I’m not talking about ideology here. Many smart people support stupid things. Manly stupid people support smart things. What, in particular, Bush is for or against isn’t so relevant to this discussion.
I’m trying to get to the bottom of what are Bush’s actual bona fides in the specific realm of intellect. It’s a difficult question to address, I admit, but I think it must be possible to address the question without being overly subjective.
No one can much doubt Bush attended Ivies as a “legacy” acceptee. His lackluster grades are also not in dispute. One professor at Harvard B-School has described Bush as one of his worst students ever. It would appear his poor scholastics started before prep. school, even, so overall, from secondary to graduate school, Bush has proven to be, at best, average.
All the businesses he helmed failed. Perhaps not a very competant executive either.
He appears to have a hard time putting together a complete sentance unscripted.
Some have claimed it’s an act; a way to lower the expectations of his adversaries so that they are surprised when he displays even moderate intellectual competancy. Some posit he is actually very bright but suffers from a learning disability, like dyslexia. Others assert he really is quite dense, and lazy to boot.
Well, which is it? To be honest, my mind is fairly open. If I used the “walks like a duck” method of discerning his intellectual prowess, I’d rank Bush as a certifiable idiot. But looks are decieving, and there’s been many a claim that Bush counts on that to get the upper hand; a smart ploy if indeed it is. Again, is Bush really the moron some claim he is, or have his detractors vastly underestimated the man’s brains. After four years, I still don’t know for sure.
May I add I’ve been tested as having a reasonably high IQ, but can’t spell to save my sorry life (see the above)? Again, books vs. covers is the rule of this conundrum.
In Bush’s defense I have seen several people that were intellectually challenged but were good in business or other ventures. IQ and SAT are formal means of determining intelligence.
Like the previous poster said… some of us are probably considered “geniuses” and are complete retards in some areas. I myself am a horrible employee and I’m very slow mentally. I might get great ideas… but it just takes an awful long to process it.
Bush in the oil business I guess is a certified failure. With sports team he saved himself. In politics he seems to be quite sucessful. He must have some emphatic intelligence with voters of some sort.
What really brings Bush down in my opiniated view are his religious views and his being to homsey (not travel especially). They limit his view on certain things and he doesn’t travel much. I think he understands the conservative american mindset very well and uses it in politics. Outside these he is very limited… with little global and wordly view.
Just spelling? Is “helmed” supposed to the past tense of the verb “to helm”? Poets get to make up words, not regular folk like us.
You can’t serious expect this to be any kind of intelligent debate, do you? You OP has been done several times, with no good result. You know the old saying about someone who keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different result, right?
Your opinion about Bush’s intellect will be based on your ideology. People on the left desperately want to believe that he is an idiot. Why? Because they think he must be because he doesn’t agree with them.
Any reasonable person not blinded by ideological fervor must conclude that it would be impossible to be the Governor of Texas and President of the United States and be as stupid as some badly want him to be.
Hard to figure. There are differing kinds of intelligence.
He was a fighter pilot. I failed out of flight school, so I suppose he is smarter than me.
He seems to have the superhuman gift for remembering names that one expects of a senior politico. I lack that too. He is not the most articulate man, but I presume if people recorded everything I said, they could find a lot of mistakes.
All in all, a good question, but we simply do not have enough unbiased data.
Before the present SAT there was a correlation between SAT scores and IQ scores. The present SAT has been changed and this correlation no longer exists. The pre-1974 SATs have also been “recentered” up relative to later tests results.
If George W. Bush’s pre-1974 SAT score was a combined 1206 as reported by Cecil and in numerous sites on the internet — than this SAT score converts to an IQ of 129 on the Otis-Gamma IQ test, which makes the converted score almost two standard deviations above the norm.
The indicated IQ would be in the top 3% of the population. As stated in the linked material, these correlations were developed using a little more than 400 SAT and Otis IQ test takers.
In addition – the actual correlation for the pre-1994 test to the WAIS is +.80. This is higher than some IQ tests have with each other as shown in the quote below.
Note also that the quote above states that the SAT was actually benchmarked using the Otis IQ test. The Otis test was used in the SAT to IQ conversion cited above.
Bush did very well against Ann Richards in the Texas gubernatorial debate, and from all I’ve read (I’ve never seen him in person), he’s quite quick with the quips at Republican fund raisers or campaign rallies.
It appears, then, that he is comfortable and articulate when in familiar territory or surrounded by those sympathetic to his believes. (“Isn’t this true of everyone?” you may ask. Yes, of course, but some people can talk their way around difficult subjects better than others.) From this, I’d say that what he exhibits is intellectual inflexibility rather than gross intellectual deficiency.
C’mon, John, helmed (or helm) is a perfectly good transitive verb. It means “steer” (as in “steering wheel,” not “castrated cattle”), and its usage is not at all uncommon. Go look it up in a dictionary.
Thank you, Tigers. It would appear Bush can perform quite well, at least on some of our standard measures of intellect. Baffling, then, is his performance in a number of other areas, for which “lackluster” could be called a euphamism.
Again, a good act, if indeed it is. Is laziness and his purported lack of curiosity/interest in intellectual pursuits more to blame?
Nevertheless, Reagan was stupid. In the eight years of his term I never heard anyone, even his supporters, dispute that point. In fact, some supporters seemed to be touting that as a source of his strength.
I looked it up, and you are right! Ah, the verbication of the English language… Although dictionary.doc does cite Shakespear as using it as a verb.
Cite? (Not about the governor or president part.)
Your statement is clearly unprovable, but state it as a fact. And yet you have demostrated on this board that you are very intelligent. Clear evidence that intelligent people are capable of saying stupid things.
From that we can conclude that he is either perversely disagreeing with nearly everything on which I am correct just to annoy me or else he is a blithering idiot. As I am not (quite) egotistical enough to believe that the President of the United States is monitoring my knowledge of all that is true and framing what he says specifically to piss me off I must assume the second conclusion is the valid one. Nobody can be that wrong that often without either doing it on purpose or being too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Oh, dearie-dear. Do you really think the most meritorious candidate always wins? If so, I want you to give us a fifty-word essay on how Bill Clinton was obviously a much more capable person than George H.W. Bush or H. Ross Perot or Bob Dole. (And I take it you are not a Texan - from what I’ve seen in Molly Ivins essays, brains has never been a requirement for occupying the Texas gubernatorial mansion.)
As to the OP, it is something of a false dilemma. While George certainly isn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee, he doubtless has compensating abilities in other areas that keep him from spending his days drooling on the daisies. (But I can’t resist pointing out that his mediocre career at Harvard came about only because the University of Texes turned him down. So please, nobody say “Gee, he must be smart cuz he went to Harvard”!)
Lincoln was also raised fairly poor, given only rudimentary schooling as a youngster on the wooded frontier (proving himself in the mean time to be a masterful autodidact), described by some as shockingly ugly, and would today be called clincally depressed. Yet despite these setbacks, he managed to become a lawyer (something Bush himself attempted to do, but his application was rejected), a legislator, and later a president by undisputed election. Contrasting Lincoln’s life and upbringing with Bush’s, I have a hard time drawing parallels.
