Panetta: Obama’s Trierweiler

Admittedly, it lacks the ingredients of spurned love and betrayal, although over the course of the 400 pages he devotes to Barack Obama, Leon Panetta seems to be experiencing an almost emotional disillusionment. And then, as Valérie Trierweiler did, he blasts the president while he is still in office.

Like Trierweiler, Panetta chose just the right moment to drop his bombshell: for Hollande, the beginning of a new parliamentary session that was promising to be difficult, with his popularity at an all-time low; for Obama the eve of the midterm elections, which were already shaping up to be less than favorable. Like Trierweiler, Panetta has attracted strong disapproval from insiders for his disloyalty and lack of decency, not for revelations about his private life, but about leadership secrets, which have done nothing to harm the book’s sales — quite the contrary.

An Intelligent but Indecisive President

Leon Panetta knows plenty about presidents, having also served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. He paints a picture of a leader who is cerebral and intelligent, but lacking in resolve and too eager to please people, even his political adversaries. “The president,” he writes, “too often relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”

He criticizes this “vacillating leader,” among other things, for the abrupt withdrawal from Iraq with its serious consequences, and for his weakness on Syria. “Obama,” he writes, “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” Complains? At least he hasn’t been heard overusing the anaphora “it isn’t easy,” as Hollande did in a press conference!

Reading Panetta’s book, it’s impossible not to draw comparisons between the two heads of state, who also happen to share an alliance rarely seen in Franco-American relations. One final similarity: Barack Obama invited Arnold Schwarzenegger to the White House, and on Oct. 10, François Hollande received the former governor of California at the Élysée Palace. Was it to discuss unemployment, the public debt, or both?