Tony Blair leaves office still a romantic, a leader who tried to do too much and failed because his ambitions were so high. Jacques Chirac's legacy is that of a political cynic who failed by trying to do too little.The British prime minister has announced that on June 27, he will quit the unassuming townhouse at 10 Downing Street that he has occupied for 10 years. The French president departs from the majestic Elysee Palace this week after 12 years. Both leave in the same condition: politically scarred and deeply unpopular at home after sparkling beginnings.
These two leaders could have changed Europe and perhaps the world had they been able to work together. Instead, they became bitter rivals who repeatedly thwarted each other, sometimes for the fun of it.
The character gap helps explain why history will reassess Blair's record more generously than it will Chirac's. We look at politicians most of all in hope of seeing reflected what we admire in ourselves. That will be to Blair's advantage.
Failure is too harsh a term in any event to apply definitively to Blair, whose career on the international scene is not likely to be at an end. He has also had indisputable accomplishments.
As he prepared to announce his resignation date on Thursday, Blair brought together Protestant and Catholic factions in Northern Ireland in a historic power-sharing agreement that owes much to his persistence, persuasiveness and passion for politics.
Blair wore his romanticism on his sleeve even as he proclaimed the end of his tumultuous decade of modernizing Britain's politics and economy:
"I was, and remain, as a person and as a prime minister, an optimist. Politics may be the art of the possible, but at least in life give the impossible a go," Blair told a Labor Party gathering in his constituency of Sedgefield before adding: "Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right."
It is a line that coming from most politicians would invite a laugh, but it resonates for Blair. Think of Vladimir Putin trying to deliver that line with a straight face. Or, alas, Chirac.
The outgoing French president has a genial, gallant and gregarious personality that does not hide a deep core of cynicism. More than a dozen conversations with him over the past 30 years were unfailingly friendly, funny and all about Jacques Chirac.
Conversations with Blair at 10 Downing Street were all about work. They centered on his determination to change Britain and the world through the force of ideas and, where necessary abroad, the use of force. He once told me with fierce determination that the political right should have no monopoly on projecting power in the world.
So believe Blair when he says that invading Iraq with the United States was his own judgment, not a decision dictated to him by Washington. Blair's support of successful " humanitarian intervention" in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and elsewhere pushed him naturally toward regime change in Baghdad in 2003.
Like many of us, Blair had an overly romantic idea of how Iraq would function under what became a misconceived and mismanaged occupation. But the mistake was his own, anchored in his belief in the positive force of politics and the ability of people to change for the better.
His historical optimism was reinforced by success at home. He transformed not only his Labor Party but also the opposition Conservatives, who have been forced to adopt Blair's philosophy of combining social justice with market efficiency to become politically competitive.
The French praise Chirac for having been right about Iraq and for standing up to President Bush. He played a decisive role in ending the bloodletting in Bosnia and showed flexibility on France's role in NATO at a time of change. He also launched with Blair in 1998 a promising attempt at French-British cooperation on European defense.
But that effort faltered as the two pushed competing visions of Europe and the world. Chirac has been unable to give content or direction to a French role in the "multipolar world" he often described but never successfully defined. A stagnant economy, corruption in his inner circle, repeated retreats on labor policy and the angry rejection by French voters of a proposed European constitution in 2005 became millstones around Chirac's neck.
Chirac pursued and used power for what it could bring to him and to France. Ruling was a goal in itself. For Blair, power was a tool for changing Britain and the world. He started much that will have to be finished by others. But that is the better legacy, by far.
Jim Hoagland