WASHINGTON: Some well-known Democrats have been flogging a recent Der Spiegel item that said President Bush had asked Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Do you have blacks, too?”

Cardoso, a sociologist by training, was reported to have been stunned. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is said to have quickly interjected: “Mr. President, Brazil has probably more blacks than the United States. Some say it is the country with the most blacks outside of Africa.”

The item has been buzzing around the Internet, though it seemed most curious how Der Spiegel alone somehow uncovered this supposed Bush gaffe. The item also appeared jumbled. Cardoso, a pal and admirer of former President Bill Clinton, said Bush was “still in training” when it came to Latin America, but that was recently and not in a private conversation with Bush.

Upon some checking, it appears that, in March 2001, at the first White House meeting of Bush and Cardoso, there was discussion of the two countries as melting pots, one participant said, but he did not recall Bush’s question.

The White House last week dismissed the report as “total crap.” The Brazilian Embassy didn’t return a call.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post found that the item actually came from an April 28 column by Fernando Pedreira, former executive editor and now columnist for the Estado Sao Paulo, a respected paper in Brazil. The column is headlined “An Overwhelming Ignorance.”

Pedreira is very close to Cardoso, who had named him the country’s ambassador to UNESCO. Meanwhile, Cardoso is said to have mentioned his chats with Bush while he was on a weekend with some close friends recently in Rio.

The White House on Tuesday repeated its pithy assessment of the report. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post