PARIS: Asked once by a French journalist whether he would ever invite President Jacques Chirac to his Crawford ranch, George Bush brushed off the question, saying that he needed a "good cowboy."
Chirac, who happens to know a lot about cows, somehow never came across as the cowboy type in Bush s eyes.
But Nicolas Sarkozy, the next president of France, has a fighting chance of passing the cowboy test.
Just two days before the first round of the presidential election last month, Sarkozy donned a red checked shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, mounted a small white horse named Universe and rode around Camargue country in France s deep south. A gaggle of reporters and cameramen followed him in a cart pulled by a tractor.
"A vague resemblance to the look of George W.
Bush on his Texan ranch," is how the left-leaning newspaper Lib ration described Sarkozy. It dismissed the event as a media stunt, saying, "Everything for the image, right up until the last minute."
The French president-to-be is unabashedly pro-American, a man who openly proclaims his love of Ernest Hemingway, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone, of America s strong work ethic and belief in upward mobility.
The last film that made Sarkozy cry was Robert Altman s "A Prairie Home Companion." He once said he wanted Gloria Gaynor s "I Will Survive," as his victory song. He calls himself proud to wear the label "Sarkozy the American.
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In his acceptance speech following his election victory Sunday night, Sarkozy reached out to the United States, signaling his desire to end the tension with Washington during Chirac s presidency.
Addressing his "American friends," Sarkozy said, " I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently."
He was so pleased with the message that he told an American friend just before the speech, "I m going to talk about America!
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There must have been relief in the White House Sunday that President Bush did not have to call S gol ne Royal to congratulate her for winning the French presidency.
After all, she said during the campaign that she would never kneel before Bush the way she suggested her opponent Nicolas Sarkozy had done. She tried to tar Sarkozy as an imitator of what she called Bush s phony compassionate conservatism.
She even told a Hezbollah deputy in Lebanon last December that she agreed with him when he talked about the "unlimited dementia" of the Bush administration.
Instead, with the imminent departure of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Bush got to congratulate the man who may well become his new best friend in Europe.
"They had a friendly, very friendly chat," said David Martinon, Sarkozy s chief of staff, in a telephone interview.
"Mr. Sarkozy wants to improve the relationship with the United States, to renew it. There s a need for a change.
There has to be a way to restore confidence. It s very important."
The fact is, Nicolas Sarkozy is George Bush s kind of guy - brash, tough-talking and proud of it.
Sarkozy s vow to rid the troubled suburbs of France of delinquent youths - "thugs," he has called them - is the French equivalent of Bush s vow to "Bring em on."
Both are teetotalers. Both are disciplined exercisers - Sarkozy jogs but, like Bush, is also an avid bike rider.
In Washington, Sarkozy s victory has been warmly welcomed.
"We certainly look forward to cooperation with the French," the White House press secretary, Tony Snow, said Monday, adding: "We know that there are going to be areas of disagreement. But on the other hand, there are certainly real opportunities to work together on a broad range of issues.
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The two men will meet in Berlin next month for the summit meeting of G-8 industrial countries, and Sarkozy would be expected to visit the United States for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September.
The U.S.
Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, told CNN on Sunday, "It would be nice to have someone who s head of France who doesn t have a knee-jerk reaction against the United States."
On the same program, Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, said that, "Sarkozy would be favorable to the United States," adding, "Clearly his views are more in line with ours."
Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, meanwhile, praised Sarkozy on Sunday as "the candidate of change.
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Certainly, Sarkozy has promised never to behave in the "arrogant" way he said that the current French government did in making threats against the United States before the start of the Iraq war. "You must have loathed us then," he said in a speech in Washington in September.
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