A Decent Respect

Bush’s “misunderestimated” formulation is rather quaint and endearing. It’s true that he’s no great light but neither have any of our other presidents over the last seventy years except the pilloried Nixon and possibly the execrable Carter (though his claim to be a “nuclear engineer” was a stretch). (Hoover was smart — a lot of good it did him.) And, of course, Reagan. His special gifts seem to transcend the matter of mere intellectual power. Examination of his prodigious output of carefully hand-crafted speeches over the decades belatedly gave the lie to mean spirited charges of intellectual mediocrity. I would suppose that Bush and most of the others have IQ’s about 115 or 120. The current occupant of the WH (you know, the one who refers to “corpsemen” and is markedly inadequate when delivering extemporaneous remarks) is in the same general league; his much vaunted intellect has more to do with marketing than mental acuity. Note well that there has been a remarkably thorough cover-up of every detail of his academic career. We are not permitted to see his undergraduate grades that merited admission to Harvard Law, where he produced no published work as Editor of the Review. His academic record at HLS is suppressed as well. There is no plausible interpretation of this other than that his academic performance was far from stellar and is being hidden because it weakens his brand. Otherwise it would be trumpeted from the mountaintops.