The Fifth Summit of the Americas took place last week. The Summit is a meeting of 34 leaders from the Americas (yes South and Central America are America too). I began to wonder, since 33 of these 34 leaders speak Spanish (guess who does not), why the United States has not had a bilingual president since .....Martin Van Buren????
Searching the net I could not really find a biligual president after the early Van Buren (he was fluent in Dutch) but Jimmy Carter and George Bush spoke, "marginal spanish." You can argue other presidents had minimal spanish skills as well (but seriously, you could argue any American knows minimal spanish, so that does not count.)
When will the day come when the U.S. president will have to be multi-lingual? Would it help our country get more foriegn respect?
Dont get me wrong, all the other leaders of the world do not speak english, but many do. I understand the The United States is the leader of the commercial world, but that said, our leaders have had to expensive and elite of an education to not at least suffice some sort of foreign language skill (possibly a minor or undergraduate degree).
Any thoughts.......
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