There is no doubt about it. U.S. presidential hopeful George W. Bush handed his rivals some welcome ammunition last week when he flubbed that pop quiz. Asked to identify the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, Pakistan and India, a stunned Mr. Bush could only come up with "Lee" for Taiwan and (an admittedly brilliant) "General" for Pakistan. Luckily, the reporter did not ask the possible next president of this country's most important ally to name the Japanese prime minister.
Compounding his embarrassment, Mr. Bush later huffed that even his foreign-policy advisers didn't know all the answers. Perhaps he thought that would reassure voters and mollify the inhabitants of those four remote and obscure places, along with the Grecians, Kosovarians and East Timorians he has recently invoked. (Who said he never discussed foreign policy?) The memories come flooding back: President Gerald Ford insisting in 1976 that Poland was not under Soviet control. Vice President Dan Quayle, remarking after a tour of Latin America, "The only regret I have is that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people." Vice President Al Gore assuring the Institute of World Affairs that "we can all be 'e pluribus unum' -- out of one, many." (What is it about vice presidents and Latin?) President Ronald Reagan's famous dictum, covering a multitude of slipups: "Facts are stupid things."
The question is, does this kind of ignorance matter? Mr. Bush's failure has sparked quite a debate in the United States. Some -- perhaps remembering his own father's criticism of Mr. Gore and President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign: "My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than those two bozos" -- insist that a grasp of foreign affairs is central to a presidential candidate's credibility. (The senior Bush has been silent on this latest bozoism.)