I want to chime in. I regard GW Bush as one of the worst presidents we’ve ever have and I loathe and despise the man. If I had to choose between vaporizing him and vaporizing my ex wife, I’d probably die of old age while trying to decide.
But—if I met the man in real life BEFORE he wrecked everything in sight I probably would have liked him and I probably wouldn’t consider him below average in intelligence. He would be a good guy to drink with and a good guy to shoot pool with; he would be worthless in a barroom fight, but so am I. I do think he would have done well as a used car salesman on a second class lot, something I’ve said before.
But—my sister’s late husband was a career air force officer; a fighter pilot who rose to full colonel and who held several high level command positions. Because of him, I met quite a few fighter pilots during his years in the air force and I have to say I never met a dumb one.
Because of this, I have a lingering fear that Bush will be proved right and that history will regard him most favorably. I say fear because I don’t want it to happen; I don’t want to be that mistaken in my judgments. I can’t bear to think of choking down that much crow. Even so, something in my subconscious tells me to give the man the benefit of the doubt; I think now that he is smarter than I thought. That doesn’t mean he isn’t in the wrong job, though. I still think that used car salesman would be about his speed.
George W. isn’t exactly retarded, but I don’t think either being a fighter pilot or having a Harvard MBA attests to any real intellectual strength, either. Just about anybody from certain families, if they’re bulldogged into going to enough classes and passing enough exams, can get a Harvard MBA. The tragedy of that is that there are those who aren’t from certain families who have to show initiative, intellectual brilliance, and tremendous stamina to earn the same MBA. As for piloting a fighter jet, training is intensive and only those rare birds who show natural ability – a combination of quick reflexes and thinking, good spatial orientation and tremendous self confidence – can do that job. But being an intellectual heavyweight is not an asset here; in fact, the greatest asset is to suspend thinking altogether in some cases and react/respond as you were trained. Sometimes you even have to ignore common sense in order to survive an emergency.
If George Bush had been trained as intensively in public speaking as he was in aviation, he’d make JFK (noted for his wit and quick verbal thinking, for those too young to remember) look like a doofus in front of a crowd. Unfortunately, his presidency has been less like flying and more like Harvard graduate school – Karl Rove is the smart kid who preps him for his exams and who writes his papers for him (and maybe he did back in Harvard, I don’t know.)
The fact that he looks a little goofy all the time actually endears him to the masses of Americans who voted for him both times.
Heredity. His brother and father are both very smart.
SAT scores that put him well above average in intelligence.
A Yale undergrad degree with average marks
A Harvard MBA
An air force exam on which he scored significantly higher than the average (remember, everyone who takes that test is a college grad). Average score: 40. Bush score: 64.
Being elected as governor of Texas, being re-elected (much more important), and doing well enough at that job that he was talked about as presidential material for a couple of years before he actually ran.
Getting elected as president of the U.S. Having to at least hold his own against Al Gore in two debates to do so.
Getting re-elected as president of the U.S.
Evidence that he is below average in intelligence:
“Bush sucks!”
I think that about sums it up.
And no, I’m not a fan of Bush. I started out being one, but a series of poor decisions, obvious problems communicating with the people (an extremely important role of a president, and one Clinton was very good at), a tendency to put unqualified cronies in critical positions, and a disastrous management of the Iraq war have convinced me not that he’s an idiot, but that he’s a stubborn, ignorant man who lets his religion guide policy choices and who has very poor judgement on many critical matters.
None of that means he’s stupid. It just means he’s a bad president.
And BTW, if supporting bad policy makes you stupid, then please explain how Richard Nixon, one of the smartest people to be president, did such a sucky job at it?
The fact is, it’s not intelligence that makes a good president. A president is not supposed to be a technocrat. A good president has to be a clear communicator. He has to know how to delegate responsibility. He has to be a good judge of character. He has to have a wide base of knowledge. He has to have a good sense of when to back off from his ideology and when to stand his ground. He has to be willing to reverse course when experience shows that his policies aren’t working. He has to be likeable, or failing that be a good enough diplomat to be able to deal with other leaders.
Bush has none of those qualities. He’s a terrible judge of character - this is the guy who looked into Putin’s heart and liked what he saw. He can’t communicate ideas worth a damn. He deals with powerful people by giving them condescending nicknames like ‘pooty-poot’. He has no sense of when to stop pushing a failed domestic policy. He soiled relations with Congress so badly that even his own party doesn’t consult with him. He’s apparently so lacking in judgement that he thought his own personal attorney would make a wonderful Supreme Court pick, skipping over dozens of people with vastly better qualifications.
One point about Presisent Bush’s SAT scores; determining his inate intelligence, touched on a bit here, is that he certainly, as a priveledged person, had access to the best pre-test coaching money could buy. That could affect his scores as opposed to the general populace. We might never be able to ascertain that as truth, but, are there records of his high school grades made public to affirm, or contrast with the SAT scores?
Sam Stone, appreciate your detailed post above. For me, the main indicator of Bush’s intelligence is that he doen’t seem thoughtful at all, and doesn’t have the capacity to learn from mistakes made, or improve his technique, especially in public speaking and Foreign Relations. An intelligent person builds on experience, gets more savvy with the punches and rolls, but from what I see, Bush just gets worse with every speech.
I think it just boils down to a person who has never had to personally account for his actions due to a Failsafe blanket for his whole life, with the family money made by taking their happy large share at the expense of the decency of this country. They are very Smart with that, and have reaped their rewards. But that sort of Smart is a sad echo of what it takes to run an intelligent Democracy.
I don’t think whether he is a good airplane driver is relevant. He is underestimated because of what has gone wrong. But he is simply following a plan. It just did not work like they thought it would. His admin is replete with New World Order neocons who are true believers . They have set into motion changes which were meant to remake the country and start to remake the world into what they see is good. There is a lot of evidence that Iraq was planned long ago. They jumped at the first opportunity . They lied to get it done. The list includes other Arab countries and if Iraq was easy we would already be in another one or two by now.
I’m not sure that even this hypothesis applies. I took the SAT four years after he did (scoring a bit higher ) and I really do not recall any general movement toward test preparation.
I suppose that it is possible that test prep originated with the Harvard- and Yale-bound high schoolers and then “trickled down” to hoi polloi, but it seems to me that test prepping did not get started until the mid-1970s and did not really take off until the early 1980s, around twenty years after Bush took the tests. (I am open to correction, of course, but I offer my anecdote as a counter to what I perceive as an anachronism. (Not that ellele is being in any way dishonest, only that people of her youth may not realize that phenomena that they took for granted may not have been prevalent, (or, possibly, even available), to her elders.)
Similarly, I doubt that he could have gotten (or even would have considered getting) someone to take the test for him. My memory is that we had to present our Social Security Card and a driver’s license to enter the test room, so I suppose that someone had engaged ringers to take their tests for them before my class was tested, but I doubt that it was a frequent occurrence aside from the semi-pro jocks. Regardless how “possible” it might have been, it just does not strike me as likely.
(My analysis, of course, is admittedly colored by the fact that I have never considered him stupid–only intellectually lazy.)
I agree that he is not stupid and that he is intellectually lazy. But I will add to that that I would definitely not classify him as “superior,” “bright” or “gifted” intellectually.
A few years ago I speculated that he is probably average to high-average in his I.Q. (100 to 110 range) That guess is based on what I can observe now and not on what his scores were when he was a young man.
I base my estimate on twenty years experience in the classroom and on my training. I also usually vote for the most liberal Democrat I can find. I don’t know if that influenced my judgment or not. (I have been known to vote for Fred Thompson, so I can stray from time to time.)
As a Texan, I’ve “observed” Bush for too many years. When running for Governor, he seemed a half-bright frat boy type. But he was able to link words & even sentences together–for speeches & even off the cuff. His mental abilities have gone downhill since then.
Obviously, I’m not a Bush supporter. But there are a few SDMB’ers whose intelligence I do not doubt–even though their political opinions give me hives.
This still puzzles me. I’ve never seen anyones public speaking abilities drop so quickly other then medical reasons. Surely in Texas the difference must be talked about more, as people there remember Governor Bush more clearly? I really have trouble believing he managed to use enough drugs during his few years as governor to damage himself without anyone noticing. Are there any other more plausible theories floating around?
My wife edits medical encyclopedias, etc., and rewrites entries. She can tell when the author of an entry doesn’t know the material. The writing wanders around a lot, isn’t precise, and makes the writer sound like an idiot (even when the same writer sounds brilliant for other material.) Perhaps Bush is doing something similar, having to speak about stuff he really doesn’t get - there is a lot more of that as president than as governor.
I’ve always thought that whenever Bush tries to speak about anything more specific than, “we must not let the terrorists win.”, he sounds like a third-grader giving a book report on a book he hasn’t read.
There is no way to judge the president in pre-prepared speeches such as The State of the Union Address. These speeches are either written by professional speech writers or fine tuned by them and put on teleprompters.
The only way to judge is in off-the-cuff remarks. Even then, there is some preparation. But in looking back over some of his debate commentary, even when he could string sentences together, they often just didn’t make sense. In one he mentions the idea of fighting so that we never have to go to war, for example. (I paraphrase.)
During his early presidency, he began to make gosh-awful grammatical mistakes. I’m not talking about things that only an English teacher would notice. These were mistakes on things that my students had to know to pass a proficiency test to get a diploma from high school.
Sometimes when he is before the press corps, he is nervous and ill-at-ease – a regular doofus. At other times – even when his language is imperfect – he seems more confident, his arms are more relaxed, his voice is more modulated and he seems more in charge. It is the damndest thing to watch.
) and I really do not recall any general movement toward test preparation.