Since France has its first round of polling today, I just wanted to share something about the bad things that elective office can do to people. I have no particular quarrel with Nicolas Sarkozy, he’s not been as destructive as Cameron or Merkel, and he seems to generally be a decent chap. But man, oh, man, this guy will say literally anything to keep his job. Including the typical dogwhistle sort of stuff about foreigners that every conservative everywhere apparently has to say:

France has too many foreigners and is not integrating them properly, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an interview on French television.

“Today we have a problem,” Sarkozy said Tuesday night on France 2 TV.

“Our system of integration is working worse and worse because we have too many foreigners on our territory, and we can no longer manage to find them accommodation, a job, a school,” he said.

France places a premium on national identity, pressing the population to put “Frenchness” before religion or national background.

Mr. Sarkozy, of course, was (and is) the son of two immigrants. It’s true. If President Sarkozy circa 2012 had his way, his parents would have had to stay in Hungary during the Communist era because he knows they wouldn’t be able to become French enough. If Mr. Sarkozy wants to find an example of Frenchness coexisting with another nation’s background, perhaps he ought to look in the mirror. I don’t know how he can say something like that sincerely with his own family background. Oh, wait.

Here’s the one part of it I don’t get, whether it’s Sarkozy dumping on his parents, Orrin Hatch threatening to knock someone’s block off, or John McCain going all Jim DeMint on us last cycle. What is to be gained by this? I mean, in 1948 Harry Truman was virulent in his attacks on Tom Dewey, but let’s not forget that was before the era of extensive lobbying, lavish pensions and post-presidential buckraking, and at least with Truman there was a genuine lack of financial security to explain why he did it. The election of Thomas Dewey simply would not have been dystopian, and Truman had to have known that. With these modern equivalents, one simply wonders what it is they feel they have to lose that’s worth dropping any sort of dignity. Sarkozy is already super-rich. Hatch and McCain are well-off too, and if they lose they can just become lobbyists and make more, while still having influence on the process. Hell, McCain hasn’t done anything since his work with Russ Feingold a decade ago, so it’s not as though he’d be losing much, and presumably he’d still get booked for the Sunday shows after being a senator as a matter of habit as much as anything else. So what gives? Is power really that addictive? Must be.