-Caveat Lector- http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=128747 How smart are the candidates? Part 1 of 3 Wednesday, 18 October 2000 1:22 (ET) How smart are the candidates? Part 1 of 3 By STEVE SAILER, UPI National Correspondent LOS ANGELES, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- A recent "This Modern World" comic strip about the presidential debates featured the "Gorebot" admonishing voters: "Foolish humans! Do you not recognize the superior processing capabilities of my advanced neural network?" In reply, a George W. Bush drawn so as to highlight his unfortunate resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman, Mad magazine's "What, me worry?" cover kid, sniggers, "Get a load of the brainiac." As amusing as these widespread stereotypes are, voters need to ask whether Vice President Al Gore really is the closest carbon-based life-form to the supersmart HAL 9000 talking computer from the movie "2001:. A Space Odyssey." And is Bush truly as dumb as a box of rocks? Is there objective evidence to support these clichés? And even if it turned out that Gore's IQ towered over Bush's, would this tell us that Gore would make a better president? Fortunately, in 2000 the public has available more unbiased data on the intelligence of the candidates than ever. A variety of SAT and IQ scores have leaked out, allowing voters to compare candidates to each other or to themselves. But, what do these numbers mean? Can these test results be set in perspective? Part 2 of this series will cover the surprising consensus of IQ experts, political scientists, and historians on just how important innate intelligence is in the making of a good president. Perceptions of candidates' intelligence have long played a major role in American politics, as have attempts to manipulate those perceptions. Misspelling the word "potato," for example, was one of the many mis-steps that doomed former Vice President Dan Quayle's presidential ambitions. Thus, it's hardly surprising that some candidates have cultivated an image of brilliance. For example, Joseph Kennedy Sr. spent heavily on the ghostwriters who largely concocted the two nonfiction bestsellers published under his son John's name. JFK even won the Pulitzer Prize for "Profiles in Courage," which is now known to be mostly the work of speechwriter Theodore Sorenson. In reality, John Kennedy possessed a fine but hardly dazzling brain. According to historian Thomas C. Reeves, author of "A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy," in prep school JFK scored 119 on an IQ test. Although a 10th of the population scores higher than 119, a recent C-SPAN poll of 58 historians rated Kennedy as possessing the eight strongest leadership qualities of all 41 presidents. Similarly, the Democratic nominee in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson, portrayed himself as an intellectual. The press created the term "egghead" to describe the bald and supposedly scholarly Stevenson. In truth, Stevenson's resume was similar to Bush's. Stevenson was the grandson of Grover Cleveland's second vice president. As a rich socialite, Stevenson barely scraped through Princeton and Northwestern. After a nondescript early career, Stevenson unexpectedly became the popular and reasonably competent governor of Illinois. He then ran for president only four years later. At his death, the only book found resting upon his bedside table was "The Social Register." In sharp contrast, the man who twice beat Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, took pains to hide his considerable brainpower. He found it expedient to present himself as a kindly old duffer interested mostly in golf and Zane Grey's cowboy novels. This masquerade fooled even the historians of the time, who somehow assumed that the organizer of the staggeringly complex D-Day invasion had the IQ of a tree stump. Shortly after Eisenhower left office, a poll of historians rated him one of the 10 worst presidents. After Ike's death, however, a new generation of historians unearthed much evidence supporting the opinion of his vice president, Richard Nixon, that Eisenhower was "The most devious man I ever came across in politics." Therefore, this year's C-SPAN poll of historians rated him one of the 10 strongest presidential leaders. There are many valid objections to relying excessively on the IQ test and its close cousin, the college admissions exam, to judge candidates. IQ critic Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor who theorizes that there are between seven and nine "multiple intelligences," responded to an inquiry about Gore and Bush's test scores, "Many thoughtful people, including me, feel that the IQ test only captures aspects of scholastic intelligence and is quite remote from other important intellectual faculties." For all their limitations, IQ-style tests have a one unique advantage. While they certainly don't reveal the whole truth about someone, they can't intentionally lie. Professional spinmeisters can manipulate their clients' images, but they can't manipulate their old test scores. Also, IQ's change surprisingly little over time. In September, the Daily Telegraph of London reported on a 66-year-long study in Scotland: "People who sat an IQ test at the age of 11 in 1932 were ranked in exactly the same order when they took the exam again at the age of 77, showing that intelligence is stable throughout life." This means the scores that politicians earned as teenagers have relevance now. LOS ANGELES, Calif. Oct. 17 (UPI) -- The popular image of the two presidential candidates is that Gore is smart, while Bush is, if not dumb, at least less smart. Is there objective evidence to support these clichés? And even if it turned out that Gore's IQ towered over Bush's, would this tell us that Gore would make a better president? While there is much hard data on Al Gore and some on George Bush, a brief review of the sketchy facts known about one former candidate will help put the two main contenders in perspective. Sen. Bill Bradley was Gore's defeated rival for the Democratic nomination. Bradley was perhaps the most celebrated college student of the 1960s. John McPhee, ace reporter for The New Yorker magazine, wrote a worshipful book about the All-America basketball player while Bradley was an undergraduate at Princeton. Bradley graduated magna cum laude. He skipped what would have been his first two seasons in the NBA to study at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. This year, however, the on-line magazine "Slate" revealed that Yale had turned down Bradley because his SAT verbal score of 485 was too low, even for a basketball star. Young people, though, should bear in mind that the seemingly low SAT scores of the older generation are not proof that your elders really are as thickheaded as they probably appear to you. You must keep in mind that in mid-90s, the Educational Testing Service changed the scoring of the SAT, especially the Verbal section, in order to return the average score to 500, the center point of their 200 to 800 scale. According to the College Board, which sponsors the SAT, Bradley's 485 would be equivalent to about a 570 now. Political consultants disagree over what that run-of-the-mill score says about Bradley. Scott McConnell, an aide to Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and an admirer of Bradley's talents, states, "I simply don't believe that verbal score for Bradley. Maybe he had the flu or misnumbered his responses." So, what about Gore and Bush? Is the vice president as inhumanly brilliant as comedians imply? A Washington Post article by David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima listed a wide range of hard numbers documenting Al Gore's intellect. At St. Alban's prep school, Gore took IQ tests twice, scoring 133 upon entering and 134 upon graduating. This puts him just below the top 1 percent in IQ. To put this in perspective, while there are 272 million Americans with lower IQ's, there are also almost 3 million with higher scores. Not surprisingly, the vice president's SAT scores were also strong but not stratospheric: verbal 625, math 730, for a total of 1,355 out of a possible score of 1600. Under the current easier scoring system, Gore's old-style 1,355 would be the equivalent of a 1,420 (690 verbal, 730 math). If Gore were attending Harvard now, when 25 percent of the students score between 1,580 and a perfect 1,600, his adjusted 1,420 SAT score would place him only around the 30th percentile. Worse, his class rank in high school was a mediocre 25th out of 51. Therefore, if he were applying to Harvard in 2000, now that 90 percent of Harvard students rank in the top 10th of their class in grades, Gore would probably be a long shot to win admission on his personal merits alone. On the other hand, entrance to Harvard was less competitive in Gore's day, so he might well have gotten in back then even without family pull. Former Harvard biologist Paul Gross, who taught in the Ivy League in Gore's era, estimates that he would have had at least a 50-50 chance of getting into Harvard in 1965 even if he wasn't a U.S. senator's son. At Harvard, Gore struggled during the first half of his career. The vice president did worse his sophomore year than Bush, a notorious slacker, ever did at Yale. Gore rallied during his junior and senior years, however, to graduate cum laude, the lowest of the three levels of honors. He later dropped out of both law school and graduate school in religious studies before taking over his father's Congressional seat. Much of Gore's reputation as being a deeper thinker than the average politician rests on his long-time interest in science and technology. His 1992 book on the environment, "Earth in the Balance," remains highly controversial. His notorious assertion on CNN, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," has spawned 1,000 jokes. Nonetheless, Gore did show unusual foresight about the Internet. He played a leading role in the 1991 legislation behind the National Research and Education Network, a forerunner of the current system. Further, Gore is credited with making an innovative and hardheaded proposal regarding America's nuclear arsenal during the 1980s. To make U.S. land-based missiles less vulnerable to a Soviet first strike, he proposed replacing multiple warhead Minuteman missiles with a swarm of single-warhead "Midgetman" missiles. Although rapid improvements in the accuracy of our invulnerable submarine-based Trident missiles made the land-based Midgetman unnecessary, Gore's concept won him a grudging respect among some Republican Cold Warriors as one of the most realistic thinkers among the Democrats. Yet, Gore's scores on four ETS "Achievement" tests (now called the "SAT II") that he took as a high school senior reflect a schoolboy more interested in literary studies than science. On a 200 to 800 scale, the young Gore earned a fine 705 in English and a 701 in history. Yet, his science scores -- 488 in physics and 519 in chemistry -- were mediocre. Gregory Cochran, a rocket scientist turned evolutionary biologist who helped design the Trident guidance system that rendered Gore's Midgetman proposal a historical footnote, comments, "Gore must have been really uninterested in science, because those are crummy scores." Gore performed weakly in the few science courses he took at Harvard. On the other hand, the vice president's impressive 730 SAT math score (old style) shows that he always had the basic mental capacity to take an intelligent layman's interest in science. Like most stereotypes, the Gore-Bush IQ comparison turns out to be partly true and partly exaggerated. Gore's intellectual advantage over Bush is statistically significant, but less than overwhelming. We don't have an IQ score for George W. Bush, but we do know his SAT scores from an article in the New Yorker : 566 verbal, 640 math, and thus 1,206 Total. (This is the equivalent of a 1,280 under current scoring.) If Gore's SAT score would place him a little below average at Harvard now, Bush's score would put him in the same mediocre situation at such Harvard wanna-bes as Cornell, Georgetown, or the University of Chicago. In an interview, Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial and much-criticized IQ bestseller "The Bell Curve," estimated that out of 275 million living Americans, about 15 million could score higher on the SAT verbal. About half that many would be stronger than Bush on the SAT math. As for Bush's IQ, Murray notes, "I think you're safe in saying that 'Dubya's' IQ, based on his SAT score, is in excess of 120, which puts him the top 10 percent of the distribution, but I wouldn't try to be more precise than that." While Gore's grades at Harvard were erratic, Bush's Yale transcript is consistently indifferent. Unlike Gore, Bush, however, did manage to obtain a graduate degree, from the prestigious Harvard Business School. Bush doesn't like to mention his time in the Texas Air National Guard, since that would raise questions about why he wasn't in Vietnam like his former rival, Sen. John McCain, a long-term resident in the Hanoi Hilton; or Gore, who was a military reporter generally kept out of harm's way. Bush, though, did use National Guard service to earn his wings as an F-102 fighter pilot. The military doesn't risk costly and dangerous fighters on stupid men. The Air Force, for example, uses the Pilot Candidate Selection Model, which includes standardized tests primarily measuring spatial and mechanical aptitudes, as well as perceptual speed. It is notable that both candidates did better on the SAT math than on the SAT verbal section. A 1979 study by psychologist James M. Schuerger found that people with higher math than verbal scores tend to be more "tough-minded." In contrast, those better with words than numbers are generally more "tender-minded." LOS ANGELES, Oct. 19 (UPI) -- Despite pundits joking for months about Al Gore's supposedly space alien-level intelligence and George W. Bush's purported blockheadedness, the public appears to have taken away from the three presidential debates a more nuanced impression of the candidates. They seem to have found that while the vice president is indeed somewhat smarter, neither candidate is exceptionally intelligent. Still, both are above average. Interestingly, this consensus is very much in line with the college entrance test scores each man earned as a teenager. Now that we have a more realistic understanding of each man's mental powers, a crucial question remains: How important is intelligence in a president? In interviews, a group of scientists and political observers from across the ideological spectrum reached a surprising degree of consensus on the advantages and pitfalls of high IQs in politicians. One way to put the two candidates' mental abilities in perspective is to consider them as if they were college applicants. Since Gore was the son of a senator and Bush the grandson of one, back in the mid-'60s their college applications were no doubt treated more deferentially than if they were named, say, Bore and Gush. Could two such young men get into Harvard or Yale today without family connections? When applying to Yale, George W. Bush scored 1206 on his SAT (on a 400 to 1600 scale). This is the equivalent of 1280 under the easier scoring system adopted by the Educational Testing Service in the mid-'90s. That's a fine score, above the 90th percentile of all students. In today's more competitive academic environment, however, that would be nowhere near good enough to get him into Yale if he didn't come from a dynasty. He would, though, likely be able to a find a strong but less exclusive college such as Cornell or Georgetown to admit him. Similarly, a high school senior armed today only with the vice president's SAT score (1355, which is equal to 1420 after the changes to the scoring system) and his mediocre high school class rank (25th out of 51) would be a definite long shot to squeeze into Harvard. On the other hand, even without family pull, Gore's credentials are probably good enough to ensure his acceptance at one or more of the eight Ivy League colleges. While there is something crass about focusing upon presidential candidates' exam scores, these numbers possess a blunt honesty lacking in much of the carefully contrived folklore about politicians' brains. One rule of thumb useful in evaluating candidates' reputations is to remember that more writers will write nice things about politicians who give more jobs to writers. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy (IQ of 119) resembled George W. Bush in important ways. They were wealthy heirs to famous political names who possessed strong electoral skills but no intellectual interests discernible to the disinterested historians of the current era. All three, though, were smart enough to hire Arthur Schlesinger Jr. This prominent Harvard historian returned their favors by extolling their glamour for years afterwards. In contrast, presidents such as Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon who employed as advisers more businessmen and soldiers than intellectuals naturally elicited less adoration from professional prose stylists. In reality, these three were formidably brainy. Hoover was the world's foremost mining engineer, Eisenhower adeptly managed history's largest sea-borne invasion, and Nixon played a central role in American public life for many decades despite few political assets other than a ruthless intelligence. How important is IQ in a president? A group of scientific and historical experts tended to find the value of intelligence in a president only modest, despite each commentator having a high IQ himself. Still, most found brainpower at least worth considering. The primary considerations in voting for president are the "general positions the candidates and their parties stand for," argues Gore-backer James Fallows, National Correspondent of the Atlantic Monthly and a longtime critic of the SAT. "My guess is that most voters follow more or less this hierarchy too. After all, most people are either 'liberal' or 'conservative' and vote that way regardless of the talents of the candidates." But Fallows goes on to suggest that the second most important factor is "a sense of how the candidate will handle both the 'inside' (decision making) and 'outside' (explanatory / leadership) parts of the job." This is where IQ can play a role. Political scientist Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial and much-criticized book on IQ, "The Bell Curve," suggested to an email discussion group, "One would think that we could safely leave this obsession with test scores to the people who are so self-conscious about their IQs that they treasure their SAT scores. This includes just about every writer at The New Republic, New York Times, and the other places that have gotten so excited about the Dubya-as-dimwit proposition. The top 10 percent is plenty smart enough to be president." Murray's proposition that smarter presidents are not necessarily better ones appears to be born out by the historical record. While some intensely bright men such as Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln enjoyed much success in office, others experienced major difficulties, such as Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, James Madison, and John Adams. Still, this doesn't mean that IQ is not desirable in a president, all else being equal. The problem is that all else is not equal. There are so few people with high IQ that you can't always find amongst them an individual with all the other presidential talents you want. In contrast, the rare individuals who make it to the White House from the fat part of the bell curve are far more gifted overall than is typical for their IQ. It's the same as with height in basketball. If you are 7-foot-6, NBA teams will throw money at you no matter how dorky you might be. But if you are only 6-foot, the competition is so fierce that you need to be as quick as Allen Iverson. Can a man be too smart to be president? "Possibly," says best selling science fiction novelist and computer columnist Jerry Pournelle. Among Pournelle's qualifications for offering opinions on IQ and politics are that he holds two PhDs, one in psychology and one in political science. In a long and varied career, he was also once deputy mayor of Los Angeles. "We have known since Shakespeare that there is and perhaps ought to be a certain distrust of those sicklied over with the pale cast of thought," says Pournelle. Although he fought in Korea as an artillery officer, he adds, "The brightest do not make the best military officers. There is a minimum, but go too high and you get problems. This is standard thinking." According to British psychometrician Chris Brand, the military adage that if a leader is more than 30 IQ points smarter than his average follower, he will have trouble communicating effectively stems from British Army research during World War II. The respondents offered fairly similar views of the candidates, but differed on the implications. Neoliberal journalist Fallows claimed, "Bush seems to have no capacity whatsoever for conceptual thought." Gregory Cochran, a rocket scientist turned evolutionary biologist, summed up the challenge facing voters. "What really matters in a leader is not being smart, but being right. Who was smarter? Warren G. Harding or V.I. Lenin? I'm sure Lenin could have beaten Harding in chess, but I definitely would rather have lived under Harding than Lenin. Harding was kind of a dumb bunny, but his prejudices and instincts were much more reasonable than Lenin's, who was wrong about everything." And no IQ test will tell citizens whether Bush or Gore will turn out in the long run to have been more in the right. That's a decision voters must ultimately make for themselves. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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