Is Kerry Smart?
Ann Althouse has also been doing some good work on this question. As usual, she consistently adds something that doesn't seem to appear anywhere else. (See here, here, and here.
(Blogosphere credit: the question seems to have been raised first by sox blog, and was taken up by Instapundit).
The gist: Bush and Kerry both graduated from Yale. Bush didn't have great grades, but he got into Harvard Business and did OK there. The Harvard MBA part of Bush's career cannot be explained by family connections as easily as the Yale part. In fact there is a pattern: it emerged in the 2000 campaign that Bush's SATs were worse than Gore's, but his grades were better. As Althouse says, many employers would go with the grades, a record of actual accomplishment rather than mere potential, and hire Bush on that basis. Bush, as many people have said before, has been underestimated by his opponents.
With all Kerry had going for him, he should have been able to get into Harvard Law as easily as Bush got into Harvard Business. But Kerry ended up at Boston College. Althouse has fended off charges that she is putting down BC, etc., but the point is that any ambitious person would take admission at Harvard over BC any day. Perhaps (no one seems to know for sure) Kerry was rejected by Harvard because of poor grades? Perhaps even (horrors) poor SATs as well? These records have never been released in Kerry's case.
For Althouse this fits with the fact that Kerry's speeches don't make much sense. Perhaps it isn't just straddling--a more or less ingenious strategy, at least for a Senator, to postpone actual decisions, and maintain wiggle room, for as long as possible. Perhaps Kerry has trouble understanding the great issues facing the U.S.?
Kaus adds a detail which I think is deliciously American (skip to end of Gourevich piece--I still don't know how to link to a specific Kaus post). Kerry's hand-written notes on events he has been part of, such as some of his actions in Vietnam, are known to be clear and concise--unlike his speeches. (Some of the recent commenters on sox blog point out that Kerry kept winning debating prizes in school). Does he pay speech-writers to produce stuff that in some ways is crap compared to his own stuff? I think that is what many politicians do now--a weird combination of laziness and pushing staff to do a lot of work for little or nothing.
Perhaps what interests me the most: the tantalizing possibility that presidents and other leaders could be ranked by IQ--and that this would be a very poor guide to their overall quality as leaders. Reynolds suggests Hoover and Carter as obvious duds with high IQs. I'm not sure Carter's IQ is or was that high. Clinton and Nixon are obviously both quite high--I think one of Reynolds' commenters suggested Nixon might be #1 in IQ. Eisenhower might be a surprising admission to this list. Besides golf, which was always held against him by intellectuals, he excelled at both Scrabble and bridge. Perhaps more seriously, he absolutely excelled at every course the Army threw at him--a bit like Colin Powell. Some kind of case has to be made for Woodrow Wilson--an actual Kant scholar, and a Gladstone-type failure in foreign policy. On the other hand, there is the famous line that FDR had a first-rate temperament, but a mind somewhat below that grade; and TR was known as the rough-and-ready man of action (never mind the Harvard degree and all the books he wrote).
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