New elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been a jogger for years. But for some reason, his fitness regimen - not to mention the NYPD T-shirt he often sports - has got people’s shorts in a knot on both sides of the English Channel, reports The Washington Post.

Left-wing newspaper Libération calls Sarkozy’s choice of exercise “an un-French, right-wing conspiracy.” For his part, Sarko says, “Of course it is right-wing … The very act of forcing yourself to go for a run, every morning, is a highly conservative business. There is the mental effort needed to overcome your laziness.”

But jogging is also regarded as an “American thing”:

Sarkozy has fueled a French suspicion that running is for self-centered individualists like Americans, reports Charles Bremner, Paris correspondent for the Times of London. “Patrick Mignon, a sports sociologist, noted that French intellectuals had always held sport in contempt, while totalitarian regimes cultivated physical fitness,” Bremner writes.

“Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the right,” Odile Baudrier, editor of V02 magazine, a sports publication, told Libération. …

“The Sarkozy jog, say his critics, is a sad imitation of the habits of American presidents, and a capitulation to ‘le défi Américain’ (a phrase that was the title of a book published here as ‘The American Challenge’) as bad as the influx of Hollywood movies,” writes Boris Johnson, a British member of Parliament and confirmed jogger, in the Telegraph.

Sarko’s point about conservatives being disciplined and goal-oriented is well-taken – just compare Bill Clinton’s diet and exercise regimen to Bush 43’s. And it just so happens that physical fitness is an American thing – our Founding Fathers were great believers in healthy eating and exercise habits, according to The Virginia Pilot:

Thomas Jefferson suggested a body undertake “two hours of exercise” a day for good health” [but not] “games played with the ball” Jefferson famously claimed, “are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind.”

The Pilot also notes that “there was no greater advocate … for strenuous activity and bodily upkeep than Ben Franklin”:

In a day when swimming was largely reserved for saving one’s skin after falling overboard, Franklin thought nothing of splashing into the River Thames as a young man and dashing off a few miles.

He did that at least once, “performing on the way many feats of activity, both upon and under water, that surprised and pleased those to whom they were novelties.”

And Sarko was certainly channeling Franklin (”He that is good for making excuses, is seldom good for anything else.”) when he embraced the idea that jogging is a “right wing” activity.

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