Jam Jar Politics.(Jacques Chirac)(Brief Article)

Some scandals are just too delicious, and those linked to French President Jacques Chirac are, well, especially juicy. As one of his rivals once said, "Chirac can have his mouth full of jam, his fingers covered with it, the pot can be standing open in front of him, and when you ask if he's a jam eater he'll say: 'Me, eat jam?' "

In other countries or cultures, that might not be acceptable behavior. But in France, there's a certain charm in cheating, and Chirac is nothing if not charming. In his re-election race against the rather humorless socialist Lionel Jospin, the reason most people give for voting for Chirac is that he's just more sympathique. It's not that evidence implicating him in several different scandals hasn't been reported. It has, extensively. But Chirac's foibles, it would seem, are ones his people find easy to understand. He epitomizes the culture from which corruption comes, and exemplifies the reasons it's so hard to eliminate. Even in grade schools, cheating is not considered a shame. And for grown-ups, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote almost two centuries ago, while rules are stiff, in practice they're soft. So why should presidents be holier than thou?

Wouldn't it seem churlish to attack Chirac for taking his family and friends on so many lovely trips when he was mayor of Paris? He paid 500,000 euros in cash for the tickets, after all. (When queried, he says he was entitled to the money from a special discretionary account.) And so what if members of his party used to draw down salaries from the government for jobs they never did? Surely they're not alone in that. Yes, yes, there were kickbacks in the construction of schools and public housing, but didn't Chirac's Gaullist Party share the wealth with the socialists and communists? Maybe a few printing invoices were padded, but what's 14 million euros here or there in a political system that runs on sheaves of high-denomination bills? As a former staffer at Chirac's party treasury wrote last month: "To close the cupboards you had to push in the bundles with your feet."

Nothing crystallized Chirac's rakish insouciance quite like revelations earlier ...