In March 2006, Barack Obama told The Hill that he could speak "Indonesian and a little Spanish."
But today at a campaign event in Ohio, Obama elaborated: "I don't speak a foreign language. It's embarrassing!"
Obama confessed his monolingual shame while defending comments he had made earlier in the week:
"I said something the other day down in Georgia, and the Republicans jumped on this. I said, you know, absolutely immigrants need to learn English, but we also need to learn foreign languages," he said Friday.
Obama told the crowd that this is one of the problems with politics today.
"This is an example of some of the problems we get into when somebody attacks you for saying the truth, which is we should want children with more knowledge. We should want our children to have more skills. There's nothing wrong with that! It's a good thing," he said.
Well, no, that's not exactly what Obama said in Georgia. Let's recall what he actually told Georgia voters:
Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English-they'll learn English-you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup.
Obama made three points:
1. He told the audience members they should be more concerned with their children's learning Spanish than immigrants' learning English. Eighty-three percent of voters disagree.
2. Obama said that everyone should be bilingual. That's a lofty goal. We can all support that once every child has mastered, say, English and math and a few other basic subjects.
3. He illustrated the importance of learning a foreign language by saying how embarrassing it is that Europeans know English, French, and German, but Americans traveling Europe can only say "merci beaucoup." That was a condescending bow to our supposed European betters. And overstated, to boot. Merci beaucoup to Yuval Levin for pointing out that Americans' knowledge of foreign languages is not that bad relative to that of Europeans.
Obama is pretending that he was attacked for merely saying we should all learn a foreign language. He should brush up on his English comprehension.
