How's the Candidates' Spanish? Hard to Say. [View All]

[kskiska]

Howard Dean was outraged. Worse, he was outraged en español. His eyebrows arching, his finger jabbing the air, his voice dripping with contempt, he stirred his Latino audience by attacking President Bush for what he'd done to nosotros ingresos.

That is, to "us incomes."

In the quadrennial stampede for the White House, President Bush and the gaggle of Democrats seeking to unseat him are pursuing Hispanic voters as never before. In debates and TV ads, in one-on-one chats and in town hall meetings, the Democratic hopefuls have shown a remarkable -- some might say reckless -- tendency to go bilingual.

(snip)

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who grew up in Mexico City, attended the debates. Asked to rate the candidates' Spanish, he snickered. Richardson gave a "passable C" to Dean and Sen. John Kerry, who spoke choppy but identifiable Spanish. Sen. Joe Lieberman, he noted, sprinkled his English with both Yiddish and Spanish, sometimes both at once. ("Viva chutzpah!")

(snip)

The current crop of Democratic candidates features no Ugly Americans, but a cosmopolitan, multilingual lot. Take Kerry, the Massachusetts senator: He speaks Italian, French and some Spanish. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark speaks French and learned Spanish while heading the U.S. Southern Command. He also admits to conversing in Russian "with the help of vodka."

(snip)

Bush is not fluent, veering often into English when his Spanish runs dry. And he is known to be grammar-challenged in languages beyond his own.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47765-2004Jan25?language=printer