It appears that this site has the interview, which is about his support for the constitution, which as lefties both you and I were against. Oh hold on. Nooo, didn't we both argue in favour of it? Silly us.

Interestingly, it contains the following passage:

"It was a beautiful song," he said. As I left the bar, I asked le patron whether he had truly fait les barricades with Cohn-Bendit in 1968.
"Yes, of course," he said. "And we still need a revolution in France. We should be more like your country, like Britain. France will never succeed until we have the right to hire and sack people whenever we like."

The veteran of the barricades had become a man of the right, then? No, he said, he was still a man of the left. And therefore stoutly for the "non".

I told him that Cohn-Bendit was for the "oui".

"What? Really? He"s changed sides then."

My apologies for the lack of coherence in my writing - which is far from worked out. When I look at, for example, Sarkozy's recent moves or the brilliant work that Ken Mehlman did for the US republicans I can understand what they are doing, why, and how. They are completely cynical and are able to put together very polished political marketing efforts that unite the varied resentments (real or not) of a number of constituencies to build power for their clients/selves. In some ways these guys are the heirs of Goebbels, but with all the benefits of both a better understanding of marketing and market research and also with much more presentable clients. On the other hand, "the left" seems slow to adapt and reluctant to listen. So when we discussed the EU vote, it looks to me like both the "non"-left failed to deal with the reality of the world market, as Cohn-Bendit says, but the oui-left failed to speak to the daily lives of people as Sarkozy says. This is something that struck me in both the "politicians should not listen to businessmen" and the California property tax discussion. One can dismiss this greedy fellow going to the UK ostensibly to avoid bureacracy but really to not pay his 35% tax, and dismiss those short
sighted greedy Californians who valued their homes over schools, and dismiss this surly bar patron who is not only an obvious fool, but a cliche as bad as a taxi driver, and so on. But my sense, and it is not a sense I can as yet back up with a detailed argument, is that all this scornful dismissal is a symptom of why the world is in the hands of Bush's, Blairs, Merkels, and Berlusconis and why even an obvous fraud like Sarkozy can not be laughed at when he strikes a populist pose