A topic that I have been intending to bring up, but have not had the time to develop, concerns a peculiarity of the French language. Now all but dead in English, the "subjunctive" mode is still going strong in French. For those unfamiliar, one could reasonably say that the French have an entire tense dedicated to doubt. I can't help but see a connection between this and issues of national character and the impact that this has on political life.

Does not the requirement that one use this mode after all kinds of expressions, which in English do not appear to contain any doubt, have an impact on discourse, forcing both speaker and listener to recognize the presence of doubt?

Alain de Chalvron, the Washington bureau chief for France 2, the French equivalent of the BBC, hasn't had an easy time since he came to America, last fall. He has had to endure a predictable barrage of remarks regarding freedom fries, Old Europe, and the "Axis of Weasel," along with a reticent White House, which has made it hard for foreign journalists to get briefings. So when John Kerry became the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination de Chalvron and other French journalists in Washington were understandably excited. They knew about Kerry: he went to a Swiss boarding school, he has a cousin who ran for the French Presidency, and he supposedly wooed Teresa Heinz by impressing her with his fluent French.

For a time, Kerry seemed equally enthusiastic about the French reporters covering his campaign. "He was quite accessible in Iowa and New Hampshire," de Chalvron said the other day, in his office in Washington. "He understands French very well. His words are correct and sometimes even sophisticated. I asked him, `How can you have this life? It must be terrible, crisscrossing the country.' Kerry answered, `C'est affreux'--`It's awful.'" De Chalvron's voice rose with admiration. "Affreux, it's not a very usual word. It's something a French person can use easily, but Kerry could have said, `Yes, it's terrible,' instead of going to pick a more difficult word."

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French anthropologist known for identifying the subconscious associations that people from various cultures make in the "reptilian" part of their brains, had offered to become the Senator's Gallic Naomi Wolf, devising ways for him to rid his speaking style of French influences.

Suddenly, Kerry appeared to develop linguistic amnesia. "During a press conference, I asked Kerry a question, on Iraq," de Chalvron recalled. "He didn't answer. In front of the American journalists, he didn't want to take a question that was not in English." Lo?ck Berrou, the United States bureau chief for de Chalvron's competitor, TF1, has been having similar problems. Berrou chatted in French with Kerry on a commercial flight last year; the Senator reminisced about his family's country house in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a village in Brittany, where Kerry's cousin is the mayor. "We've pushed hard to get an interview with him, and no answer," Berrou says.

Family members have apparently been put on a leash as well. Kerry's wife, Berrou says, "speaks with us in French with no problem, and her press attach? has to pull her by the shirt to get her away from us."

The other day, in his office, de Chalvron showed footage of Kerry bringing hot towels to foreign journalists in the back of the plane and bantering with Parisian reporters about his chances. De Chalvron was perplexed. "For us, to speak any other language and have an open view of the world, for a President, should be a plus," he said.

As for an on-the-record interview, de Chalvron is still trying, but Kerry's campaign has not responded. He did, however, recently land an interview with Pat Robertson, who told him, "Jean Fran?ois Kerry will never be elected."

... The last thing you want in American politics, apparently, is to be captured on camera understanding French, let alone speaking it. Rush Limbaugh would start portraying you as hardly American at all (he already does this with Kerry, in fact, having heard about these suspicious francophone abilities on the grapevine).

Geoff Nunberg pointed out to me that in Nebraska they once passed a law making it illegal to teach foreign languages in the schools, period. Foreign language learning is now, like sodomy, legal in all states; but these are not freedoms that a politician should brag about taking advantage of. Such is the determined linguistic isolationism of the USA. I would have thought that to have a US president (for once) who could argue fluently and convincingly in the native language of some other head of state would be a fantastic asset. But instead it is perceived as a kind of disloyalty, evidence of being an untrustworthy egghead, and you would lose millions of votes over it. It's both depressing and amazing.