I'd love to see this guy debate Owl Gore...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/world/europe/25klaus.html?_r=1

A Fiery Czech Is Poised to Be the Face of Europe 

PRAGUE — In the 1980s, a Communist secret police agent infiltrated 
clandestine economics seminars hosted by Vaclav Klaus, a fiery future 
leader of the Czech Republic, who had come under suspicion for extolling 
free market virtues. Rather than reporting on Marxist heresy, the agent 
was most struck by Mr. Klaus’s now famous arrogance. 

“His behavior and attitudes reveal that he feels like a rejected 
genius,” the agent noted in his report, which has since been made 
public. “He shows that whoever does not agree with his views is stupid 
and incompetent.” 

Decades later, Mr. Klaus, the 67-year-old president of the Czech 
Republic — an iconoclast with a perfectly clipped mustache — continues 
to provoke strong reactions. He has blamed what he calls the misguided 
fight against global warming for contributing to the international 
financial crisis, branded Al Gore an “apostle of arrogance” for his role 
in that fight, and accused the European Union of acting like a Communist 
state. 

Now the Czech Republic is about to assume the rotating presidency of the 
European Union and there is palpable fear that Mr. Klaus will embarrass 
the world’s biggest trading bloc and complicate its efforts to address 
the economic crisis and expand its powers. His role in the Czech 
Republic is largely ceremonial, but he remains a powerful force here, 
has devotees throughout Europe and delights in basking in the spotlight. 

“Oh God, Vaclav Klaus will come next,” read a recent headline in the 
Austrian daily Die Presse, in an article anticipating the havoc he could 
wreak in a union of 470 million people already divided over its future 
direction.

An economist by training and a free marketeer by ideology, Mr. Klaus has 
criticized the course set by the union’s departing leader, President 
Nicolas Sarkozy of France. The ambitious Mr. Sarkozy has used France’s 
European Union presidency to push an agenda that includes broader and 
more coordinated regulation by the largest economies to tame the worst 
of the market’s excesses.

Even those who worry about Mr. Klaus’s potential role as a spoiler 
concede that his influence over policy in the European Union will be 
circumscribed, given his largely symbolic functions as president in the 
Czech Republic.

But Mr. Klaus’s sheer will and inflammatory talk — the eminent British 
historian Timothy Garton Ash once called him “one of the rudest men I 
have ever met” — are likely to have some impact. 

“Klaus is a provocateur who will twist his arguments to get attention,” 
said Jiri Pehe, a former adviser to Vaclav Havel, Mr. Klaus’s rival and 
predecessor as president.

To supporters, Mr. Klaus is a brave, lone crusader, a defender of 
liberty, the only European leader in the mold of the formidable Margaret 
Thatcher. (Aides say Mr. Klaus has a photo of the former British prime 
minister in his office near his desk.)

To his many critics, he is a cynical populist, a hardheaded pragmatist 
long known as a foil to Mr. Havel, the philosopher-dreamer, and a 
troublemaker. 

Mr. Klaus declined to be interviewed for this article. His office called 
a list of proposed questions “peculiar.” 

As a former finance minister and prime minister, he is credited with 
presiding over the peaceful 1993 split of Czechoslovakia into two states 
and helping to transform the Czech Republic into one of the former 
Soviet bloc’s most successful economies. 

But his ideas about governance are out of step with many of the European 
Union nations that his country will lead starting Jan. 1. 

While even many of the world’s most ardent free marketeers acknowledged 
the need for the recent coordinated bailout of European banks, Mr. Klaus 
lambasted it as irresponsible protectionism. He blamed too much — rather 
than too little — regulation for the crisis. 

A fervent critic of the environmental movement, he has called global 
warming a dangerous “myth,” arguing that the fight against climate 
change threatens economic growth. 

Perhaps his greatest ire has been reserved for the European Union. In 
2005, he called for it to be “scrapped.” Now, he is a vocal opponent of 
the Lisbon Treaty, which aims to help Europe become more of an 
international player, but which he argues will strip countries of 
sovereignty. 

On a state visit to Ireland this month, Mr. Klaus incensed the 
government and annoyed many in his own country by publicly praising 
Declan Ganley, a businessman and political activist who was influential 
in persuading a majority of Irish voters in June to reject the treaty. 

And while other European leaders have criticized a newly assertive 
Russia, Mr. Klaus has forged close ties with Prime Minister Vladimir V. 
Putin and recently distanced himself from the Czech government’s 
criticism of Russia over the war with Georgia in August. 

Those who know Mr. Klaus say his economic liberalism is an outgrowth of 
his upbringing. Born in 1941, he obtained an economics degree in 1963 
and was deeply influenced by free market economists like Milton 
Friedman. 

Mr. Klaus’s son and namesake, Vaclav, recalled in an interview that when 
he was 13, his father told him to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to better 
understand Communism’s oppressiveness. 

“If you lived under communism, then you are very sensitive to forces 
that try to control or limit human liberty,” he said in an interview. 

In 1989, during the Velvet Revolution to overthrow Czechoslovakia’s 
Communist leaders, Mr. Klaus offered his services as an economist to 
Civic Forum, the group opposing the government. When the new government 
took control, he became finance minister. But his relationship with the 
dissidents quickly soured. 

Mr. Havel recalled in his memoirs that Mr. Klaus had an aversion “to the 
rest of us, whom he had clearly consigned to the same Dumpster, with a 
sign on it saying ‘left-wing intellectuals.’ ”

In 1991, Mr. Klaus founded a new center-right party, the Civic 
Democratic Party, which won elections in June 1992, making him prime 
minister. His radical privatization strategy — including a voucher 
scheme later emulated in Russia, where it led to the amassing of vast 
wealth by a few oligarchs — was marred by allegations of corruption, 
with Mr. Havel accusing Mr. Klaus of “gangster capitalism.”

Ladislav Jakl, now Mr. Klaus’s pony-tailed private secretary, said that 
the main difference between the leaders was that Mr. Havel sought to 
give people goodness whereas Mr. Klaus was determined to bestow freedom. 

Mr. Klaus was forced to resign as prime minister in November 1997 after 
a government crisis caused by a party financing scandal. And in 2002, he 
was forced to resign as party leader when his party lost a second 
election. 

But Mr. Klaus later decided to run for the presidency and won by a slim 
margin in 2003. He has since gained in popularity, and was re-elected 
this year by the Czech Parliament. 

Bohumil Dolezal, a leading commentator who once advised Mr. Klaus, said 
Mr. Klaus’s greatest talent was his ability to appeal to average Czechs, 
who imbibed his easy populism along with their beers. 

“Czechs have a deep and hysterical past full of injustice, and Klaus is 
a master at tapping into this,” Mr. Dolezal said, adding that the office 
of the presidency, despite its limited powers, lends the aura of emperor-
king. 

“Even if a horse was president of the Czech Republic, it would have a 50 
percent approval rating,” he said. “And Klaus is surely much cleverer 
than a horse.”

CMPQwk 1.42-21 9999 
Democrats --  The party responsible for the housing meltdown ....

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