Posted on 01/26/2006 10:56:35 AM PST by lowbridge
Study pegs Democratic presidents as brighter
By RICHARD ORR
Herald Correspondent
It´s really not all that hard finding GWB´s brain.
It´s right there in the files of the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pa., which has been publishing its research on each new president since 1973.
The GWB study published in October 2004 took four months to complete and compared him to all the presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt through Bill Clinton.
Based on the report´s findings, Democrats are smarter than Republicans -- quite a bit so, in fact. The three smartest Democrats were -- in order of intelligence -- Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and John Kennedy with IQs of 182, 175 and 174, respectively.
At the bottom of the Democrat list were FDR (147), Harry Truman (132) and Lyndon Johnson (126).
The three smartest Republicans were Richard Nixon (155), Dwight Eisenhower (122) and Gerald Ford (121).
At the bottom of the Republican list were Ronald Reagan at 105, Bush the Elder at 98 and -- like father, like son -- Bush the Younger at 91.
The highest IQ readings of 200-plus were garnered by Marylin Vos Savant -- who holds the Guinness record -- and Truman Capote, whose IQ at one time was said to be so high, it couldn´t be accurately measured because they couldn´t come up with a test he couldn´t ace.
The report notes that the six Republican presidents in the past 50 years scored an average IQ of 115. Nixon led the pack with 155. The Democrat average was 156, with Clinton´s 182 at the head of the class.
Criteria for the study included any writings they generated on their own without help from staff, their ability to “speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors” that were “scored using the Swanson-Crain system of intelligence ranking.” It´s considered accurate to within five percentage points.
Of course, IQ isn´t everything. Jimmy Carter, for instance, was among the brightest but certainly not among the best because he lacked the charisma and forcefulness needed for true leadership ability. Genius and sincerity alone aren´t enough.
Ronald Reagan had the charisma and the sincerity and the public appeal but not the brains, which allowed him to be led around by forces he wasn´t even aware of.
When it comes to GWB, he´s not only short on brain power and charisma, he also has this disconcerting air of detachment -- even indifference -- about him. When told about New Orleans, his first response was, “I used to party there.”
His father before him projected that selfsame air of disengagement -- best illustrated when he glanced at his watch with an irritated look on his face during one the “debates” that are really nothing more than canned questions and predictable answers.
According to the Lovenstein study, GWB´s poor showing as president comes from his difficulty with the King´s English “in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis.”
Said Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein: “He has no published works or writings, which made it more difficult to arrive at an assessment. We relied more heavily on transcripts of his unscripted public speaking.”
The complete report can be found at www.lovenstein.org. It includes a telling “voice-stress confidence analysis.”
(Richard Orr is a Herald correspondent. He can be reached at richard@texasonline.net or richard@plainviewdailyherald.com.) Posted to MyPlainview: JANUARY 16, 2006 19:59 CST
I'm sure the fellow added 40 points to the score, just because liberalism "is such a smart choice".
Liberals are idiots, they'll fall for anything...
Hoax or not, Clinton cheated on his IQ test.
An imagine how much higher the Democrat average will increase if HRC takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009!
Let them continue to misunderestimate Republicans...and lose.
Clinton's 182? Please. Guy couldn't even get a hummer w/o getting caught! Couldn't sexually harass women and keep them quiet very long and couldn't figure out how not to lie. so, that's not really that smart, now is it?
If this is true, then IQ is an absolutely useless statistic.
LOL, this one goes back to 2000. My recollection was that there were some Gore operatives involved in getting it out originally.
How could the author have missed the furor when Doonesbury Xerographer, Treudeu got sucked into this one.
Not only that, look WHAT he married.
Here's a link to the same story that presumably works.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15977016&BRD=517&PAG=461&dept_id=473182&rfi=6
Is this a real newspaper? I hope they have been informed this outfit doesn't really exist and this story was discredited a a hoax years ago, when it first appeared.
You think somebody might have told them they fell for a goofy six-year-old internet joke?
Talk about low IQ.
Cool, some joker out there actually created a "lovenstein.org" web page out there based just on this hoax.
If we grant that this silly crap is true, (for the sake of arguement), then obviously there is no correlation between IQ and wisdom.
So what? High IQ doesn't translate into good management. Carter and Clinton with high IQs will probably go down in history as two of the worst Presidents. Yet Reagan and Bush, supposedly not the brightest, will be recognized as the two best Presidents.
Whoever did this study has too much time on their hands.
Maybe they pulled the story?
Been debunked. The only president ever telling anyone his IQ was Carter, and I even doubt his.
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