George W. Bush's I.Q.
Though the main focus of these comments is President George W. Bush, a quick search of the Internet shows that bashing an opponent's brains (so to speak :) is part of the many types of mud that gets slung around the political wasteland.
According to Newsmax, Al Gore failed 5 of 8 classes he took at Vanderbilt Divinity School (1971 - 1972). Next was Vanderbilt Law School (1974 - 1976), "after a brief and lackluster law school career, young Gore dropped out."
Wikipedia reports that while at Harvard (1965 - 1969) Gore's poor grades initially put him in the lower 5th of his class. This was in part due to watching TV and playing pool rather then concentrating on studies. He also sometimes smoked marijuana. The next two years saw considerable improvement and he graduated with a B.A.
However, Newsmax omits the fact that Gore dropped out, because he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won. The point being, both sides engage in passing along falsehoods and half-truths.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/763182/posts
http://www.wnd.com/2002/03/13043/
http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/heard32300.html
http://www.jenniferbraceras.com/blog/gores-dubious-school-record/
--------
The best example of the difference between leftists and real people that I've heard lately was this:
A ship is sinking just off shore, the leftists run around screaming for "someone to do something" thus "raising awareness", real people put themselves in harms way and go rescue those in distress.
According to Newsmax, Al Gore failed 5 of 8 classes he took at Vanderbilt Divinity School (1971 - 1972). Next was Vanderbilt Law School (1974 - 1976), "after a brief and lackluster law school career, young Gore dropped out."
Wikipedia reports that while at Harvard (1965 - 1969) Gore's poor grades initially put him in the lower 5th of his class. This was in part due to watching TV and playing pool rather then concentrating on studies. He also sometimes smoked marijuana. The next two years saw considerable improvement and he graduated with a B.A.
However, Newsmax omits the fact that Gore dropped out, because he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won. The point being, both sides engage in passing along falsehoods and half-truths.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/763182/posts
http://www.wnd.com/2002/03/13043/
http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/heard32300.html
http://www.jenniferbraceras.com/blog/gores-dubious-school-record/
--------
The best example of the difference between leftists and real people that I've heard lately was this:
A ship is sinking just off shore, the leftists run around screaming for "someone to do something" thus "raising awareness", real people put themselves in harms way and go rescue those in distress.
Gore's Grades Belie Image of Studiousness
By David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday , March 19, 2000
If Al Gore is commonly thought of as a grind, the sort of fellow who during his school days would take notes in precise Roman numeral outline, strive mightily to ingratiate himself with teachers, and bring sterling report cards home to his demanding parents, his academic transcripts go some way toward subverting that notion.From his lower school years at St. Albans to his incomplete effort at Vanderbilt law school, Gore was often an underachiever. Though his IQ numbers and aptitude test scores were well above average, his grades were uneven, never approaching the plateau of A's and B's that might be expected of one who possesses such a pedagogical demeanor. His generally middling college grades at Harvard in fact bear a close resemblance to the corresponding Yale marks of his presidential opponent, George W. Bush, whose studiousness and brainpower have been more open to question during this campaign.
Gore arrived at Harvard with an impressive 1355 SAT score, 625 verbal and 730 math, compared with Bush's 1206 total from 566 verbal and 640 math. In his sophomore year at Harvard, Gore's grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale. That was the year Gore's classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana. His grades temporarily reflected his mildly experimental mood, and alarmed his parents. He received one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses and one B-minus, an effort that placed him in the lower fifth of the class for the second year in a row.
For all of Gore's later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man's Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT. As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A's to C's as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.
When John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, was recently shown his illustrious former pupil's college board achievement test scores, he inspected them closely with a magnifier and shook his head, chuckling quietly at the science results.
"Four eighty-eight! Terrible" Davis declared upon inspecting the future vice president's 488 score (out of a possible 800) in physics.
"Hmmmm. Chemistry. Five-nineteen. He didn't do too well in chemistry."
As Davis moved down the page, his magnifier settled on Gore's more promising achievement scores in other scholastic realms.
"English. Seven oh-five. Right at the top!"
"U.S. History. Seven oh-one. Not so bad."
Then he came to Gore's results in IQ tests taken in 1961 and 1964, at the beginning of his freshman and senior years. "One thirty-three and 134. Absolutely superb. That means tremendous ability."
These high IQ and achievement scores did not necessarily translate into equivalent high grades for Gore in high school English and history. From ninth grade (called Form III in the Anglophilic St. Albans culture) to his senior year (Form VI), he earned an equal number of C's and B's in English, but no A's. In history during those four years, he also moved between C's and B's until his senior year, when he broke through with an A-plus in Sacred Studies, a religious history course. He pulled steady C's for all three years of high school French. The one course in which he received straight A's was art, which he took all four years of high school.
"You have here a boy who shows a lot of potential," Davis said after inspecting Gore's tests and grades. "He was as a rule a hard worker, but he wasn't really interested in certain things, and when he wasn't so interested he tried faithfully to do what he was supposed to, though not necessarily very well."
Gore's reputation for being earnest and hardworking, if sometimes pedantic, is often contrasted with the personality of his political patron and White House boss, Bill Clinton, who is considered more extemporaneous. But they shared one surprising trait from their school years, a tendency to procrastinate on subjects that did not enthrall them and then cram at the last minute. Clinton once skipped his Yale law school classes for three months before borrowing a friend's notes, then ended up scoring better on the tests than his classmate did. Gore was less daring, but many of his St. Albans classmates remembered how during his senior year he often put off studying for exams until the night before, when he would sneak down to the 24-hour Little Tavern on Connecticut Avenue and cram all night in a back booth.
Clinton ended his secondary school career ranked fifth in his class of several hundred at the public Hot Springs High in Arkansas, while Gore left St. Albans ranked 25th in a senior class of 51. But reputation was everything in high school. The prestige of the private school in Washington, its history as a feeding ground for the Ivy League, and the confidence college admissions officers had when examining a St. Albans transcript--where there was no grade inflation and a C meant a C--all served Gore well when it came to getting into Harvard, the only school to which he had applied.
The late Canon Charles Martin, headmaster at St. Albans during Gore's era, used to say that he was "preparing his boys for the kingdom of heaven, not the kingdom of Harvard," but in fact he was doing both. Earlier in the century, St. Albans had been known as a pipeline for Princeton and Haverford, but that changed in the mid-1950s when Harvard decided it wanted more Washington and Virginia boys and accepted all 16 St. Albans boys who applied. By the time Gore's class came around in 1965, a recommendation from the St. Albans administration was about all it took for one of its students to get in.
Davis wrote Gore's recommendation, and said he was never concerned about the young man's transcript full of C's and B's and his middle rank in the class. "In Al's case he was what Harvard most wanted at that time," Davis said. "What they wanted was competent academic performance plus future potential. Plus they were very impressed by the fact that he was a political son. Colleges like Harvard, Princeton and Yale are just as excited to get important sons as top academic scholars. They want our boys as much as our boys want them. And Al was captain of the football team. Any nice big boy was welcome if he played football."
Gore flirted with English at Harvard, dreaming of a life as a novelist, but decided to make government his concentration. He got off to an uncertain start in that subject, with a C and C-minus in his first two courses, before righting himself. In his junior year, he earned a B, a B-plus and an A-minus in three government courses, and he aced his senior government thesis on the impact of television on the presidency, a strong finish that made him a cum laude graduate. His devotion to the subject by then was so intense that he gave much of his time to a not-for-credit seminar with his favorite professor, Richard Neustadt, an expert on the presidency. Bush, a history major, scored mostly B's in that subject, as was first reported in the New Yorker, though the five history courses he took his senior year were all pass-fail.
After serving in the military for two years, Gore returned to graduate school late in the summer of 1971, first taking religious studies courses at Vanderbilt and then entering the university's law school. His efforts in both instances were incomplete, reflecting the uncertainty he felt during that period about what he should do with his life. He had considered everything from writing to police work.
He took the religious studies courses while also working full time as a journalist at the Nashville Tennessean, and after getting off to a strong start with an A-minus in Ethics, he failed to complete any of the three courses he took in the fall of 1971, and those incompletes eventually lapsed into F's. He returned for another semester in the spring of 1972, when two more incompletes turned into F's. Two years later, he enrolled in law school and spent three semesters there taking heavy course loads while still working at the newspaper. He performed satisfactorily, with a high grade of 81 in Legal Writing and a low grade of 69 in Civil Procedures II. Partway through the spring semester in 1976, he decided to run for an open seat in Tennessee's 3rd Congressional District. His mother, Pauline Gore, herself a lawyer, tried to persuade him to remain in school while running, but he withdrew, turning away for good from the academic life, while beginning a political career in which he increasingly took on the characteristics of a scholar.
Gore has never released his transcripts, which were obtained independently by The Washington Post. Parts of them have been cited as well by Bill Turque, a Newsweek writer who has written a biography of Gore titled "Inventing Al Gore."
The vice president chose not to comment on his grades and test scores, but his press secretary, Chris Lehane, responded with lighthearted sarcasm. "This just proves that many of the preconceived notions of Al Gore have been stiff and boring," Lehane said. "He in fact has a very rich and well-rounded background--artist, athlete and academic."
By David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday , March 19, 2000
If Al Gore is commonly thought of as a grind, the sort of fellow who during his school days would take notes in precise Roman numeral outline, strive mightily to ingratiate himself with teachers, and bring sterling report cards home to his demanding parents, his academic transcripts go some way toward subverting that notion.From his lower school years at St. Albans to his incomplete effort at Vanderbilt law school, Gore was often an underachiever. Though his IQ numbers and aptitude test scores were well above average, his grades were uneven, never approaching the plateau of A's and B's that might be expected of one who possesses such a pedagogical demeanor. His generally middling college grades at Harvard in fact bear a close resemblance to the corresponding Yale marks of his presidential opponent, George W. Bush, whose studiousness and brainpower have been more open to question during this campaign.
Gore arrived at Harvard with an impressive 1355 SAT score, 625 verbal and 730 math, compared with Bush's 1206 total from 566 verbal and 640 math. In his sophomore year at Harvard, Gore's grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale. That was the year Gore's classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana. His grades temporarily reflected his mildly experimental mood, and alarmed his parents. He received one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses and one B-minus, an effort that placed him in the lower fifth of the class for the second year in a row.
For all of Gore's later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man's Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT. As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A's to C's as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.
When John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, was recently shown his illustrious former pupil's college board achievement test scores, he inspected them closely with a magnifier and shook his head, chuckling quietly at the science results.
"Four eighty-eight! Terrible" Davis declared upon inspecting the future vice president's 488 score (out of a possible 800) in physics.
"Hmmmm. Chemistry. Five-nineteen. He didn't do too well in chemistry."
As Davis moved down the page, his magnifier settled on Gore's more promising achievement scores in other scholastic realms.
"English. Seven oh-five. Right at the top!"
"U.S. History. Seven oh-one. Not so bad."
Then he came to Gore's results in IQ tests taken in 1961 and 1964, at the beginning of his freshman and senior years. "One thirty-three and 134. Absolutely superb. That means tremendous ability."
These high IQ and achievement scores did not necessarily translate into equivalent high grades for Gore in high school English and history. From ninth grade (called Form III in the Anglophilic St. Albans culture) to his senior year (Form VI), he earned an equal number of C's and B's in English, but no A's. In history during those four years, he also moved between C's and B's until his senior year, when he broke through with an A-plus in Sacred Studies, a religious history course. He pulled steady C's for all three years of high school French. The one course in which he received straight A's was art, which he took all four years of high school.
"You have here a boy who shows a lot of potential," Davis said after inspecting Gore's tests and grades. "He was as a rule a hard worker, but he wasn't really interested in certain things, and when he wasn't so interested he tried faithfully to do what he was supposed to, though not necessarily very well."
Gore's reputation for being earnest and hardworking, if sometimes pedantic, is often contrasted with the personality of his political patron and White House boss, Bill Clinton, who is considered more extemporaneous. But they shared one surprising trait from their school years, a tendency to procrastinate on subjects that did not enthrall them and then cram at the last minute. Clinton once skipped his Yale law school classes for three months before borrowing a friend's notes, then ended up scoring better on the tests than his classmate did. Gore was less daring, but many of his St. Albans classmates remembered how during his senior year he often put off studying for exams until the night before, when he would sneak down to the 24-hour Little Tavern on Connecticut Avenue and cram all night in a back booth.
Clinton ended his secondary school career ranked fifth in his class of several hundred at the public Hot Springs High in Arkansas, while Gore left St. Albans ranked 25th in a senior class of 51. But reputation was everything in high school. The prestige of the private school in Washington, its history as a feeding ground for the Ivy League, and the confidence college admissions officers had when examining a St. Albans transcript--where there was no grade inflation and a C meant a C--all served Gore well when it came to getting into Harvard, the only school to which he had applied.
The late Canon Charles Martin, headmaster at St. Albans during Gore's era, used to say that he was "preparing his boys for the kingdom of heaven, not the kingdom of Harvard," but in fact he was doing both. Earlier in the century, St. Albans had been known as a pipeline for Princeton and Haverford, but that changed in the mid-1950s when Harvard decided it wanted more Washington and Virginia boys and accepted all 16 St. Albans boys who applied. By the time Gore's class came around in 1965, a recommendation from the St. Albans administration was about all it took for one of its students to get in.
Davis wrote Gore's recommendation, and said he was never concerned about the young man's transcript full of C's and B's and his middle rank in the class. "In Al's case he was what Harvard most wanted at that time," Davis said. "What they wanted was competent academic performance plus future potential. Plus they were very impressed by the fact that he was a political son. Colleges like Harvard, Princeton and Yale are just as excited to get important sons as top academic scholars. They want our boys as much as our boys want them. And Al was captain of the football team. Any nice big boy was welcome if he played football."
Gore flirted with English at Harvard, dreaming of a life as a novelist, but decided to make government his concentration. He got off to an uncertain start in that subject, with a C and C-minus in his first two courses, before righting himself. In his junior year, he earned a B, a B-plus and an A-minus in three government courses, and he aced his senior government thesis on the impact of television on the presidency, a strong finish that made him a cum laude graduate. His devotion to the subject by then was so intense that he gave much of his time to a not-for-credit seminar with his favorite professor, Richard Neustadt, an expert on the presidency. Bush, a history major, scored mostly B's in that subject, as was first reported in the New Yorker, though the five history courses he took his senior year were all pass-fail.
After serving in the military for two years, Gore returned to graduate school late in the summer of 1971, first taking religious studies courses at Vanderbilt and then entering the university's law school. His efforts in both instances were incomplete, reflecting the uncertainty he felt during that period about what he should do with his life. He had considered everything from writing to police work.
He took the religious studies courses while also working full time as a journalist at the Nashville Tennessean, and after getting off to a strong start with an A-minus in Ethics, he failed to complete any of the three courses he took in the fall of 1971, and those incompletes eventually lapsed into F's. He returned for another semester in the spring of 1972, when two more incompletes turned into F's. Two years later, he enrolled in law school and spent three semesters there taking heavy course loads while still working at the newspaper. He performed satisfactorily, with a high grade of 81 in Legal Writing and a low grade of 69 in Civil Procedures II. Partway through the spring semester in 1976, he decided to run for an open seat in Tennessee's 3rd Congressional District. His mother, Pauline Gore, herself a lawyer, tried to persuade him to remain in school while running, but he withdrew, turning away for good from the academic life, while beginning a political career in which he increasingly took on the characteristics of a scholar.
Gore has never released his transcripts, which were obtained independently by The Washington Post. Parts of them have been cited as well by Bill Turque, a Newsweek writer who has written a biography of Gore titled "Inventing Al Gore."
The vice president chose not to comment on his grades and test scores, but his press secretary, Chris Lehane, responded with lighthearted sarcasm. "This just proves that many of the preconceived notions of Al Gore have been stiff and boring," Lehane said. "He in fact has a very rich and well-rounded background--artist, athlete and academic."
An Egghead for the Oval Office
By Eugene Robinson / June 1, 2007
Al Gore has been in town launching his new book, "The Assault on Reason," and you could have predicted the buzz: Is he about to jump into the race? What you probably wouldn't have predicted is the counter-buzz that Gore, poor fellow, is just too ostentatiously smart to be elected president.
In the book, you see, Gore betrays familiarity with history, economics, even science. He uses big words, often several in the same sentence. And in public appearances he doesn't even try to disguise his erudition. These supposedly are glaring shortcomings that should keep Gore on the sidelines, rereading Gibbon and exchanging ideas about the structure of the cosmos with Stephen Hawking.
Leave aside the question of whether Gore is even thinking about another presidential run, or how he would stack up against the other candidates. I'm making a more general point: One thing that should be clear to anyone who's been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades.
When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don't see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.
I want a president who reads newspapers, who reads books other than those that confirm his worldview, who bones up on Persian history before deciding how to deal with Iran's ambitious dreams of glory. I want a president who understands the relationship between energy policy at home and U.S. interests in the Middle East -- and who's smart enough to form his or her own opinions, not just rely on what old friends in the oil business say.
I want a president who looks forward to policy meetings on health care and has ideas to throw into the mix.
I want a president who believes in empirical fact, whose understanding of spirituality is complete enough to know that faith is "the evidence of things not seen" and who knows that for things that can be seen, the relevant evidence is fact, not belief. I want a president -- and it's amazing that I even have to put this on my wish list -- smart enough to know that Darwin was right.
Actually, I want a president smart enough to know a good deal about science. He or she doesn't have to be able to do the math, but I want a president who knows that the great theories underpinning our understanding of the universe -- general relativity and quantum mechanics -- have stood for nearly a century and proved stunningly accurate, even though they describe a world that is more shimmer than substance. I want him or her to know that there's a lot we still don't know.
I want the next president to be intellectually curious -- and also intellectually honest. I want him or her to understand the details, not just the big picture. I won't complain if the next president occasionally uses a word I have to look up.
The conventional wisdom says that voters are turned off when candidates put on showy displays of highfalutin brilliance. I hope that's wrong. I hope people understand how complicated and difficult the next president's job will be, and how much of a difference some real candlepower would make.
I don't want the candidates to pretend to be average people, because why would we choose an ordinary person for such an extraordinary job? I want to see what they've got -- how much they know, how readily they absorb new information, how effectively they analyze problems and evaluate solutions. If the next president is almost always the smartest person in the room, I won't mind a bit. After all, we're not in high school anymore.
[email protected]
By Eugene Robinson / June 1, 2007
Al Gore has been in town launching his new book, "The Assault on Reason," and you could have predicted the buzz: Is he about to jump into the race? What you probably wouldn't have predicted is the counter-buzz that Gore, poor fellow, is just too ostentatiously smart to be elected president.
In the book, you see, Gore betrays familiarity with history, economics, even science. He uses big words, often several in the same sentence. And in public appearances he doesn't even try to disguise his erudition. These supposedly are glaring shortcomings that should keep Gore on the sidelines, rereading Gibbon and exchanging ideas about the structure of the cosmos with Stephen Hawking.
Leave aside the question of whether Gore is even thinking about another presidential run, or how he would stack up against the other candidates. I'm making a more general point: One thing that should be clear to anyone who's been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades.
When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don't see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.
I want a president who reads newspapers, who reads books other than those that confirm his worldview, who bones up on Persian history before deciding how to deal with Iran's ambitious dreams of glory. I want a president who understands the relationship between energy policy at home and U.S. interests in the Middle East -- and who's smart enough to form his or her own opinions, not just rely on what old friends in the oil business say.
I want a president who looks forward to policy meetings on health care and has ideas to throw into the mix.
I want a president who believes in empirical fact, whose understanding of spirituality is complete enough to know that faith is "the evidence of things not seen" and who knows that for things that can be seen, the relevant evidence is fact, not belief. I want a president -- and it's amazing that I even have to put this on my wish list -- smart enough to know that Darwin was right.
Actually, I want a president smart enough to know a good deal about science. He or she doesn't have to be able to do the math, but I want a president who knows that the great theories underpinning our understanding of the universe -- general relativity and quantum mechanics -- have stood for nearly a century and proved stunningly accurate, even though they describe a world that is more shimmer than substance. I want him or her to know that there's a lot we still don't know.
I want the next president to be intellectually curious -- and also intellectually honest. I want him or her to understand the details, not just the big picture. I won't complain if the next president occasionally uses a word I have to look up.
The conventional wisdom says that voters are turned off when candidates put on showy displays of highfalutin brilliance. I hope that's wrong. I hope people understand how complicated and difficult the next president's job will be, and how much of a difference some real candlepower would make.
I don't want the candidates to pretend to be average people, because why would we choose an ordinary person for such an extraordinary job? I want to see what they've got -- how much they know, how readily they absorb new information, how effectively they analyze problems and evaluate solutions. If the next president is almost always the smartest person in the room, I won't mind a bit. After all, we're not in high school anymore.
[email protected]
Is It Wise to Be So Smart?
By Dana Milbank / May 30, 2007
A capacity crowd of 1,500 people jammed into Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University last night for Al Gore's speech and book-signing. But the numbers don't matter: Even if Gore were speaking before a sellout crowd at Verizon Center, he would still be the smartest guy in the room.
He reminded his listeners of this repeatedly last night.
"Were it possible to summarize this book in only 15 minutes, it wouldn't be the book it is, but I'll do my best," he announced en route to a 34-minute talk.
He waxed esoteric about the ancients: "Both the Agora and the Forum were foremost in the minds of our Founders. . . . Not a few of them read both Latin and Greek, as you know."
He waxed erudite about the Enlightenment: "Gibbon's 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' was first published the same year as the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations.' "
And he waxed informed about the Information Age: "One of the challenges in discussing the premise of this book is to establish as a concrete reality the importance of this virtual space, forgive the phrase, within which the conversation of democracy takes place."
Gore practically oozes gray matter.
"He's the smartest guy out there," said a former Gore volunteer named Andy Williams, who snagged a coveted front-row seat.
"He's very smart," concurred Alan Schwartz, wearing a T-shirt with President Bush's image and the words "Worst President Ever."
"He's the smartest guy in the pack," said Eugenia Ayers, who was one of the first in line.
And therein lies a problem for the Gore '08 bubble.
Publication this month of Gore's jeremiad against Bush, "The Assault on Reason," has fed fervent hopes among environmentalists and others on the left that he will run again for the presidency -- an unlikely prospect, but one Gore does not completely dismiss. Yet reading Gore's book, or listening to his speeches, may remind some of those same supporters what they liked least about him the first time he ran, in 2000. Gore is usually smart and sometimes prophetic -- but, all too frequently, pedantic.
"It's the biggest problem he's got," said Schwartz, from Germantown. "People don't want somebody who makes them feel stupid."
Imagine the Iowa hog farmer cracking open "Assault on Reason," and meeting Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Lippmann, Johannes Gutenberg, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and Marshall McLuhan -- all before finishing the introduction.
"The new technology called 'Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,' or FMRI, has revolutionized the ability of neuroscientists to look inside the operations of a living human brain and observe which regions of the brain are being used at which times and in response to which stimuli," Gore writes.
Still with him? Try this: "The architectural breakthrough associated with massive parallelism was to break up the power of the CPU and distribute it throughout the memory field to lots of smaller separate 'microprocessors' -- each one co-located with the portion of the memory field it was responsible for processing."
Not that you'd doubt Gore on these points, but, just in case, there are 273 endnotes.
Gore's main points are powerful, if not obvious: The Bush administration has manipulated the facts on the Iraq war and a range of other policies, the public has been easily manipulated, and Americans watch too much television. As in 2000, it's the way he makes his points that causes him trouble.
Of course, the passionate Gore fans who flocked to last night's speech wouldn't have been annoyed if he had opted to read from an organic chemistry textbook. The 1,500 tickets, at $16 a pop, were sold out days ago, and Politics and Prose sold books by the case.
Outside, a group called DC Draft Al Gore distributed stickers, buttons and petitions telling Gore that "Americans from every corner of our nation are calling on you." One opportunist worked the line with playing cards, saying, "In case Gore doesn't run, does anybody need a deck of Obama or Hillary cards?"
Professor Gore used a roving microphone and paced back and forth, pausing thoughtfully and looking upward at times, putting one hand in his coat pocket and gesturing with the other. He began by expressing his concern about the American public's knowledge. "How could it be that 70 percent of the American people genuinely believed that the person responsible for attacking on 9/11 was Saddam Hussein?" he asked. As for the Bush administration's false claims about Iraq's weapons, he called it "shocking and much more troubling to me that our nation fell for it so easily."
He spoke of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, only briefly mixing up his patriots: "James Madison wrote -- no, Thomas Paine, I'm sorry." He gave a brief history of the printing press's spread through Northern Europe. He used social science phrases such as "the collective process" and the "marketplace of ideas" and the "exchange of goods and services" and "guided by the role of reason." And he threw in a New Age feel when he discussed the Internet: "It is simply that we have to conjure the full importance that it has in our lives in ways that go beyond what we can see and hear with our senses."
The crowd loved it. But would the "average American," the one who, Gore said in disbelief, "now watches 4 1/2 hours of television per day?" (He felt compelled to add that "some of us are not watching it nearly that much.")
"I want the smartest guy around to be president," said Schwartz, in the "Worst President Ever" T-shirt. But, he added, "how do you convince people it's okay to feel inferior to their leaders?"
By Dana Milbank / May 30, 2007
A capacity crowd of 1,500 people jammed into Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University last night for Al Gore's speech and book-signing. But the numbers don't matter: Even if Gore were speaking before a sellout crowd at Verizon Center, he would still be the smartest guy in the room.
He reminded his listeners of this repeatedly last night.
"Were it possible to summarize this book in only 15 minutes, it wouldn't be the book it is, but I'll do my best," he announced en route to a 34-minute talk.
He waxed esoteric about the ancients: "Both the Agora and the Forum were foremost in the minds of our Founders. . . . Not a few of them read both Latin and Greek, as you know."
He waxed erudite about the Enlightenment: "Gibbon's 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' was first published the same year as the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations.' "
And he waxed informed about the Information Age: "One of the challenges in discussing the premise of this book is to establish as a concrete reality the importance of this virtual space, forgive the phrase, within which the conversation of democracy takes place."
Gore practically oozes gray matter.
"He's the smartest guy out there," said a former Gore volunteer named Andy Williams, who snagged a coveted front-row seat.
"He's very smart," concurred Alan Schwartz, wearing a T-shirt with President Bush's image and the words "Worst President Ever."
"He's the smartest guy in the pack," said Eugenia Ayers, who was one of the first in line.
And therein lies a problem for the Gore '08 bubble.
Publication this month of Gore's jeremiad against Bush, "The Assault on Reason," has fed fervent hopes among environmentalists and others on the left that he will run again for the presidency -- an unlikely prospect, but one Gore does not completely dismiss. Yet reading Gore's book, or listening to his speeches, may remind some of those same supporters what they liked least about him the first time he ran, in 2000. Gore is usually smart and sometimes prophetic -- but, all too frequently, pedantic.
"It's the biggest problem he's got," said Schwartz, from Germantown. "People don't want somebody who makes them feel stupid."
Imagine the Iowa hog farmer cracking open "Assault on Reason," and meeting Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Lippmann, Johannes Gutenberg, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and Marshall McLuhan -- all before finishing the introduction.
"The new technology called 'Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,' or FMRI, has revolutionized the ability of neuroscientists to look inside the operations of a living human brain and observe which regions of the brain are being used at which times and in response to which stimuli," Gore writes.
Still with him? Try this: "The architectural breakthrough associated with massive parallelism was to break up the power of the CPU and distribute it throughout the memory field to lots of smaller separate 'microprocessors' -- each one co-located with the portion of the memory field it was responsible for processing."
Not that you'd doubt Gore on these points, but, just in case, there are 273 endnotes.
Gore's main points are powerful, if not obvious: The Bush administration has manipulated the facts on the Iraq war and a range of other policies, the public has been easily manipulated, and Americans watch too much television. As in 2000, it's the way he makes his points that causes him trouble.
Of course, the passionate Gore fans who flocked to last night's speech wouldn't have been annoyed if he had opted to read from an organic chemistry textbook. The 1,500 tickets, at $16 a pop, were sold out days ago, and Politics and Prose sold books by the case.
Outside, a group called DC Draft Al Gore distributed stickers, buttons and petitions telling Gore that "Americans from every corner of our nation are calling on you." One opportunist worked the line with playing cards, saying, "In case Gore doesn't run, does anybody need a deck of Obama or Hillary cards?"
Professor Gore used a roving microphone and paced back and forth, pausing thoughtfully and looking upward at times, putting one hand in his coat pocket and gesturing with the other. He began by expressing his concern about the American public's knowledge. "How could it be that 70 percent of the American people genuinely believed that the person responsible for attacking on 9/11 was Saddam Hussein?" he asked. As for the Bush administration's false claims about Iraq's weapons, he called it "shocking and much more troubling to me that our nation fell for it so easily."
He spoke of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, only briefly mixing up his patriots: "James Madison wrote -- no, Thomas Paine, I'm sorry." He gave a brief history of the printing press's spread through Northern Europe. He used social science phrases such as "the collective process" and the "marketplace of ideas" and the "exchange of goods and services" and "guided by the role of reason." And he threw in a New Age feel when he discussed the Internet: "It is simply that we have to conjure the full importance that it has in our lives in ways that go beyond what we can see and hear with our senses."
The crowd loved it. But would the "average American," the one who, Gore said in disbelief, "now watches 4 1/2 hours of television per day?" (He felt compelled to add that "some of us are not watching it nearly that much.")
"I want the smartest guy around to be president," said Schwartz, in the "Worst President Ever" T-shirt. But, he added, "how do you convince people it's okay to feel inferior to their leaders?"
Kerry
http://www.net-benefits.net/showthread.php?t=8065 (this one is pretty good) - John Kerry, D Student
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08kerry.html?_r=0 - Kerry's Grades near Bush's
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4684384 - Bush beats Kerry by a point.
http://www.net-benefits.net/showthread.php?t=8065 (this one is pretty good) - John Kerry, D Student
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08kerry.html?_r=0 - Kerry's Grades near Bush's
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4684384 - Bush beats Kerry by a point.
Yale grades portray Kerry as a lackluster student: His 4-year average on par with Bush's
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | June 7, 2005
WASHINGTON -- 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.
In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that 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.
The grade transcript, which Kerry has always declined to release, was included in his Navy record. During the campaign the Globe sought Kerry's naval records, but he refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file. Late last month, Kerry gave the Navy permission to send the documents to the Globe.
Kerry appeared to be responding to critics who suspected that there might be damaging information in the file about his activities in Vietnam. The military and medical records, however, appear identical to what Kerry has already released. This marks the first time Kerry's grades have been publicly reported.
The transcript shows that Kerry's freshman-year average was 71. He scored a 61 in geology, a 63 and 68 in two history classes, and a 69 in political science. His top score was a 79, in another political science course. Another of his strongest efforts, a 77, came in French class.
Under Yale's grading system in effect at the time, grades between 90 and 100 equaled an A, 80-89 a B, 70-79 a C, 60 to 69 a D, and anything below that was a failing grade. In addition to Kerry's four D's in his freshman year, he received one D in his sophomore year. He did not fail any courses.
''I always told my Dad that D stood for distinction," Kerry said yesterday in a written response to questions, noting that he has previously acknowledged that he spent a lot of time learning to fly instead of focusing on his studies.
Kerry's weak grades came despite years of education at some of the world's most elite prep schools, ranging from Fessenden School in Massachusetts to St. Paul's School in New Hampshire.
It is noteworthy, however, that Kerry received a high honor at Yale despite his mediocre grades: He was chosen to deliver his senior class oration, a testament to his reputation as a public speaker. He delivered a speech questioning the wisdom of the Vietnam War, in which he would soon see combat.
Kerry gradually improved his grades, averaging 81 in his senior year. His highest single grade was an 89, for a political science class in his senior year. Despite his slow start, he went on to be a top student at Naval Candidate School, command a patrol boat in Vietnam, graduate from law school, and become a prosecutor, lieutenant governor, US senator, and presidential candidate.
In his Navy application, Kerry made clear that he spent much of his college time on extracurricular activities, including the Yale Political Union, the Debating Association, soccer, hockey, fencing, and membership in the elite Skull and Bones Society. 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.
Gaddis Smith, a retired Yale history professor who taught both Kerry and Bush, said in a telephone interview that he vividly remembers Kerry as a student during the 1964-1965 school year, when Kerry would have been a junior. However, Smith said he doesn't have a specific memory about Bush.
Based on what Smith recalls teaching that year, Kerry scored a 71 and 79 in two of Smith's courses. When Smith was told those scores, he responded: ''Uh, oh. I thought he was good student. Those aren't very good grades." To put the grades in perspective, Smith said that he had a well-earned reputation for being tough, and noted that such grades would probably be about 10 points higher in a similar class today because of the impact of what he called ''grade inflation."
Bush went to Yale from 1964 to 1968; his highest grades were 88s in anthropology, history, and philosophy, according to The New Yorker article. He received one D in his four years, a 69 in astronomy. Bush has said he was a C student.
Like Kerry, Bush reportedly suffered through a difficult freshman year and then pulled his grades up.
Michael Kranish can be reached at [email protected].
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | June 7, 2005
WASHINGTON -- 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.
In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that 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.
The grade transcript, which Kerry has always declined to release, was included in his Navy record. During the campaign the Globe sought Kerry's naval records, but he refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file. Late last month, Kerry gave the Navy permission to send the documents to the Globe.
Kerry appeared to be responding to critics who suspected that there might be damaging information in the file about his activities in Vietnam. The military and medical records, however, appear identical to what Kerry has already released. This marks the first time Kerry's grades have been publicly reported.
The transcript shows that Kerry's freshman-year average was 71. He scored a 61 in geology, a 63 and 68 in two history classes, and a 69 in political science. His top score was a 79, in another political science course. Another of his strongest efforts, a 77, came in French class.
Under Yale's grading system in effect at the time, grades between 90 and 100 equaled an A, 80-89 a B, 70-79 a C, 60 to 69 a D, and anything below that was a failing grade. In addition to Kerry's four D's in his freshman year, he received one D in his sophomore year. He did not fail any courses.
''I always told my Dad that D stood for distinction," Kerry said yesterday in a written response to questions, noting that he has previously acknowledged that he spent a lot of time learning to fly instead of focusing on his studies.
Kerry's weak grades came despite years of education at some of the world's most elite prep schools, ranging from Fessenden School in Massachusetts to St. Paul's School in New Hampshire.
It is noteworthy, however, that Kerry received a high honor at Yale despite his mediocre grades: He was chosen to deliver his senior class oration, a testament to his reputation as a public speaker. He delivered a speech questioning the wisdom of the Vietnam War, in which he would soon see combat.
Kerry gradually improved his grades, averaging 81 in his senior year. His highest single grade was an 89, for a political science class in his senior year. Despite his slow start, he went on to be a top student at Naval Candidate School, command a patrol boat in Vietnam, graduate from law school, and become a prosecutor, lieutenant governor, US senator, and presidential candidate.
In his Navy application, Kerry made clear that he spent much of his college time on extracurricular activities, including the Yale Political Union, the Debating Association, soccer, hockey, fencing, and membership in the elite Skull and Bones Society. 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.
Gaddis Smith, a retired Yale history professor who taught both Kerry and Bush, said in a telephone interview that he vividly remembers Kerry as a student during the 1964-1965 school year, when Kerry would have been a junior. However, Smith said he doesn't have a specific memory about Bush.
Based on what Smith recalls teaching that year, Kerry scored a 71 and 79 in two of Smith's courses. When Smith was told those scores, he responded: ''Uh, oh. I thought he was good student. Those aren't very good grades." To put the grades in perspective, Smith said that he had a well-earned reputation for being tough, and noted that such grades would probably be about 10 points higher in a similar class today because of the impact of what he called ''grade inflation."
Bush went to Yale from 1964 to 1968; his highest grades were 88s in anthropology, history, and philosophy, according to The New Yorker article. He received one D in his four years, a 69 in astronomy. Bush has said he was a C student.
Like Kerry, Bush reportedly suffered through a difficult freshman year and then pulled his grades up.
Michael Kranish can be reached at [email protected].
Last Thursday, NBC "Tonight Show" viewers got a perfect example of how the Nobel Laureate basically makes things up, and that his poor grades in college were quite an indicator of just how little he understands about science."...
GORE: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy - when they think about it at all - in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot ..."
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/al-gore-ezra-klein-misquote-95858.html#ixzz37xlq2uBN
GORE: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy - when they think about it at all - in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot ..."
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You have any idea how hot "millions of degrees" is?? Apparently neither does Gore.
You have any idea how hot "millions of degrees" is?? Apparently neither does Gore.
- - - - - - - -
"the hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/al-gore-ezra-klein-misquote-95858.html#ixzz37xlq2uBN
Secret Weapon for Bush?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/politics/campaign/24points.html?_r=0
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 …
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.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/this-just-in-kerrys-iq-likely-lower-than-bushs
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/politics/campaign/24points.html?_r=0
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 …
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.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/this-just-in-kerrys-iq-likely-lower-than-bushs
Who Is Smarter, Kerry or Bush?
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/benedetto/2005-06-10-benedetto_x.htm
“it turns out that their grades while undergraduate students at Yale were remarkably similar. In fact, Bush's were a tad higher. His four-year average was 77; Kerry's 76. Both were C students. Kerry graduated from Yale in 1966; Bush in 1968.”
Kerry himself apparently believed it. In April 2004, he was quoted in Newsweek as saying, "I can't believe I am losing to this idiot." The widely published remark was made in an aside to aides while watching a Bush news conference.
That theme carried over after Kerry lost. Many of his backers publicly attributed Bush's victory to a dumb electorate. During the campaign, his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, underscored that feeling while promoting Kerry's health care plan.
"Only an idiot wouldn't like this," she told the Intelligencer Journal in Lancaster, Pa.
Kerry's grades were made public this past week by the Boston Globe, which found them in his U.S. Navy officer training school application. During the campaign, Kerry refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file, but gave the Navy permission to release the documents last month, the Globe reported.
The transcript showed that he got four Ds in his freshman year, Bush received one D in his four years, in astronomy. At the time, Yale considered grades between 70 and 79 a C and 60 to 69 a D.
“He was billed as the intellectual, though, and you had better grades in college."
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/benedetto/2005-06-10-benedetto_x.htm
“it turns out that their grades while undergraduate students at Yale were remarkably similar. In fact, Bush's were a tad higher. His four-year average was 77; Kerry's 76. Both were C students. Kerry graduated from Yale in 1966; Bush in 1968.”
Kerry himself apparently believed it. In April 2004, he was quoted in Newsweek as saying, "I can't believe I am losing to this idiot." The widely published remark was made in an aside to aides while watching a Bush news conference.
That theme carried over after Kerry lost. Many of his backers publicly attributed Bush's victory to a dumb electorate. During the campaign, his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, underscored that feeling while promoting Kerry's health care plan.
"Only an idiot wouldn't like this," she told the Intelligencer Journal in Lancaster, Pa.
Kerry's grades were made public this past week by the Boston Globe, which found them in his U.S. Navy officer training school application. During the campaign, Kerry refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file, but gave the Navy permission to release the documents last month, the Globe reported.
The transcript showed that he got four Ds in his freshman year, Bush received one D in his four years, in astronomy. At the time, Yale considered grades between 70 and 79 a C and 60 to 69 a D.
“He was billed as the intellectual, though, and you had better grades in college."