Sure, it's easy for Nicolas Sarkozy to say now, as he just did to Le Figaro, that he always knew Obama would beat Hillary Clinton. But it as if as long as two years ago Sarkozy was betting that Obama and McCain would win their respective party's nominations.
As this old Economist blog item points out, when Sarkozy was still Interior Minister and he visited Washington in September 2006, the only other American pols he met with besides President Bush were Obama and McCain: McCain was probably the nominal GOP presidential frontrunner at the time, but Obama certainly wasn't considered the leading contender for the Democratic nomination. And yet Sarko seemed to know. . . .
So I guess now we'll have to compare today's Sarko-Obama meeting with the Sarko-McCain meeting in Paris from March to see if we can get any read on who Sarkozy thinks is going to win. Because the man evidently does know how to pick 'em.
--Jason Zengerle