And thanks for covering the Clement... departure. Yes, I think his usefulness as seen by Münte and Steinmeier was as a "centrist" token. This is an illustration (yet another) of the inroads made by the story "centre is good, centre is without ideology, centre just wants to fix practical problems... the right is centre..." It's common to both Europe and the US, see Lieberman.
Clement became a favourite of ET in this year for his incessant calls to continue reforms, which were of course inevitable, as called by melanchton and afew
Aha! I told you so! I knew there was a conspiracy afoot to reform ET. It's time we expelled those reformist interlopers from the nether regions of France.... notes from no w here
