Posted on 06/06/2005 10:56:58 PM PDT by FairOpinion
During last year's presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.
But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.
Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.
Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
But Bush had some business sense -- remember he got an MBS from Harvard, which the article doesn't mention.
All Kerry ever did was to windsurf.
"Asked to describe nonschool training that qualified him for the Navy, Kerry wrote: ''A great deal of sailing -- ocean and otherwise, including some navigation. Scuba diving. Rifle. Beginning of life saving." He said his special interests were ''filming," writing, and politics, noting that the latter subject occupied 15 hours per week."
Thanks loads for this ping!
My, these are the easy classes.
an MBA...
He got 4 D-s out of the total of 10 subjects in his freshman year. He should have been flunked out.
Lackluster student...
Lackluster soldier...
Lackluster enemy collaborator...
Lackluster anti-war protester...
Lackluster testimonies of "seared" memories...
Lackluster Senator for 20 years...
Lackluster convictions when voting on military issues...
Lackluster candidate during the primaries...
Lackluster presidential candidate...
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
Am I just sleepy or do I detect a pattern here???
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Marries well though if money is the object.
I'm shocked you're up at this hour...lol. You must be reading a good book.
I love this article. I want to shout the news from my rooftop. (I live among democrats, but only for a few more days).
A D student in Yale Polisci wanted to be President? Some irony there.
Probably not, but this was before gradeflation. These guys would be A-/B+ students today. Almost everybody else does that well at the best colleges. Getting a C, let alone a D, is now a major trauma.
As I remember, you can carry Ds if the classes are not part of your major...
One D in four years! Kerry had FOUR in his freshman year!
I just LOVE this news!
He get`s a 77 in French even though he grew up in France and it`s his second language (or first language).
Kerry knew all of this when he permitted all the lies about GWB being dense and his sorry self being such an intellectual.
Damn, I despise him.
I woke up, couldn't go back to sleep, and decided to check out the new news. Your link just made my early day!!! As a former teacher, I can just "see" JFK as a student in my classroom. Now, we know why HE didn't get into a name law school. He's gotten by on bluster and connections all these years and has had the gall to denigrate better men than he could ever hope to be.
Kerry may have only scored a 61 in Geology- but he knows how to find GOLD.
And let's not forget this from the New York Times last year! Even the Times reported that it appearances Bush has a higher I.Q. than Kerry...
Secret Weapon for Bush? (Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than Kerry per military records)
NY Times ^ | 10/24/04 | JOHN TIERNEY
To Bush-bashers, it may be the most infuriating revelation yet from the military records of the two presidential candidates: the young George W. Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than did the young John Kerry.
That, at least, is the conclusion of Steve Sailer, a conservative columnist at the Web magazine Vdare.com and a veteran student of presidential I.Q.'s. During the last presidential campaign Mr. Sailer estimated from Mr. Bush's SAT score (1206) that his I.Q. was in the mid-120's, about 10 points lower than Al Gore's.
Mr. Kerry's SAT score is not known, but now Mr. Sailer has done a comparison of the intelligence tests in the candidates' military records. They are not formal I.Q. tests, but Mr. Sailer says they are similar enough to make reasonable extrapolations.
Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.
Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.
Many Americans still believe a report that began circulating on the Internet three years ago, and was quoted in "Doonesbury," that Mr. Bush's I.Q. was 91, the lowest of any modern American president. But that report from the non-existent Lovenstein Institute turned out to be a hoax.
You might expect Kerry campaign officials, who have worried that their candidate's intellectual image turns off voters, to quickly rush out a commercial trumpeting these new results, but for some reason they seem to be resisting the temptation.
Upon hearing of their candidate's score, Michael Meehan, a spokesman for the senator, said merely: "The true test is not where you start out in life, but what you do with those God-given talents. John Kerry's 40 years of public service puts him in the top percentile on that measure."
All this brings to mind the report card of another allegedly great "intellectual".....algore. Both he and Kerry are still licking their wounds.
It said he gave a speech "questioning the wisdom" of US involvement in Vietnam, months before he would go there.
I thought his officially approved biography makes it clear that he went to Vietnam all enthusiastic-like and only once he got there did he question the wisdom of US involvement there. He came home and became anti-war.
I'd assumed that he was already anti-war when he went with the express purpose of getting Kennedy-esque "credibility" as a naval officer so that he could leverage it politically afterwards.
It would be very helpful to see the text of this very important historical document (sic) which is suprisingly absent from Kerry's affiliated websites.
Can anyone point me to a transcript?
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