Speaking of languages, I was reminded of an unfortunate question and answer during Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s primary debate in Austin this spring.

That debate was co-hosted by CNN and Univision. The Univision anchor posed this question to the candidates:

Is there any downside to the United States becoming a bilingual nation?

Both candidates seemed to understand the question in terms of the bilingualism of the citizenry, as opposed to, say, a Canadian-style bilingual government. It’s a convenient omission, because a bilingual citizenry more or less suggests that the vast majority of citizens can speak more than one language; a bilingual state, on the other hand, means to empower diversely monolingual citizens.

Anyway, here are their answers. It’s significant because Obama’s our next president and Clinton our next diplomat-in-chief:

CLINTON: Well, I think it's important for as many Americans as possible to do what I have never been able to do, and that is learn another language and try to be bilingual because that connects us to the rest of the world.

I think it is important, though, that English remain our common unifying language because that brings our country together in a way that we have seen generations of immigrants coming to our shores be able to be part of the American experience and pursue the American dream.

You know, I have been adamantly against the efforts by some to make English the official language. That I do not believe is appropriate, and I have voted against it and spoken against it.

I represent New York. We have 170 languages in New York City alone. And I do not think that we should be, in any way, discriminating against people who do not speak English, who use facilities like hospitals or have to go to court to enforce their rights.

But I do think that English does remain an important part of the American experience. So I encourage people to become bilingual. But I also want to see English remain the common, unifying language of our country.

OBAMA: Well, I think it is important that everyone learns English and that we have that process of binding ourselves together as a country. I think that's very important. I also think that every student should be learning a second language, because you know, so, when you start getting into a debate about bilingual education, for example, now, I want to make sure that children who are coming out of Spanish-speaking households had the opportunity to learn and are not falling behind.

If bilingual education helps them do that, I want to give them the opportunity.

But I also want to make sure that English-speaking children are getting foreign languages because this world is becoming more interdependent and part of the process of America's continued leadership in the world is going to be our capacity to communicate across boundaries, across borders, and that's something frankly where we've fallen behind.

One of the failures of No Child Left Behind, a law that I think a lot of local and state officials have been troubled by, is that it is so narrowly focused on standardized tests that it has pushed out a lot of important learning that needs to take place.

And foreign language is one of those areas that I think has been neglected. I want to put more resources into it.

In other words: both want more Americans to learn other languages; neither wants English to lose its monopoly of Government.

Also: our chief diplomat can’t speak another language. In other words, around the world, she will be expecting all negotiations to take place on her terms.

There is a deep cost here, one that neither candidate was willing to discuss: becoming a multilingual nation is only possible if we become a new kind of people, a people willing to push hard for consensus in resolving problems.

That’s a million miles from our political culture, which is marked by impatient pushiness on the part of the ruling parties, and intransigence on the part of the opposition.

If accidental monolingualism is poverty, insistent monolingualism is poverty mentality.