no, there have been other prominent French presidential candidates who made a point of being non-idoelogical and rather optimistic; the authors seem not to have heard of Jean-Jacques Servan-Shreiber, or JJSS, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s introduced such bubbly American election tropes as cheerleaders, balloons  and marching bands at his rallies, while centrist Francois Bayrou more recently has appealed to middle-class Catholic moderation as a basis for a stable, optimistic view of social cooperation ... Macron not quite so unusual