Being more popular in Europe than George W. Bush is scarcely the hardest task facing his presidential challengers but John Kerry is off to a particularly good start among Europeans anxious to repair transatlantic ties.
Don't expect the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" so loudly derided by Bush's Republican allies over the Iraq war to endorse the Democratic frontrunner in public - French, German and other EU leaders know they may well face four more years trying to get along with a Bush who can seem indifferent to their concerns.
But the French-speaking Kerry, scion of a diplomatic family with a wife raised in Portuguese Africa and a well-connected clan of French cousins, has already struck a chord in Europe by criticising Bush's "erratic unilateralism".
"If Kerry wins, the more he conquers America's indifference towards Europe and the more he expects of us, the better it will be for transatlantic relations," former German President Richard von Weizsaecker said in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.
"He wants to consult America's valuable allies, rather than frightening them off," he wrote. "He is committed to protecting the environment and wants co-operation in the United Nations."
Some analysts see efforts by the Bush administration to draw the sting of Kerry's criticisms by trying to improve their own strained relations with Europeans who opposed the Iraq war.
Kerry has accused the Bush team - "intoxicated with the pre-eminence of American power" - of abandoning "belief in collective security, respect for international institutions and international law, multilateral engagement and the use of force not as a first option but truly as a last resort".
The Massachusetts senator's international credentials are lengthy; son of a foreign service officer, he attended a Swiss school and spent 18 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was raised in Mozambique and educated in South Africa. Among Kerry's French first cousins figures former cabinet minister Brice Lalonde.
"I would think he would have a strong personal interest in foreign issues, unlike Bush...who doesn't even read the papers," said William Drozdiak, executive director of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center in Brussels.
Drozdiak says a central plank of Kerry's campaign will be to accuse Bush of squandering the sympathy of close allies in the two years since the September 11 attacks and then damaging old relationships over last year's US invasion of Iraq.
"That's why...we may be heading over the next six months for very positive Transatlantic relations, primarily because Bush and his political handlers are going to realise the best way to fight that is to make nice with the Europeans," he said.
There have been signs of that already. Diplomats say US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, was unusually cordial and restrained during meetings with his European counterparts in the German city of Munich earlier this month.
"There is a structural difference between Bush and Kerry - Bush is out to get us and Kerry isn't," said Francois Heisbourg, head of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research foreign policy institute. "As far as I am aware he has no axe to grind with the Europeans, or the French in particular."
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