Those mischievous folks at Gawker say that Obama is more popular than Jesus and Angelina Jolie, and they’ve got the evidence:

Barack Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone again! So soon after the last one. And just one week after he showed up on the front of publisher Jann Wenner’s UsWeekly!

Well, I have it on good (perhaps!) authority that “Nothing sells like celebrity,” and Barack Obama is the Messiah of celebrities and all other correct-thinking Americans.

Today—as opposed to 18 months ago, when Obama was launched as the Messiah—pretty much everybody who matters agrees that Barack Obama is (as I’ve been saying for a while) the coolest Machiavellian dude in the presidential race.

David Brooks launched the debate by positing a “Fast Eddie” Obama (as a peer of “Slick Willie” Clinton).

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Ann Althouse digs deep into Obama’s dissembling and sees a positive sign. Note her response to one of her readers:

mporcius said…”Ann likes that Obama has betrayed a pledge about or changed his mind about campaign financing because Ann doesn’t want to give up on the war effort in Iraq. Ann wants to believe that Obama will change his mind about Iraq (or that he has been lying the whole time) and when Obama pulls something like this, Ann is encouraged.”

[Althouse answers:]That’s basically the answer. In fact, I think Obama may be a better bet than McCain on Iraq.

My number 1 concern about Obama is that he won’t check the Democratic Congress. But I’m not confident that McCain will either.

Look, you can’t trust either man completely. You can’t trust anyone running for President. Remember when George Bush assured us that he opposed nation building?

Jonah Goldberg pokes the biggest hole in Brooks’s and Althouse’s “theory.” He points out that being a great in-fighter and ruthless politician does not make you adept at handling foreign policy:

But it’s worth noting that being cutthroat and savvy in electoral politics doesn’t necessarily translate into being cutthroat and savvy, never mind wise, in power. George W. Bush — we’ve been told — was ruthless in getting elected. When in power, he discovered Putin’s soul. (Bush’s dad, who did what it took to crush Dukakis, is a better example of Brooks’ fast-eddie thesis). Ted Kennedy is arguably the most ruthless politician in America, that hardly means he’d be a great foreign policy president. In fact, I would argue that despite Kennedy’s toughminded political cynicism, he’s still naive about foreign policy. If Brooks is right about Obama’s campaign smarts, my guess is that Obama would still be naive about foreign policy. All his throw-’em-under-the-truck maneuvering is likely rationalized by his desire to “do good” once elected. And that do-goodery is not (necessarily) any less naive simply because he’s doing whatever bad he deems necessary to do good.

Andrew Sullivan, who for months on end tore down the Clinton’s for their “Rovian” tactics, is now a fan of these underhanded tactics when they’re carried out by his American idol Obama, and especially when Obama bests the Clintons by doing them.

As for me: I admire Obama’s political skills—and indeed I’ve advocated for Democrats to get just as tough and ruthless as the Republicans are wont to be. But I just don’t trust him, because I don’t know one thing that he stands for and stands firm on. And I’ve been saying the same thing, like a broken record, ever since I started writing about Obama—and his “narrator.”

Why does a candidate for president of the United States need a “narrator” unless he is spinning tales? Some months ago, I wrote:

[The novelist Richard] Russo gets at the issue: the media’s storytelling reduces everything and everyone to a binary choice—Spitzer is either All Evil or All Saint, take your pick.

A similar dynamic is at play in the Reverend Wright scandal. Obama’s problem is that there isn’t a simple story line that can explain his 20-year affiliation with Wright and allow Obama at the same time to hold on to his own pacific, post-racial Magic Negro Healer image.

In order to keep believing that Obama is the Magic Negro, you’ve got to write off Wright as an inconvenient uncle. If you can’t bring yourself to believe that the bile-spewer is a harmless old fool, then you are left doubting the sincerity of the Magic Negro. He begins to look like just another cynical politician who makes alliances that will advance his career.

Either way, Obama loses (and we voters lose our illusions). And the blame can be laid directly at the feet of his “narrator,” David Axelrod, who manufactured a PRopagandaTM image of Saint Barack Obama that no human being can live up to and thus put him inside a box from which he cannot escape.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask a presidential candidate who is an unknown quantity to the American people (because he has no track record) to be clear about what, specifically, he stands for. Do you?

If at first you don’t succeed—and the first round of press for Michelle Obama in February (which included an interview on Larry King, profiles in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, as well as the New York Times and the WSJ) was a resounding failure, since it was totally overshadowed by “undernews” [i.e., "gossip" about the chip on her shoulder]—try, try again:

The campaign to soften her hard edges is in full swing. Today she was on The View—and event that was live-blogged by reporters for the New York Times—and today her struggle to build a better media image for herself is also analyzed in a front-page puff piece (er, I mean “report”) in the NYT.

Whatevs. She’s the wife of a presidential nominee, and might well become First Lady. We all need to get used to her, at the very least …

Question of the day: Can someone be both overexposed and unknown? (Answer: no. She is known [and overexposed] in a way the campaign doesn’t want her to be known, so they’re trying to rebrand her.)

Bonus question: Has the Obama campaign read Matthew Baum’s research about “soft news” being a good place to reach “low information voters”? (I’ve written about this here and here.) It sure seems like it, since this relaunch of Michelle includes primarily the “soft news”—and I use the word “news” advisedly—outlets (like The View and US magazine).

Final question of the day: Doesn’t anyone else wonder where the Obamas’ number-one champion

has been lurking since her candidate’s triumph? I detect the (invisible) hand—or at least the method—of Oprah behind the Oprahfication of Michelle.

There’s no doubt that you’re part of the West:

In today’s New York Times, I read about the importance of the rapid response in political campaigns. (I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Brian Stelter’s byline on the story, he (formerly) of TV Newswer fame. Bravo!):

Today, campaigns act within hours to anticipate the news cycle and twin their response with the original attack in voters’ minds. In the fall, Mrs. Clinton’s team swiftly knocked down an NPR report that said she had failed to tip a waitress in Iowa (the campaign had kept the receipt).

Parrying a television advertisement with another, however, has typically taken days if not weeks.

“There’s no question that the Obama response to Clinton’s 3 a.m. ad was created to make news,” said Larry Rasky, the communications director for Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2008 presidential campaign. “It seemed fast and effective in terms of repositioning the story.”

The Obama campaign has proved to be far and away—by miles—the most effective in working the current media terrain. They get New Media, and they get Old Media. They have left no stone unturned in the brave new world of  politics and geopolitics, which is, to a large extent, driven by the global media.

Obama began his quest for the presidency with the most coveted prize of all in the world of pop communications: a send-off from the Queen of Infotainment. Since then, the Obama folks have shown that they understand every demographic and interest group in America—including the rich and untapped pool of voters who read tabloids. 

I’m not mocking the Obama campaign but admiring it, because it understands that the old categories in politics have broken down. The campaign has a superior grasp of media.

But it will always be the politics that does you in, as David Brooks notes today:

Clinton had sounded like Old Politics, but Obama created a vision of New Politics. And the past several months have revolved around the choice he framed there that night. Some people are enthralled by the New Politics, and we see their vapors every day. Others think it is a mirage and a delusion. There’s only one politics, and, tragically, it’s the old kind, filled with conflict and bad choices.

The Obama campaign had the bad luck of bad timing yesterday. But the campaign has also made a lot of bad choices.

Toward the end of the press conference, the question of Goolsbee’s meeting was raised again. Obama answered curtly and then walked out after a staffer called last question. The press erupted with shouts, but Obama continued to walk out.

He paused only to say, “Come on guys; I answered like eight questions. We’re running late.”

Eight whole questions! What a great effort!

But that’s nothing compared to the lawyerly parsing from Team Obama that makes Bill Clinton look like a D student:

“At no point did anyone in our campaign convey to anyone that there had been any backing away from Obama’s position on Nafta,” a campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, said Monday …

The controversy began last week when CTV, a Canadian television network, reported that an Obama official had called the Canadian ambassador in Washington to play down the significance of Mr. Obama’s criticism of Nafta.

The campaign and the Canadian Embassy issued denials that were, it appears, technically accurate. But they were incomplete because they did not address Mr. Goolsbee’s meeting with Canadian officials.

This is by now a well-known Obama tactic: to provide “evidence” that the person making an attack against him is not telling the whole truth. This tactic has been referred to as jujitsu, and it has worked well to repel the attacks of his opponent Hillary Clinton. He has often appeared to win an argument by getting in the last word.

When your opponent is the media, however, you never get the last word. Besides, while words do matter, impressions matter more, as today’s New York Times piece points out [e.a.]:

The memorandum exposed Mr. Obama to accusations of hypocrisy on a touchstone issue …

The memorandum raises questions about the transparency and the ability of the campaign to address problems before they grow.

Yes indeed: if you project the image of being above-it-all, then you’d better be above-it-all. The aura around Obama changed yesterday. Seen from the position of a defensive crouch, he’s no longer such a cool cat.

Such is the awesome power of having one bad PR day.

The final word on that goes to CNN’s Candy Crowley, the star of my posts yesterday for her beginning the day with her flat-out denial that there was a NAFTA-gate and then signing off with what may become Obama’s euolgy:

CROWLEY: Also, today, Anderson, Hillary Clinton put out an ad talking about Obama and how he has talked so much about Afghanistan, but noting that, as committee — that as chairman of a subcommittee with some jurisdiction over U.S. policy in Afghanistan, he has failed to chair a single committee meeting.

All of this, Anderson, under one single umbrella. This is Hillary Clinton saying, Barack Obama is not the guy you think he is – Anderson.

COOPER: It’s an interesting point that she made in the sound bite that you played, where she said, look, if this was my campaign, which had had a meeting with the Canadian government and then people from my campaign had denied it, you know, how would you be covering this story?

This certainly does seem, for Obama, a candidate who’s talked about transparency and a campaign which has tried to pride itself on transparency, a black eye.

CROWLEY: Well, absolutely.

And this is a double whammy, the trade and the NAFTA issue, as to whether this aide of Obama’s went and talked to the Canadian government and said, oh, listen, he’s not actual really serious about this. The problem is not just, where does Barack Obama stand on NAFTA? His campaign makes a credible argument that he’s been for — against NAFTA, at least portions of it, the labor and the environmental part, for some time.

The question here is, for a guy that says no more Washington- speak, I’m going to tell you exactly where I stand, this becomes a public relations issue. And, you know, we have talked before, Anderson, sometimes, the perception of something is worse than the reality.

And for a candidate whose entire campaign is built around an adoring public’s perception of him as a Messiah, that is one pretty big goddamn problem.

One day perhaps the captains of the various media industries (old and new) will understand their vast power to shape public opinion among the ignorant, distraction-loving, and narrative-seeking masses [e.a.].

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

It’s always been like that, you say. What does it matter? you ask.

It matters because this ignorance can be easily leveraged through the myriad new forms of political propaganda that the Age of Technology has ushered in and unleashed.

It matters because unless we educate people (in an engaging way, not only in a boring PBS or NPR way) in their common humanity rather than pander to their tribal instincts, we are moving backward, not forward.

It means a new era of wars, not “post-partisan politics.”

————
*** Do I really have to remind you that infotainment rules?

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

update: the McCain-endorsement story has legs 

I’m struck by some very different reactions to the major political endorsements of the last couple of days, both of which I would categorize as major PRopaganda^TM events.

When Barack Obama was crowned by the Kennedy family on Monday at a rally at Washington American University in Washington, D.C. (ETP’s Rachel Sklar delivered a flavor of the ambience here), I didn’t hear a lot of objections to the adulatory press coverage, of Google News offered one small sample:

Windsor Star

Sen. Kennedy endorses Obama for president
Kansas City Star, MO - Jan 29, 2008
By MARGARET TALEV With nostalgic references to his assassinated brother, President John F. Kennedy, liberal icon Sen. Edward Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama …
Video: Raw Video: Governor Speaks About Kennedy Endorsements Obama Hopes to Reap Benefits of Kennedy Presidential Endorsement Voice of America
Ted Kennedy endorses Obama Jamaica Gleaner
CNN - Reuters UK
all 1,302 news articles »

By contrast, on the next night, while anchoring Florida primary coverage on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann set the deeply disapproving—if not outraged—tone for liberals when he heard that Rudy Giuliani would be endorsing John McCain the next day. (I wrote about it here, as I watched K.O.’s creepazoid performance. He also dissed Hillary Clinton by saying that her primary victory in Florida was “meaningless.”)

I wasn’t around to watch the Republicans’ piece of political theater (live, from the Reagan Library) the next day (you can watch it here), but The Flack offered his professional color commentary:

He ran a losing campaign with more than his share of PR gaffes.

Yet, as I sit here watching Rudy Giuliani’s withdrawal and endorsement speech, I can’t help but think how he timed this anti-climactic announcement to run live on the local TV network lead-ins across most of the nation. Geesh. He finally did something right on the media strategy front. [e.a.]

The Flack is impressed professionally but appalled personally:

The nation’s local TV news directors took the bait — hook, line and sinker — to hand over to this right wing ideologue unfettered access to a large hunk of their news programming holes. The Giuliani withdrawal speech morphed into a several-minute commercial for that pasty, anachronistic candidate who has stood by this failed presidency more than any other. [e.a.]

I’m left with the impression that if local TV news directors had handed over unfettered access to a left-wing ideologue, everything would have been just fine and dandy—from both a professional and a personal point of view.

Because I wasn’t around to watch TV during either of those live events and I don’t have the time to research how much airtime either of them got and on which channels, I can’t parse which PRopaganda^TM event got “fairer” treatment by the media. Nor do I care.

I get the Rudy hatred.*** What I don’t get is the attitude that TV programmers somehow shouldn’t have given airtime to strategists who came up with a very effective PR campaign, regardless of its content.

“Free media” is free to those who can grab it, no? The competition’s PR “consiglieres” just have to try harder, that’s all. It’s the American way!

———-

*** Though I don’t share it. He did a lot of good things for New York while haranguing us with his in-your-face law-and-orderism, which during Election ‘08 has been characterized as “Rudy is a fascist.” Been there, done that. Whatever.

Personally, I welcome what I see as a trend toward moderation in the Republican Party that the rise of McCain and Giuliani signals—I hope it means a trend of having opponents across the aisle that Democrats can work with.

I also agree that Giuliani has run a campaign of ideas—and that unlike his opponents on the Republican side, he has ideas.

But I know that partisanship trumps everything right now. Oh well.

The Flack passes along the news (from Newsweek) that al Qaeda’s main spokesman, Zawahiri, feeling burned by the media, is trying another tack—he’s now making himself available for long-distance interviews by journalists, via email questions submitted to al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahaab (The Cloud).

Newsweek rightly labels this a publicity tactic, and it’s a shrewd one, because it garners al Qaeda a different kind of global media attention from what they’re used to [e.a.]:

This is the first time Al Qaeda has made a formal call to journalists, although it will not be the first time the radical Islamic group has granted interviews to Western media. Counterterrorism experts believe that the posting is genuine and that it is part of Al Qaeda’s evolving tactics to use the Web as part of its propaganda arsenal. “This is a continuation of the efforts by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership to push themselves forward in the public viewpoint,” says Maj. Reid Sawyer, editor of “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” and a lecturer of terrorism studies at Columbia University

Zawahiri hopes to put himself on equal footing with world leaders by doing an “Al Qaeda Press Avail,” as the Flack calls it. As a PR pro, he’s calling bullshit on it [e.a.].

By feigning media access, the organization cultivates an image of civilized engagement among the unsuspecting masses, all the while perpetrating or planning unspeakable actions.

“Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst now in the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point describes this as playing to the YouTube generation. ‘It completely fits Al Qaeda’s communications strategy over the past two years, which is how to get people more invested in the movement.’”

And Zawahiri is not alone in gaming the court of public opinion by playing the “freedom of the press” card. A free media today seems more of a propaganda tool and less of a requirement to qualify as a modern society.

The Flack is certainly right to note that all kinds of international players are now gaming the court of public opinion. I wouldn’t characterize our free media as a propaganda tool, though, but rather as a rich propaganda outlet or channel-–one that the world’s most mischievous and/or bad actors (dictators and/or theocratic totalitarians) are very savvy about exploiting via PRopaganda^TM (PR-fueled “dramatic narratives”) because they are so savvy about actual propaganda in their own autocracies, dictatorships, and/or totalitarian theocracies.

Influencing public opinion is a black art in totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is often subtle. (Even autocrats and theocrats find that it is much more effective to persuade the people to come around to their point of view than it is to have to police them and punish them all the time. Understandably, people get impatient and upset with that kind of violence and will try to revolt. So if you want to suppress them and keep them pacified, you have to be less obvious about your control over them, more refined, more convincing. Dictatorships that want to last need the silent consent of their people, so they spend an inordinate amount of time building theories and revisionist histories and other narratives that “justify” their existence. These narratives are constantly “streamed” through their societies—via textbooks, classrooms, party conference papers, academia, and of course the media, which is controlled by the state.)

Of course the world’s bad guys are going to have superlative media skills.

The Flack writes:

Think Putin, Ahmadinejad, Assad and all the other despots who’ve gutted their nation’s free media, without any real retribution.

Well, not quite. These men haven’t gutted their nations’ free media. What free media? Iran has no free media. Syria has no free media. Russia has only a nominally free media since Putin took power.

The absence of freedom (of the press, among other things) in these countries—and the (dictatorial, theocratic, autocratic, or totalitarian) mode of power their leaders hold over their people—is exactly the problem with them.

It’s important that American media organizations and media-related professionals understand how easy it is for them to be used as propaganda outlets by the world’s bad actors.

But if execs like CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for example, are any indication, our media conglomerates are so uninterested in the content of what they air (as long as it brings in plenty of dough) that they notoriously turn a blind eye to the beyond-the-news-cycle impact of glorifying, say, Vladimir Putin:

Platon for TIME

French president Nicolas Sarkozy was in town this week. Did you hear? No? Me neither.

However, I did hear a few weeks ago that Sarkozy had walked out on a 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl in the first few minutes of taping. At the HuffPo, they thought his rudeness was stunning.

Watch French President Sarkozy walk out of a 60 Minutes interview he called “stupid” and a “big mistake.”

Steve Boriss has an altogether different view:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy walked-out of an interview with 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl when she asked about his troubled marriage. His last words were “If I had to say something about Cécilia, I would certainly not do so here.” Well, that certainly seems reasonable. So the question that must be asked is not why Sarkozy would act the way he did, but why a seasoned American reporter like CBS’ Stahl felt she could act the way she did, by asking such a personal, inappropriate, and disrespectful question.

I dunno. While I was in Europe earlier this fall, I watched the BBC when I had access to satellite TV. Its anchors ask very rude questions, and they are pitbulls—which I’ve complained about enough in the past. But I was reminded that this is also useful and necessary behavior when those same anchors are confronting apologists for, say, genocide in Darfur—and the anchors on the BBC World Service routinely do confront representatives of the world’s “bad actors” on television.

Their “evenhanded” approach to Israel (which is expressed in constant strong disapproval) buys them permission to criticize “other” bad actors, too, see? That kind of relativism is how we achieve “balance” on the scales of political correctness, which, in the early 21st century, seems to have replaced the political principle of human dignity as the thing we civilized Westerners are most committed to. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Rudeness goes with the territory of journalism, not to mention the territory of American democracy and French republicanism. No one forced Sarkozy to seek power and fame and fortune, or a place on the world stage. And he is not made of glass.

Of course the 60 Minutes incident upset the applecart for him, PR-wise. It was obviously meant to be the beginning of a rollout, leading up to Sarkozy’s visit with his buddy Bush and his speech to Congress. Instead, he managed to alienate the MSM so badly that TV coverage was scant. For those of you who blinked and missed it, here’s CNN’s coverage.

By contrast, here’s how the UK’s Guardian narrated the event:

Sarkozy gets rapturous welcome as he mends relations with US

The long years of animosity between the US and France formally ended just after 11am yesterday when the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, entered the House of Representatives to applause and yelps of approval. Congressmen gave him a standing ovation and queued to shake his hand.

What accounted for the “rapturous” welcome? Sarkozy’s rousing image of America the Good:

On behalf of my generation, which did not experience war but knows how much it owes to their courage and their sacrifice; on behalf of our children, who must never forget; to all the veterans who are here today and, notably the seven I had the honor to decorate yesterday evening, one of whom, Senator Inouye, belongs to your Congress, I want to express the deep, sincere gratitude of the French people. I want to tell you that whenever an American soldier falls somewhere in the world, I think of what the American army did for France. I think of them and I am sad, as one is sad to lose a member of one’s family.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The men and women of my generation remember the Marshall Plan that allowed their fathers to rebuild a devastated Europe. They remember the Cold War, during which America again stood as the bulwark of the Free World against the threat of new tyranny.

I remember the Berlin crisis and Kennedy who unhesitatingly risked engaging the United States in the most destructive of wars so that Europe could preserve the freedom for which the American people had already sacrificed so much. No one has the right to forget. Forgetting, for a person of my generation, would be tantamount to self-denial.

But my generation did not love America only because she had defended freedom. We also loved her because for us, she embodied what was most audacious about the human adventure; for us, she embodied the spirit of conquest. We loved America because for us, America was a new frontier that was continuously pushed back—a constantly renewed challenge to the inventiveness of the human spirit.

My generation shared all the American dreams. Our imaginations were fueled by the winning of the West and Hollywood. By Elvis Presley, Duke Ellington, Hemingway. By John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth. And by Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, fulfilling mankind’s oldest dream.

What was so extraordinary for us was that through her literature, her cinema and her music, America always seemed to emerge from adversity even greater and stronger; that instead of causing America to doubt herself, such ordeals only strengthened her belief in her values.

What makes America strong is the strength of this ideal that is shared by all Americans and by all those who love her because they love freedom.

America’s strength is not only a material strength, it is first and foremost a spiritual and moral strength. No one expressed this better than a black pastor who asked just one thing of America: that she be true to the ideal in whose name he—the grandson of a slave—felt so deeply American. His name was Martin Luther King. He made America a universal role model.

The world still remembers his words—words of love, dignity and justice. America heard those words and America changed. And the men and women who had doubted America because they no longer recognized her began loving her again.

Fundamentally, what are those who love America asking of her, if not to remain forever true to her founding values? [e.a.]

Indeed. Politicians should take note of Sarkozy’s tone and vision. The one who can adapt it for today’s audience will capture the White House. That’s my bold prediction.

Also, Hollywood, which is still busy presenting an evil and redemption-free image of America to movie audiences—and paying the price—should pay attention.