In honor of Presidents Day, the Pew Research Center took to Facebook to remind the world that, when he’s on the unemployment line next January, Obama should aim his resumes at one country in particular: France.
Using data from the think tank’s most recent Global Attitudes & Trends studies, Pew has made one thing clear: the French really, absolutely love Barack Obama. Of the countries surveyed, the president’s confidence rating is higher in France than anywhere else except the the Pacific Rim, where Filipinos and South Koreans gave him 90 and 88% ratings. France came in third worldwide with 83%, a percentage point higher than Ghana, one of nine African nations polled and one of fifty-four Obama was not born in:
Of course, liking Obama seems to be a direct reaction to how much people hated President George II, who had cataclysmically low approval in Western Europe at the end of his second term:
And there’s even a little career guidance involved: should Obama expatriate, he’ll the most work available to him in the area of climate change. The French haven’t been terribly happy with his work on the subject so far, with less than half of the people survey thinking he could do more to combat the scourge of a warming planet.
While Obama isn’t currently eligible to run for the French presidency in 2017, it may be time to give France a few electoral votes in our elections: they’ve got fantastic taste in American presidents. And they replaced their electoral college with universal suffrage in 1962.