Many Germans feel superior to Americans (and everybody else), despite the stagnation of their welfare-state economy with its stunning 12 percent unemployment (which would set off riots here), and Angela Merkel wants to ride to the rescue, not only of Germany but of German-American relations. Her Christian Democrats like Americans, unlike some of the parties in the coalition ruling Germany now. She understands that, superior or not, Germans have to make their economy more like ours to put sauerbraten in every pot. She has even teased the Germans into discussing the flat tax.
In a debate with Chancellor Schroeder, she seemed comfortable paraphrasing Ronald Reagan's words, if not his style. She asked voters to answer a question similar to the question Mr. Reagan posed to Americans in his debate with Jimmy Carter in 1980: "Are you better off now than you were seven years ago?" The chancellor, like the Gipper, is a great communicator, and she's not. She's a woman who's regarded as "one of the boys." She has tried to soften her image, but the physicist who grew up in East Germany is a "tough cookie," and not even Helmut Kohl's description of her as "mein maedchen" -- my little girl -- has changed very much. She's become the Teflon candidate, and Herr Schroeder hasn't cut into her 11-point lead in the public-opinion polls.
Political emancipation in Germany, as one woman in her own party observed, comes with a price: "conforming to the masculine." (Sound familiar?) Certain feminists say she doesn't understand the problems of working mothers because she's not one, an argument much like the notion that only a whale could review "Moby Dick."
Conservatives in Germany traditionally suffer a gender gap, which in this case suggests a large majority of male voters will make the difference in her election. Nevertheless, she's courting women with aggressive appeals to improving child care. Our presidents, of course, can't say out loud what they think about elections in Germany or anywhere else in the world, but the diplomatic gossip persists that a trans-Atlantic relationship between Chancellor Merkel and President Bush could be a romance like the one Margaret Thatcher had with Ronald Reagan. We're a long way from St. Valentine's Day, but stranger things have happened.