Barney, seen here guarding the microphone outside the White House in case Kennedy or Biden show up, resents your slur on his intelligence.
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
u b well com
It's very hard to have an IQ over 200 since that is the highest one you can have. The range is from 0 to 200 with 100 being the centerpoint average.
Everyone knows that all Republicans are stupid, except for the ones that are evil. Why even bother to do a study.
Send a letter to the people that count.
Rollie Hyde – Publisher
Danny Andrews - Editor
Doug McDonough – News Editor
rhyde@hearstnp.com
dandrews@plainviewdailyherald.com
dmcdonough@hearstnp.com
I thought lefties admired Bush Sr. for being so DIPLOMATIC and WORLDY. I didn't know you could do that by being dumb.
Aside from his bumbling ways,IIRC, Carter is a trained nuclear physicist.Although he too can't pronounce nuclear.
Many years ago Ms. Vos Savant was on Kevin McCarthy's local Dallas call-in radio program. The first caller's question stumped her and she abruptly left the program.
Kevin chuckled, "Well, there goes the world's smartest woman!"
I wish I could remember what the question was...
Anyone out there who know?
Anyhow, ever since then, I've avoided her writing and column. She is a smuck!
I had a prof who loved giving students IQ tests. I never got a real score on any of the 7 tests I took. I didn't miss any questions, and furthermore finished each exam at least 15 mins before the bonus time. The tests just concluded my IQ was >180. I took a Mensa related one a few years ago that said my IQ was over 200, but that was the upper limit.
In my opinion, IQ tests are poor exams at best. If you happen to be blessed with pattern recognition skills and are well read, you are likely to ace any exam presented. However, this has little bearing on other measures of intelligence.
This was exposed as a hoax a year or more ago.
This needs a barf alert.
Actually, there is no preset upper limit on IQ. The various tests do have ceiling limits (beyond which they aren't at all reliable) -- these ceilings are under 200. That means that the test cannot measure the actual IQ -- not that the IQ itself can't be bigger.
IQ tend to be normally distributed -- with a standard deviation of about 15 or 16 (depending on the test). That means that someone with an IQ of 200 would be over 6 standard deviations above the average. Such a person would be "smarter" than 99.9999999% of the population -- or one in over a billion.
BTW, there is an interesting thing called the "Flynn Effect", whereby measured intelligence has been increasing by about 3 points per decade -- 30 points in 100 years. This would imply that we have 20 times the number of geniuses as 100 years ago -- but, they seem to be hiding. More likely, we're just getting better at taking tests of abstract reasoning.
Here's my email to Mr. Orr
Dear Mr. Orr,
If I am incorrect, and someone has hacked the Plainview Daily Herald web site or done domain masking to make it appear as if this article appeared on the Plainview Daily Herald web site, please accept my apologies for the following email.
I had to laugh when I saw your original article on Bush's IQ. The only thing funnier was your retraction. You lamented, as so many reporters do, that the whole problem was the internet, that scurrilous wild west of information that doesn't have editors, the watch dogs and protectors of truth. However, this bogus information ended up on http://www.myplainview.com which appears to be a web site run by the Plainview Daily Herald. This bogus information made it onto the net because a certain individual, apparently employed by that newspaper, ran with a story without doing sufficient fact-checking. It made it by all the editors and onto the web site.
Mr. Orr, this was a pretty big story when it first happened. Anybody who follows presidential politics should know it. The problem is, you wanted it to be true, so you ran with it. If you had followed the last presidential election closely, you would have already known that Bush scored higher than John Kerry on his military aptitude tests. The claim that a man with an MBA from Harvard had an IQ of below 100 should also have made you skeptical. If you are interested, Bush had a 1206 on his SAT, and his military aptitude tests reflect an IQ in the 125-130 range, approximately the top 10% of the population.
The reason you ran with this story is because you wanted it to be true. You ran with it without even cursory fact checking. A Google search on "lovenstein institute" returns 594 responses, most debunking the story and giving a history of the hoax.
Unfortunately, newspapers frequently are run by people who live in an echo chamber. They hire people who agree with them, and if people disagree, they are dismissed. Liberalism is bereft of ideas, but because many of you still live in the dark ages, when you were the gatekeepers of information, you have grown flabby in your thinking. The opposition can no longer be dismissed by silencing them or throwing their letters in the trash can. Dan Rather cannot pass off forged documents anymore, although twenty years ago, he probably would have been able to throw the election to Kerry with this tactic, and the rest of the press would have covered for him.
Do yourself a favor. Get out of the echo chamber. Actually listen to someone who disagrees with you. You won't fall for as many hoaxes, and someone might actually change your mind.
Best regards,
No kidding.
I guess if this makes them feel better, we can let them be the smart ones and we can be the winners.
Seems fair.
ok...thanks for the enlightenment
Thanks for the civil response to my pedantry -- you're one in over a billion.
He just emailed me back. His entire response was "Thank you for your views." It's kind of like bbs off a bull's skull.
Bush won.
"Liberals have a Wikipedia mentality."
So true...but don't you like when FReepers lead links to it to justify something? It's junk folks.
Barney, seen here guarding the microphone outside the White House in case Kennedy or Biden show up, resents your slur on his intelligence.
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