France aghast as Economist mocks baguette-wielding Obama

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Fri, 01/04/2013 - 20:08
France aghast as Economist mocks baguette-wielding Obama
British news magazine The Economist has managed to upset the French again, this time by publishing a mock-up of Barack Obama in a stripy T-shirt, red scarf and blue beret, accompanied by the words “broken” and “lousy”.

At first glance the cover might be misconstrued as a light-hearted jibe – photoshopping a beret onto the US president’s head seems like such a juvenile idea, it’s a surprise more people don’t laugh at The Economist rather than with it – but once you start reading the blistering editorial that follows, it’s quite clearly not.

The attack is meant for American politicians, which The Economist berates for mishandling the so-called “fiscal cliff” debt crisis. But by comparing their behaviour with European leaders, The Economist succeeds in offering a hearty helping of Brussels-bashing – its favourite hobby – at the same time.

“Washington’s pattern of dysfunction is disturbingly similar to the euro zone’s in three depressing ways,” it begins, going on to describe the deal as “lamentable” and “an abject failure,” meanwhile slapping EU policy-makers as “incompetent” and “incapable”.

Now, for an American reader, this is an insult to their leaders – getting called a European, in political terms, is slander in the States. For a European reader, it’s even worse. The question is not how bad their leaders are; they are doing so unquestionably badly that they have become the benchmark for how bad somebody else is doing.

But for a Frenchman, who is still, at this point, staring at the picture of beret-ed Obama, his crusty baguettes and the words “lousy” and “broken” on the front cover, this is most definitely an insult to the French.



Predictably, the French press responded to the cover with a lot of feet-stamping and spitting of feathers. Within hours of its publication dozens of articles – not to mention threads of garbled and angry comments – had appeared online.

The use of the marinière T-shirt will be particularly painful for France’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, who only recently used it as a symbol of French-made success, sporting one himself, just months previously, on the front of a French magazine.

Montebourg has already made his feelings clear about The Economist, which he said in November “has never been known for its sense of moderation,” following uproar over an even harsher bout of France-bashing.



The Economist, of course, has made its own feelings clear about France on several occasions. In April this year, during the run-up to the French presidential election, the magazine featured rivals François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy reclining in a forest with bread rolls, fruit and naked companions, apparently unaware of the European crisis, in a take on Édouard Manet’s ‘The Luncheon on the Grass’.



As for their reaction to the winner…



Although back in 2010, Sarkozy got a much rougher deal.



But what, might you ask, of a German reader who finds House Speaker John Boehner tacked into Bavarian lederhosen? If the initial reaction is anything to go by, the Germans seem to have either taken the upper ground or laughed off the joke – not one single German publication had bothered to mention the cover on Friday afternoon. If the French really want to be left alone, then perhaps they should take note…

France aghast as Economist mocks baguette-wielding Obama | Les blogs


The Economist

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Economist piece

The fiscal cliff deal
America’s European moment
The troubling similarities between the fiscal mismanagement in Washington and the mess in the euro zone
Jan 5th 2013 | from the print edition


FOR the past three years America’s leaders have looked on Europe’s management of the euro crisis with barely disguised contempt. In the White House and on Capitol Hill there has been incredulity that Europe’s politicians could be so incompetent at handling an economic problem; so addicted to last-minute, short-term fixes; and so incapable of agreeing on a long-term strategy for the single currency.

Those criticisms were all valid, but now those who made them should take the planks from their own eyes. America’s economy may not be in as bad a state as Europe’s, but the failures of its politicians—epitomised by this week’s 11th-hour deal to avoid the calamity of the “fiscal cliff”—suggest that Washington’s pattern of dysfunction is disturbingly similar to the euro zone’s in three depressing ways.

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The first is an inability to get beyond patching up. The euro crisis deepened because Europe’s politicians serially failed to solve the single currency’s structural weaknesses, resorting instead to a succession of temporary fixes, usually negotiated well after midnight. America’s problems are different. Rather than facing an imminent debt crisis, as many European countries do, it needs to deal with the huge long-term gap between tax revenue and spending promises, particularly on health care, while not squeezing the economy too much in the short term. But its politicians now show themselves similarly addicted to kicking the can down the road at the last minute.

This week’s agreement, hammered out between Republican senators and the White House on New Year’s Eve, passed by the Senate in the early hours of New Year’s Day and by the House of Representatives later the same day, averted the spectre of recession. It eliminated most of the sweeping tax increases that were otherwise due to take effect from January 1st, except for those on the very wealthy, and temporarily put off all the threatened spending cuts (see article). Like many of Europe’s crisis summits, that staved off complete disaster: rather than squeezing 5% out of the economy (as the fiscal cliff implied) there will now be a more manageable fiscal squeeze of just over 1% of GDP in 2013. Markets rallied in relief.

But for how long? The automatic spending cuts have merely been postponed for two months, by which time Congress must also vote to increase the country’s debt ceiling if the Treasury is to be able to go on paying its bills. So more budgetary brinkmanship will be on display in the coming weeks.

And the temporary fix ignored America’s underlying fiscal problems. It did nothing to control the unsustainable path of “entitlement” spending on pensions and health care (the latter is on track to double as a share of GDP over the next 25 years); nothing to rationalise America’s hideously complex and distorting tax code, which includes more than $1 trillion of deductions; and virtually nothing to close America’s big structural budget deficit. (Putting up tax rates at the very top simply does not raise much money.) Viewed through anything other than a two-month prism, it was an abject failure. The final deal raised less tax revenue than John Boehner, the Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, once offered during the negotiations, and it included none of the entitlement reforms that President Barack Obama was once prepared to contemplate.

The reason behind this lamentable outcome is the outsize influence of narrow interest groups—which marks a second, unhappy parallel with Europe. The inability of Europeans to rise above petty national concerns, whether over who pays for bail-outs or who controls bank supervision, has prevented them from making the big compromises necessary to secure the single currency’s future. America’s Democrats and Republicans have proved similarly incapable of reaching a grand bargain; both are far too driven by their parties’ extremists and too focused on winning concessions from the other side to work steadily together to secure the country’s fiscal future.

The third parallel is that politicians have failed to be honest with voters. Just as Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande have avoided coming clean to the Germans and the French about what it will take to save the single currency, so neither Mr Obama nor the Republican leaders have been brave enough to tell Americans what it will really take to fix the fiscal mess. Democrats pretend that no changes are necessary to Medicare (health care for the elderly) or Social Security (pensions). Republican solutions always involve unspecified spending cuts, and they regard any tax rise as socialism. Each side prefers to denounce the other, reinforcing the very polarisation that is preventing progress.

Fixed today, hobbled tomorrow

Optimists will point out that America is unlikely to face a European-style debt crisis in the near future, but the slow-burning fuse is itself a problem. One positive side-effect of Europe’s crisis is that it has forced euro-zone countries to raise their retirement ages and rationalise pensions and health-care promises. America, which has the biggest structural budget deficit in the rich world bar Japan, will become an outlier in its failure to deal with the fiscal consequences of an ageing population. Its ageing is slower than Europe’s but, as its debt piles up and business and consumer confidence is dampened, the eventual crunch will be more painful.

The saddest thing about this week’s deal is how unaware Messrs Obama and Boehner seem to be of the wider damage their petty partisanship is doing to their country. National security is not just about the number of tanks or rockets you have. As it has failed to deal with the single currency, Europe’s standing has crumbled in the world. Why should developing countries trust American leadership, when it seems incapable of solving anything at home? And while the West’s foremost democracy stays paralysed, China is making decisions and forging ahead.

This week Mr Obama boasted that he had fulfilled his mandate by raising taxes on the rich. In fact, by failing once again to clear up America’s fundamental fiscal trouble, he and Republican leaders are building Brussels on the Potomac.

The fiscal cliff deal: America