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Don't Hate Bush Because He's DumbDimwits often make good presidents.

By Steve ChapmanPosted Thursday, Oct. 12, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

Illustration by Robert Neubecker A question that has dogged George W. Bush for months is one no candidate wants to hear: Is he smart enough to be president? The issue first arose when he couldn't name the leaders of several important countries during a radio talk show pop quiz, was reinforced by reports that he spent his college years in fraternity high jinks, and has been kept alive by his chronic inability to construct grammatical sentences or pronounce words correctly. Anyone with degrees from Yale and Harvard is presumed to be intelligent, but Bush has managed to overcome that presumption. In last Tuesday's debate, it's true, he didn't say anything to sound like a moron. But he also didn't give viewers any reason to doubt that Gore is the smarter guy.

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Bush's problem is not a new one for the Republican Party. In fact, it's a perennial handicap. Bob Dole was regarded as a man without ideas whose intellectual horizon started and stopped at the Senate Rules Committee. Clark Clifford dismissed Ronald Reagan as "an amiable dunce." Gerald Ford's verbal and physical pratfalls were made for Saturday Night Live. Dwight Eisenhower became famous for mangling syntax and reading Zane Grey. On the other side, John Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize in biography for Profiles in Courage. Adlai Stevenson's wit and erudition helped make him the darling of intellectuals, who saw him as a kindred soul. Bill Clinton is a former Rhodes scholar with a formidable capacity to absorb, digest, and make use of information on almost any subject.

Related in Slate

Jacob Weisberg's "Ballot Box" debunks the myth that dumb presidents do just fine and makes the case for voting on the intelligence issue. His "Complete Bushisms" lists George W. Bush's most memorable syntactical gaffes. This "Assessment" of Adlai Stevenson debunks his status as an intellectual.

Related on the Web

Click here for the granddaddy of Bush-is-stupid sites, toostupidtobepresident.com. In the interest of fairness, check out this site, which pushes the less accepted notion that Clinton is stupid. If you want evidence that FDR indeed marks the apogee of presidential intelligence, look for it in these letters to him from Albert Einstein.

Over the years, it's become almost a given that Democratic nominees are brighter than their Republican rivals. The GOP has even tried to turn that perception into an advantage, as when George Bush portrayed Michael Dukakis as a high-falutin' Cambridge intellectual.

The perception has a solid foundation in fact. Gore, for example, scored a 625 on the verbal portion of the SAT compared to Bush's 566, and he has personally written articles and a book on serious subjects while W.'s aversion to serious reading is undisputed. In terms of IQ and intellectual curiosity, Democratic candidates have long enjoyed a conspicuous edge. Presidential historian William Leuchtenburg of the University of North Carolina says that to find a Republican who was clearly smarter than his rival, "you probably would have to go back to 1928" when Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith.

There are the occasional tossups, like Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman, and even Democrats derided Lyndon Johnson as an unlettered rube (though no more stupid than Barry Goldwater). But as Leuchtenburg says, it's hard to find an example of a smart Republican running against a dim Democrat. Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, who worked in Richard Nixon's White House, calls him "the smartest man I ever knew." But his opponents were not exactly pinheads. Besides running against JFK, Nixon faced Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern, both of whom were college professors before entering politics.

The real debate is not about whether Democrats generally possess superior brainpower but whether that advantage really matters. Richard Norton Smith, biographer of Hoover and Dewey, argues that Eisenhower was "a genius using people to get what he wanted." Reagan was far more successful as a president than as a student. By contrast, an excess of IQ points didn't prove much use to Carter or Nixon. With the help of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton proved beyond all doubt that intellectual prowess can coexist with disastrously poor judgment. Kennedy and his super-smart advisers helped make the term "the best and the brightest" an ironic putdown.

Hess argues that the differences between candidates are ultimately inconsequential. "Anyone who can get elected has the cognitive skills to do the job," he says. Though Gore may be smarter than Bush, he contends, "Bush is quite superior in some skills." Smith approvingly quotes John Marshall's description of George Washington, whom he admired deeply, as "more solid than brilliant."

If gray matter were the only consideration, of course, we would award the presidency to the winner of the College Bowl. But it's still striking that gray matter counts so much more on the Democratic side. One explanation is that FDR was so hospitable to intellectuals, a tradition upheld by Stevenson and Kennedy. (JFK's secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, once said he got the job because Harvard didn't have a school of agriculture.) In recent decades, Republican presidents have brought along their own high-octane thinkers—Edward Levi, George Shultz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Martin Feldstein, and so on. But intellectuals, for whatever reason, still tend to congregate somewhere left of center. Americans who have done graduate work are considerably more likely than those with just a college education to vote Democratic. So Republicans are inclined to think that too much book learning can be just as harmful as too little.

In the end, high intelligence is neither a requirement for success in the Oval Office nor a reliable protection against failure. Other factors—character, convictions, communication skills, understanding of other people, and plain old luck—matter a great deal, too. And as Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker says, "Frankly, in American politics the standard of intelligence and academic excellence is not very high." For any considering the prospect of Bush in the White House, that's the good news. Or maybe the bad.

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Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments from The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: Grey Satterfield says JFK had looks charm and wit but wasn't an intellectual and didn't write his Pulitzer-winning book. Adam Carasso wonders if in fact neither Bush nor Gore would get into an Ivy League school with those scores today. "Really" said Don't hate Bush for being dumb: "there are so many other reasons, that's not even in the top ten." But most of the comments said the same thing--intelligence is not the reason we're voting for him. And they said it equally about Gore and Bush. Check it out:]

I believe this the wrong question to ask, and the fact that we obsess over his IQ suggests what's wrong with American meritocracy. Rather than looking at the man's SATs, we might consider whether George W. Bush has any qualifications for the presidency. George Washington's mind may have been "solid," but he led the American revolutionary struggle. This should count for something.

Bush appears to be an affable, unambitious person who happens to have famous forebears. He has achieved nothing in his life, aside from getting the state of Texas to build a baseball stadium for the Rangers. He shows neither familiarity with, nor a passion for, policy. Combine this with the questions about his intelligence, and I have to wonder why anyone supports him.

--Andrew W. Cohen

(To reply, click here.)

The real issue is not so much one of the relative brainpower of the two candidates, although I would prefer the intelligent knave to the ignorant fool, but this year especially the fundamental issues are all ones of party philosophy. As one who believes that the federal government bureaucracies represent my interests far more effectively than the more corrupt state bureaucracies and large corporations like GM, GE, the pharmaceutical industries, the energy industries etc, I have no difficulty favoring an arrogant intellectual like Gore over an ignoramus millionaire aristocrat like GWBush.

--George Friedman

(To reply, click here.)

Of the two candidates, everyone is positive that Gore is the most intelligent. It's quite possible that he has a higher IQ than Bush. However, I doubt that anyone would call Bush dumb. He would never have achieved what he has in his life, if he wasn't intelligent.

One fact that is indisputable--Bush finishes what he starts. Gore's educational record gives us some idea of his modus operandi. He starts, but doesn't finish. Also, check your facts about Clinton being a Rhodes Scholar - he was accepted, he started, he didn't finish! Fact.

Bush has learned to surround himself with thinkers, doers,and go-getters. He knows how to work with people (Gore prefers working alone). Bush is honest--Gore lies constantly. Bush can work with members of both parties, Gore has proven he can't.

Give me a moral man, who cares about doing the right thing, that can work with people (both at home and abroad) anyday. So keep your high SAT scores. If you'd check, quite a few wealthy, successful people, didn't even go to college.

--Qsilver

(To reply, click here.)

(10/12)

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