Franco-Giuliani

Paris?The New Yorkers I've met in Paris find it a bit hard to believe (and some find it a bit hard to stomach) that Rudy Giuliani is one of the most famous politicians in Europe. He is certainly the most famous present or former mayor in Europe, with the possible exception of French president Jacques Chirac, who used to be mayor of Paris. And this would be true even had September

11 never happened. That's because a wild crime wave?or at least what passes for one?has swept most Western European cities in the last decade. France has had its share of lunatics shooting up schoolrooms, the English bobby has been replaced in certain South London neighborhoods by a gun-toting Flying Squad-team member and there are huge hang-on-to-your-wallet zones in most of the urban areas in Spain.

Given their predisposition to gripe about the globalized economy, you would expect Europeans to blame the United States when their own fellow-citizens mug each other. And many of them, in fact, do, passing off every serial killing as a dérive américaine. This is not a majority attitude, though, because of the precipitous drop in American crime throughout the 1990s. Our rate of street violence has dropped to the point where, according to the European Union's own statistics, with 4244 crimes per 100,000 residents annually, France now has a higher crime rate than the United States.

Europeans are extremely curious about American criminology, James Q. Wilson's books on crime get quoted all over the place and practically every cab driver knows what the "broken windows" theory of crime is, along with the details of the New York program of arresting turnstile-jumpers. This is such a massive problem in France that the exits to certain of the suburban rail lines look like high-jump courses. On a trip to St-Denis a couple of years ago, I was the only person I saw who used a ticket to exit the station. Even the old ladies were Fosbury-flopping over the turnstiles.

Since New York is the city most Europeans know, Rudy has become the living symbol of how to handle crime in our era. Maybe that's fair, and maybe it's giving too much credit. But in almost every European country for the past few years, Jacques Sixpack and Hans Lunchpail complain incessantly: "What we need is a Rudy Giuliani."

France is the first country to have got one, and he's really making hay. In the years since I've been coming to France, I have never seen a politician as popular as interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy is at just this minute. "Sarko," as he's called in the tabloids, is stepping up enforcement in the subways, patrolling housing projects that until recently were no man's lands and breaking up the little Hoovervilles of immigrant grifters that have grown up around certain of France's cities.

And Sarkozy has done it in a way that has not turned off the left, because he shows no hatred toward immigrants in general, or Islam in particular. In fact, he's succeeded in using immigration as a showcase for his tolerance, in much the same way Rudy used gay rights. In those infuriating cases, he has stopped the practice of deporting juvenile delinquents to their "home" countries; such deportations used occasionally to be done even when the delinquent in question had arrived in France at such a young age that he neither had any relatives left back "home" nor spoke the language there. And, second, Sarkozy is going full speed ahead with a program to give Islam some kind of official status among France's religions. His support for building a "grand mosque" in Marseille, according to a recent news report, has met with 80-percent support among France's younger voters. Sarkozy has turned into such a rock star that French people suspect it is only a matter of time before Chirac seeks a way to sabotage him.

So a recent report in the French satirical-newspaper-and-gossip-sheet Le Canard Enchaîné?revealing that Sarkozy's motorcade had been spotted going 200 kilometers an hour outside of Montpellier?was widely noticed, and Sarkozy's office angrily denied it. This may sound like a real slow-news-day story until it's put in context.

The context is this: The Chirac government is modeling itself more or less directly on the "permanent campaign" that Dick Morris designed for Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, when the president won the hearts of America's voters by trundling out itty-bitty initiatives (like cellphones for neighborhood watch groups) and trumpeting them as a national crisis. That is what Chirac has done with les chauffards. A chauffard is basically a bad driver.

Yes, at a time when the civilized world is gearing up for battle with a madman in Iraq, at a time when the European Union is on the verge of drawing up a constitution, the French government has made the family of behaviors that include "road rage" its top priority. Somewhat more surprisingly, the French press has been docile enough to cooperate. So now, whenever two people get run over by a teenager outside a provincial city, it makes the front page of Le Monde.

Crisis?What Crisis?

So Sarkozy's speeding motorcade was a problem, but it's a problem that could have been avoided had the journalists who wrote the story been invited to accompany Sarkozy (comfortably) in an American-style press van, rather than left to tail him (frustratingly) in their own cars. There is nothing like free transportation to create a commonality of interest between politicians and the people who cover them. During the Hillary-Lazio Senate race in the summer of 2000, I had been in the press van all day, following Lazio from event to event in the Catskills, and had kept borrowing other journalists' cellphones to push back a drink I had scheduled with a friend in the city that night. It had been planned as a dinner, actually, but the campaign kept adding events, so my friend and I had to push it back to 8:30, then 9:30, then 10:30...

Well after nightfall, the van was still 100-some-odd miles out of the city, at a mountain resort north of New Paltz somewhere, and it was looking like we'd have to camp under the trees.

But then a miracle happened. When the press van pulled out of the resort behind Lazio's own, we saw blue lights ahead of us. A police vehicle started to escort us downstate, motorcade-style, and pretty soon we were zooming along at about 40 miles over the speed limit. I bring this up because this was unquestionably news. It was unquestionably news because in the summer of 2000 (if you remember), a lot of the campaign looked like it would hinge on the "gas crisis." This "crisis" was a few cents' hike in the price of gas. Lazio, who was filmed in his sport-utility vehicle throughout the campaign, sought to get the upper hand in two ways. The first was calling for repeal of the 4.3 cent-per-gallon gas tax that had been passed as part of Bill Clinton's first budget in 1993. It was rather stupid, since a big theme of Lazio's campaign was that New Yorkers put too much into the federal budget and got too little back in return, and the gas tax is a rare item in the federal budget guaranteed to transfer revenue from places where everyone drives (like Porkbucket, MS) to places where everyone doesn't (like New York, NY).

Lazio's second gambit for capitalizing on the "gas crisis" was to challenge the carpetbagging Hillary to "get out of the motorcade" and see how real New Yorkers lived. This, too, was rather stupid, since Lazio was a big motorcade man himself. New Yorkers would have known this had we reported on our ride home. But the only reporter to whom it even occurred to complain was a whiny Milquetoast from some wire service. He didn't mind that we had a police escort back downstate. What bothered him was that the van was going so fast it made him scared.

Cripes. As far as I know, none of the other reporters felt any remorse over not reporting how we got home, and I don't feel bad about it even today. This conception of journalism as just lying in wait for month after month until you find a little tidbit that allows you to holler "hypocrisy" is what (justly) gives reporters a bad name.

Then, too, there was a beer at stake.