While I’m sympathetic with Carl Cannon’s complaints about Donald Trump, this portion of his op-ed got my Irish up:
It’s not that John Kerry (Yale class of ’66, U.S. Navy Officer Candidate School, Boston College Law School,’76) or Barack Obama (Columbia ’83 and Harvard Law ’91) are immune from questions about their acumen.
He’s not pointing to anything that proves that either John Kerry or Barack Obama are particularly smart. Or dumb for that matter. He’s just repeating their resumes and assuming you can deduce something from those makes a long laundry list of assumptions. Let’s focus on John Kerry.
John Kerry’s SAT scores have been published. He got a combined score of 1190, slightly lower than George W. Bush. Let’s compare that with some really smart people. Bill Gates and Ben Bernanke both got a 1590 on their SATs and Steve Balmer got a 1600, a perfect score. That put him in the bottom 25% of Yale admissions at the time he was admitted. Obviously, both he and Bush were legacies.
“Legacy” is a term I’ve used before but perhaps I should explain it. In old college parlance a “legacy” was someone who was admitted to a particular college due to connections rather than accomplishments. Kerry’s dad was a Yale grad. His mom was a member of a prominent (and wealthy) family. I haven’t been able to uncover where his maternal grandfather attended college (I suspect Harvard) but his maternal grandmother’s male ancestors were Harvard grads going back three centuries.
His SAT scores were average for all college applicants in the year he took them. By all accounts (and his college transcripts) he was no intellectual, more interested in skiing than scholarship. Those SAT scores suggest that his IQ was just about average for Navy OCS at the time.
Boston College Law School is not a top 20 law school and his transcripts tell us he didn’t get top scores while he was there. The bottom line here is that John Kerry is far more likely to be of average intelligence or at best average intelligence for a member of the professional class than he is to be particularly smart.
After law school his jobs were strictly political jobs. I don’t think that points to any great intelligence, either, but YMMV.
Why is it that so many people long for their politicians to be smart? If they do they’re bound for disappointment.
Usually strikes me as a tribal thing. My politicians are smart and yours are stupid. It is my guess that a number of them are actually quite bright, but that alone guarantees nothing. Temperament and judgment (among other things) are at least as important.
Steve
Really “smart” people tend to use their intellect in ways that demonstrate it rather than simply showing it off. IMO, Kerry is a poser, someone always looking for greatness to achieve self aggrandizement not necessarily to make the world better. Obama is another one who, while having a diverse, pampered education, plays with his educational background — hiding various school records or sublimating portions of his academic history, as he accentuates his elite credentials at Harvard. I will add in another current media sensation, Trump, to the mix as being someone incessantly talking about his “smarts” and wealth in order to define himself as “special”, but who nonetheless appears to be nothing more than a trumped up, shrewd and very insecure billionaire.
Probably some are but the objective evidence for it is pretty slim. I think that Congressional representatives, senators, and presidents are by and large very typical members of the professional class, i.e. from just over normal intelligence to a bit more than a standard deviation above normal. I’ve found that local politicians and members of Congress generally have some street smarts but I wouldn’t confuse that with intelligence.
jan, I can’t really write about Trump without sounding too disdainful. He reminds me of the old joke. What’s a foolproof way to make a small fortune? Start with a large fortune. He started out in life with $40 million. I guess that he’s built on that is to his credit but his performance is no better than if he’d put the $40 mil into a DOW indexed mutual fund. I don’t know how smart he actually is regardless of his boasting. He’s probably a little smarter than the average bear but not enormously so.
What Trump does well is to evoke passion from people — passionate dislike or passionate adoration. It reminds me of the hype surrounding Obama in 2008. Few seemed to legitimately process what he said, or the depth of experience he brought to the table. They mainly viewed him favorably as a cool, minority candidate who was masterfully articulate in his rousing presentations to the people.
Trump is following a similar game plan, except this time it’s with the republican label attached to his podium. He, like Obama, goes for big rallies and big ideas. The only salvation for the R party is that many of the more well-known people in that party are not gobbling up all his garbage, and are criticizing his style as well as his solutions — something democrats are either reticent or plain cowardly to do with their own.
At least Kerry is fluent in French, while Dubbya is barely fluent in English. Amerikans should be embarrassed that no President since Teddy Roosevelt was fluent in a foreign language and none were hard scientists. Angela Merkel, on the other hand, is a PhD physical chemist and multilingual. Even worse, our SCOTUS consists of STEM-inepts, exclusively either Roman Catholic or Jewish.
wouldn’t want most of the STEM people I have known running things. Too many hedgehogs.
Steve