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Who killed Betty Van Patter?
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By Suzi Parker
[12/09/99]

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Just don't ask him to name any Chechens.

By now the story is so well known it could become an early turning point in the campaign. Last month, a cagey television reporter cornered Bush in Boston and asked him if he could name the leaders of four hotspots: Pakistan, India, Taiwan and Chechnya, a breakaway republic in Russia. Bush answered "Lee" for Taiwan — last names get full credit — but failed to identify any of the others.

It got worse at last week's GOP debate, when Bush volunteered he was reading James Chase's biography of Dean Acheson, but couldn't answer questions about what he'd learned from it, beyond reciting a campaign sound bite about freedom being "our nation's greatest export."

Throughout the campaign, Bush has been getting the Eliza Doolittle treatment from a handful of his party's foreign-policy mandarins. Critics on the right and the left, meanwhile, have dismissed him as an intellectual lightweight and delighted in his occasional dopey gaffes. "If Mr. Bush was telling the truth about the Acheson book, he is apparently capable of reading 512 pages of material and coming away from the exercise without a single new thought," Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times.

The quiz has given his critics an appealing angle. In the New Yorker, cartoonist Bruce McCall depicted Bush's world with a slyly mislabeled map -- Africa and South America were switched, and the Middle East was marked "Arabia" and "Jewia." The New Republic gave him a dunce cap and dumb grin for a pair of cover stories on "stupid candidates." The late shows have been merciless.

But is Bush getting a bad rap?

The day after the quiz story broke, my Foreign Policy colleagues and I were milling around a conference room waiting for an editorial meeting to start. Soon enough, conversation turned to the quiz -- specifically, who among us could claim a perfect four for four. Nobody could do it. This from a room full of people who could find Bishkek on a map without breaking a sweat.

The following week, the New Yorker editors put together their own pop quiz, and sent their fact checkers on a mission to trip up a bevy of star political journalists. Along with straightforward challenges, such as identifying the presidents of France, Sudan and Venezuela, there were a half-dozen ringers, including ZaSu Pitts (a silent movie star), Yma Sumac (a Peruvian singer) and Shun Lee West (a Manhattan restaurant).

"I thought our test was very hard," staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg confessed in a telephone interview. "I would have done very poorly myself."

Only the Washington Post's James Hoagland earned a passing mark.

Years ago, Spy magazine pulled a similar stunt, luring unwitting members of Congress into commenting on U.S. policy toward ethnic cleansing in "Freedonia." Congressman Dick Armey recalled the prank in a 1997 speech to Johns Hopkins students, suggesting that lapses in political geography tend to be forgiven.

"As you all know, Freedonia does not exist -- except as the fictional country in the movie 'The Mouse That Roared' ... For the record, if they had asked me that question, I would have cheerfully admitted I don't have a clue about Freedonia or a lot of other places for that matter." Indeed. Freedonia was actually from the Marx Brothers movie "Duck Soup."

Most pundits (those without an ax to grind, anyway) quickly wrote off Bush's pop quiz as trivia, and thus, well, trivial. He probably should have done better than one out of four, but his poor performance speaks less to his foreign policy credentials than to poor instincts. He should have smelled a trap and run like hell.

While Bush got away with a few snickers from the cognoscenti when he referred to Greeks as Grecians and Kosovars as Kosovarians earlier this year, the quiz refuses to go away. Like Dan Quayle's "potatoe" flub, it has become a kind of shorthand for these apparent intellectual and foreign-policy shortcomings.

"Maybe there's some justice to that," Hertzberg remarked. "The Grecians thing is much more disturbing, because it suggests a depth of ignorance, a kind of comprehensive lack of understanding about the world."

All the more reason to take seriously the question of how competent Bush is to run the U.S. foreign-policy show. Rather than blindly dismissing the Republican front-runner out of hand as a provincial airhead, or blindly defending him against dubious reporting, we have to make sure Bush is being asked the right questions —- and pay close attention to his answers.

What should those questions be? I called up international-affairs experts and asked them, "If you could corner George W. Bush and ask him one question about his foreign policy, what would it be?"

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