The Best Kept Secret

These Republican primaries are strange business. With all these candidates who would make George W. Bush look like a dangerous progressive, the only presentable one is… a Mormon!

It gets even stranger. Did you know that Mitt Romney, said to be the Mormon who could save the Republican Party from ridicule, speaks very good French?

You didn’t know? Hardly surprising. What would constitute a valuable asset for a politician in any other country is, on the contrary, the best kept secret of the Romney campaign.

In this country where almost all the presidents have been monolingual (exceptions: Jefferson, who lived in Paris at the end of the 18th century, and George W., who spoke “Mexican,” as he said), knowledge of a foreign language is a political handicap.

The Democrat John Kerry, who spoke French, bore the brunt of it in 2004. And pronouncing a few words in Mandarin during a debate derailed the fleeting campaign of Jon Huntsman in the Republican primaries.

Not only was the latter, an ex-ambassador to China, considered too liberal, but the average Republican was horrified by what is now called Huntsman’s “Mandarin moment,” a so-called “senior moment” arising from a memory lapse.

His remarks in Mandarin were “ridiculous,” decried Donald Trump, while funny chaps christened him “China Jon” or “The Manchurian Candidate.”

French is even worse: It gives you a light sulfurous coating, evoking debauchery and frivolity, champagne orgies and the “Folies Bergeres,” snobbery and communism…. A negative Newt Gingrich ad against Romney ends with accordion in the background and the words, “And, just like John Kerry, he speaks French too!” As if of all his faults, this one is the worst!

It was on his first visit to China as a Mormon missionary that Huntsman learned Mandarin. Similarly, Mitt Romney learned French during the two years he spent as a young missionary in France.

Mormons are strange creatures, who have nothing to do with their folkloric image. Far from being a polygamous and backward sect, today’s Mormons are, on the contrary, rigorously monogamous for the most part and better educated than average.

Wiser too… and that’s to say the least! They are “abstinent” wall to wall: no tobacco, no alcohol, no coffee or even tea… and no sexual relations outside of marriage.

The missionary work is part of the training of a good young Mormon, and it is thus that in 1966, Mitt Romney found himself appointed at 21 years of age to the French mission — first in Bordeaux, then in Paris.

He learned French to the point of speaking it “almost without accent,” say the quotes in Le Monde, by going door-to-door 10 hours a day to try to convert the French. Without success, of course: What, no wine, no short black, no “p’tites pepees,” no Gauloise cigarettes? No thank you!

The poor thing found himself also confronted by a shocking event in May 1968, “in opposition to the values of order and civility that we wanted to propagate,” recalls one of his companions of the time. Another formative experience: He resigned himself to eating coq au vin, after which it was explained to him that the alcohol evaporates from cooked wine.

Despite these disadvantages, the young Romney singled himself out by his seriousness, his devotion and an exceptional sense of organization, to the point of assuming the presidency of the mission at 23 years of age.…