27 NYT France Flies, Germany Flops Roger Cohen April 16, 2011 -- ve always had a soft spot for Nicolas Sarkozy. He was the guy with the wrong name and the wrong background who took on the smug talkers with names like Dominique de Villepin and vanquished them. He was the outsider from the wrong schools who believed in energy and talent and had the audacity to smash the taboo that said a French politician can’t love America and prosper. Sarkozy was a doer. He thought Francois Mitterrand’s seductive phrase (in French at least) — “Il faut laisser le temps au temps” (You must let time take its course) — was baloney that left you with disasters like the Bosnian genocide. He thought work and reward should be linked, a Gallic heresy, and he worked hard. He hated the dependency culture of an overdeveloped French state, which entrenched rights and enfeebled responsibility. That he was elected president showed that France, deep in its soul, knew it had to escape the Mitterrand-Chirac rut with its glut of erudition and its glob of inaction. That was heartening. The sanctimonious attacks on him from the left oozed the paralyzing conservatism that had blinded France to change. The attacks on Sarkozy from a blue-blooded or petit-bourgeois right often betrayed the same quasiracist disdain evident in rightist attacks on President Obama. Yes, I liked Sarkozy — and still do. Then there was his rudeness; his taste for his rich friends’ yachts; his need for adulation that helped reduce a good newspaper, Le Figaro, to a fawning mouthpiece; his authoritarian itch from which gypsies most conspicuously suffered; his petulant impatience, his petty vanities and his peevish jealousies — HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023513