Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> TalkLeft

Legal Commentary

: TalkLeft

Turning French

By Big Tent Democrat

Roger Cohen plays the "French Card" regarding our economic crisis:

I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States. . . . There is a touch of France in its “étatisme” — the state as all-embracing solution rather than problem . . . I’d thought of Obama as less Robespierre than Talleyrand. I still think he’s more bridge-building centrist than revolutionary. He needs to be. Money has never been more fungible than today. Punish capital and it will punish you by saying, “Hasta la vista!” The former French President François Mitterrand learned that a little over a quarter-century ago when, after an initial wave of nationalizations, he reversed course. . . Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries. . . Obama, in his restorative counter-revolution, must be careful to steer clear of his French temptation.

[More...]

I gather two points from this column - (1) Roger Cohen wanted to make sure people knew he lived in France for an extended period; and (2) he knows nothing about economics. I do not write that Cohen knows nothing about economics because of what Cohen wrote about economics in the column - it is because he wrote nothing about economics in the column, a column ostensibly about our economic crisis. Therefore, I assume he knows nothing about economics. He does know about Robespierre, Talleyrand, Mitterand, and presumably, fine Paris restaurants, but that knowledge is not usefully applied to the current economic crisis. Would that he knew a bit more about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 05, 2009 (boomark / email).