The Next Governor of the 51st Etat

Nick presses the flesh over here to get elected over there:

Nicolas Sarkozy is campaigning hard to be the next president of France on the jogging trails of Central Park and in the corridors of the White House.

On a four-day trip to the United States, the 51-year-old minister of the interior, France’s leading presidential hopeful on the right, pinned the Legion of Honor on the police commissioner of New York, honored firefighters in Midtown Manhattan for their losses on 9/11 and signed hundreds of copies of his new best-selling book on France’s future.

He told Jewish leaders of his love of Israel, American business leaders of his love of free enterprise, and Francophiles of his love of America. He confessed that he loves to read Hemingway and watch movies like “Miami Vice.”

.... “My devotion to our relationship with America is well known and has earned me substantial criticism in France,” Mr. Sarkozy declared in a speech before the French-American Foundation in Washington on Tuesday, his last day here. “I’m not a coward. I’m proud of this friendship, and I proclaim it gladly.”

....The French, he said, “wear American jeans and love American burgers and pizza.

“Nothing makes a French person prouder than seeing a French actor in an American film,” he added.

“All French parents dream of sending their child to an American university.”

Americans, he said, are “so successful and so misunderstood.”