OK, class, put away your books and take out a sheet of paper and number from 1 to 10. We’re having a pop quiz.
Name the leaders of these four major world trouble spots: Chechnya, Taiwan, Pakistan and India.
As you may have heard by now, when Texas Gov. George W. Bush was asked that question last week by a Boston TV reporter, he could name only one. He answered “Lee” for Lee Teng-hui, when asked to name the president of Taiwan.
That’s one more correct answer than I got. But as the Boston TV reporter said in explaining his own ignorance of foreign dignitaries, “I’m not running for president.”
Which raises the very salient question: What do Americans want out of their president?
For example, are we are going to start choosing our presidents based on a pop quiz?
Will debates begin to look like the highbrow quiz show “Jeopardy”?
If so, the front-runners might turn out to be someone like Alan Keyes or Pat Buchanan.
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Keyes, after all, was a United Nations diplomat under President Reagan. Based on that, and his relentless bashing of liberals and “abortion murderers,” Keyes is running for president in his third attempt to attract more than 3 or 4 percent of the vote in a primary.
Buchanan, a veteran of two Republican White Houses, also fancies himself as something of an expert on the big names and dates of history and foreign policy. It is just his interpretation of those names and dates, like his questioning whether the United States should have gotten involved in World War II, that sometimes sounds like rantings from the yahoo fringe.
Maybe voters don’t care about what facts a president knows as much as they care about how he (or, someday, she) interprets them.
Long before he came down with Alzheimer’s disease, Ronald Reagan’s memory of names and faces was so poor in office that he greeted Sam Pierce, his secretary of housing and urban development as “Mr. Mayor” one day.
Yet, Reagan was one of America’s most popular and successful presidents. Like him or not, you knew where he stood.
Similarly, Bill Clinton often has been criticized for his failures to sketch out a clear-cut foreign policy, even while he has scored some historic successes.
“Surround yourself with the best people you can find,” Reagan once said, “delegate authority and don’t interfere.” Bush has acquired some of the same key advisers Reagan and the senior Bush had, including former Secretary of State George Schultz and Russia expert Condoleeza Rice, now provost at Stanford University.
As long as the junior Bush does not delegate his way into something like the Iran-contra scandal, he could easily survive questions about his foreign-policy expertise.
By contrast, Al Gore’s recent image embarrassment exposes deeper problems.
Time magazine reported that famous feminist author Naomi Wolf had been getting paid $15,000 a month (recently lowered to $5,000) to surreptitiously advise Gore about his image, particularly to attract more younger and female voters.
It was Wolf, Time reported, who persuaded the president to wear more “earth tones,” behave less like a “beta male” to President Clinton’s domineering “alpha male.”
In other words, as I once read on a bumper sticker, if you’re not the lead dog, your view’s always pretty much the same.
If you strip away Wolf’s trendy language, you have some good advice there. Vice presidents are, almost by definition, betas. A second-banana image is almost part of the job description.
Gore’s problem is not the Wolf story but the deeper flaws it exposes. The Gore campaign has been too top-heavy and spent too much money with little to show for it. Gore’s polling numbers have slipped behind rival Bill Bradley in New Hampshire and other important Eastern states.
Worst of all, the story reinforces the impression that Gore simply does not have a grasp on who he is and, therefore, has difficult conveying a strong, commanding image of leadership.
Bush’s flap reinforces the impression that he is “Bush lite” on foreign policy, compared to his dad. But this image problem may not be as serious in this campaign season as Gore’s. After all, most Americans are light on foreign policy. We tend to elect people not based on the facts they know but on their ability to get reliable information and make sound decisions.
As Reagan and Clinton have shown, it is easier to vote for someone who seems to know who he is. Bush conveys the impression of a guy who knows who is and what he knows, take him or leave him. Gore still seems to be groping.