born and bred in France, will treat public references to her as a "Muslim woman" with all the contempt they deserve.

This, indeed, is arguably the strongest, toughest, hardest battle in the Sarkozy reform program. If he and his government can restore, as they say they want to, and extend, and expand, and build upon, those famous "values of the Republic" which brook no differences in the standards by which French citizens are regarded and rewarded, they will, above and beyond all the potshots at "vulgarity," give something big to their compatriots, and some day they will be thanked. #

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