And the multilingual impulse is widespread through their government leadership. Instead, they carry out their business in a variety of languages embracing the diverse tongues of their native country, as well as the surrounding international community. The leaders of the G8 countries, the top eight economies in the world today, do not rest on their laurels as a pretext to remain insular. The U.S.вЂ™s superpower status and relative geographic isolation from Europe, Asia, and Africa, however, do not mean it operates in a vacuum when it comes to foreign policy вЂ“ the rules of engagement remain the same. Every nation has an army of translators fluent in as many languages as there are countries who serve as the conduits of foreign policy exchanges. Dollar is the reserve currency of the world, English has become the reserve language of the world, spoken as the official language of more countries than any other in the world. Naturally, American exceptionalism is alive and well today. Roosevelt (French and German) in 1945, before McGovern-Fraser. Perhaps todayвЂ™s electoral set-up helps to explain why the United States has not had a President fluent in a language other than English since Franklin D. In 2004, Democratic nominee John KerryвЂ™s fluency in French, which had hitherto been a campaign secret, was revealed when prompted at a campaign rally, leading some in the media to believe it would cost him. During last yearвЂ™s Republican primary, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman were criticized for their abilities to speak French and Mandarin, respectively, and were viewed by some Republican primary voters as less patriotic than their opponents. Those who deviate from this pattern have suffered at least temporary setbacks. We are very much an insular country and thus, the PresidentвЂ™s relation to non-English-speaking Americans and immigrants (those who generally cannot vote to begin with), or even to delegates of foreign countries with whom the U.S. This is, of course, to be expected, since only 14 percent of Americans can claim fluency in conventional Spanish, with other languages lagging way behind. Even though people rave about the comparative advantages of multilingualism in searching for a job in todayвЂ™s global economy, nowhere on the list of qualifications is the presidential nominee expected to be fluent in a language other than English. The ideal nominee, therefore, is one who has the durability and charisma to survive the protracted yearlong nomination process, has the outward projection of erudition, demonstrates an intense and visible sense of patriotism, and so forth. Since primary voters tend to be demographically unrepresentative of the larger electorate (and some closed primaries exclude non-partisans from participating), successful nominees usually resemble primary votersвЂ™ likeness. The advent and spread of primary elections may have empowered the voting public at the expense of party leaders, but it also changed the types of candidates preferred for nomination. In 1968, the McGovern-Fraser Commission altered the power dynamic of the electoral system. The disconnect today between vaunted American ideals of multiculturalism and the reality of Anglophone dominance in the presidency can in large part be traced to the American electoral system.

President Obama is not the first President to lack multilingual faculties, nor should he shoulder all the blame for this being the case. He cannot converse with foreign leaders in their native tongue, nor can he speak with the millions of immigrants in this country in their first language.В Although the annals of American political rhetoric are replete with laudatory remarks for the diverse combination of peoples, cultures, and languages unique to the United States, our Heads of State have been largely unrepresentative of AmericaвЂ™s lingual vibrancy. Ironically, however, President Obama cannot speak a second language himself. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.вЂќ вЂњInstead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English - theyвЂ™ll learn English - you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. At a 2008 campaign event, Senator Barack Obama responded to the perennial conservative impulse to make English the official language of the United States:

List of monolingual countries