Obama to visit with Sarkozy in France today
"Campaign - Presidential"07/25/2008
PARIS (AP) - Friday was France's turn to greet Barack Obama who was to visit Paris just long enough for talks with the French president and a joint news conference, but no rousing speech like the one he delivered in Berlin despite his solid French fan club.
One paper here said the Democratic presidential hopeful would rather keep quiet about his popularity with the French.
Most newspapers headlined Obama's pending arrival with the leftist daily Liberation giving a full front-page spread to "Obamania."
After Berlin, where Obama drew some 200,000 spectators for a speech Thursday, the conservative newspaper Le Figaro wrote that Obama is not looking to draw crowds in Paris "because he knows his huge popularity in our country could ill serve him with a part the American centrist electorate."
That was a reference to the negative image France had for years among some Americans because of Paris' vocal opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
Only one venue was on Obama's Paris schedule - the presidential Elysee Palace. A meeting with President Nicolas Sarkozy was set for 5 p.m. to be followed by a joint news conference.
Sarkozy, a conservative, was rushing back from a summit in southwestern France to host Obama.
Although Sarkozy and Obama are on different sides of the political fence, the French leader seems to have a softspot for the US senator.
"Obama? He's my buddy," Le Figaro quoted the president as saying before Obama's arrival. "I am the only Frenchman who knows him."
Sarkozy, elected in 2007, first met Obama in 2006 while a candidate for the French presidency.
Sarkozy offered considerably less to Obama's Republican rival, John McCain during a March visit to Paris. After 45 minutes of talks, McCain was left on his own, fielding questions from reporters in the courtyard of the Elysee.
French supporters of Obama were excited about the visit.
"He is young, not from the establishment. It's a change of US politics, of the US image in the world," said Samuel Solvit, the 22-year-old head of a Paris-based Obama committee.
"We are not here to influence the American vote, to use it politically. We are here to say that what is going on in the US has an influence on the world," Solvit, an economics student, said in an interview with Associated Press Television News.
After his brief trip to Paris, Obama travels to London, the last stop of a tour of the Middle East and Europe designed to reassure voters in the United States about Obama's ability to lead the country and make his way with aplomb through world diplomacy.
In Berlin, he underscored his desire to take a frayed cross-Atlantic alliance in a new direction after eight years of the administration of President George W. Bush. He seemed to have succeeded, with the B-Z tabloid referring to him as "Prince America" and invoking President John F. Kennedy's famous solidarity pledge of "Ich bin ein Berliner" to say that Thursday was "the day on which Berlin again said 'I am an American.'"