Aha! 
A surefire way to get Republicans and "Reagan Democrats" to vote for Obama. If he's elected, the French (saddled with that gauche “Sarko l’Américain”) will be vert with envy! What could possibly make a Republican happier than sticking it to those true elites, the French?

Every French president since the liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now. Mr. Sarkozy’s taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Celine Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoyevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand.) The current president’s fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Mr. Sarkozy’s ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.

“A rupture,” is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.

“An incredible change,” said Jean Lacouture, de Gaulle’s biographer. One recent afternoon he sat in his study overlooking the Seine, meditating on this turn of events. “When de Gaulle returned to a liberated France in 1944,” he recalled, “he made a show of visiting famous writers like Paul Valéry and François Mauriac. It was his way of declaring a renewed sense of French glory.”

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“Sarko l’Américain” is another common insult. The French, though, may soon have to think up a fresh one if (and you can almost hear Mitterrand starting to turn in his grave) the United States elects a president who delivers speeches like the one Senator Barack Obama gave on race while this country has its first modern leader not to have graduated from the country’s upper-crust schools, a head of state who on a recent visit to the Vatican arrived late, with an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic named Jean-Marie Bigard in tow. The coup de grâce: the hyperactive Mr. Sarkozy reportedly text-messaged somebody or other while with the pope.

That incident infuriated some French Roman Catholics along with many stodgy Gaullists and other traditional French conservatives who, though they helped elect him, now find Mr. Sarkozy, to put it bluntly, vulgar.