In Deepest Bordeaux

And then I went to a different country and saw how different life could be if we didn’t have the values and the kinds of opportunities that exist in America. ~Mitt Romney

Somehow, I don’t think a two-year mission to France in the 1970s qualifies as an example of seeing how radically different cultural values change life for the worse.  What is this guy’s real problem with the French? 

The French have many extra holidays, short work weeks, subsidised farmers, artisanal bakers (ah, fond memories of MAPSS final exams are coming back now), abundant cheese production, the occasionally superb film along with a lot of junk, some glorious older architecture, a lot of hideous newer architecture, surprisingly powerful labour unions, a hideous technocratic elite and an absolutely destructive belief in equality combined with waves of poor Muslim and African immigrants, but they also have fewer single-parent families (though they also have far more cohabiting parents), they have an active pro-natal policy and have ruled out same-sex marriage, which the Mitt couldn’t even manage to get people in Massachusetts to do.  They have enough sense not to belong to NATO, which we still haven’t figured out after all these years.  In other words, it’s a very mixed picture with a lot on the debit side (just as is the case in this country), but what exactly was so terrible in Romney’s experience that he has made it a defining part of his outlook that France is his primary example of deprivation and misery?