Simply Politics & News

[wstera2]

"that would have taken the ability to connect the dots and I know he can;t do that"

Hmmmm. Then why vote for Kerry if he's even dumber?

(Hat tip to SBHX)

This piece of gem added with the NYT article that shows KERRY's IQ is a good 5 point lower than Bush would shatter two of the most dearly held ideals of the (ahem) Educated Left.

No wonder the Left is Angry, their ranks these days have been swelled by the great unwashed they've always had great disdain for.

Arrrgh! Feeling unclean? Sure does make you want to take a bath doesn't it?
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POLITICAL POINTS
Secret Weapon for Bush?
By JOHN TIERNEY - NYT

To Bush-bashers, it may be the most infuriating revelation yet from the military records of the two presidential candidates: the young George W. Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than did the young John Kerry.

That, at least, is the conclusion of Steve Sailer, a conservative columnist at the Web magazine Vdare.com and a veteran student of presidential I.Q.'s. During the last presidential campaign Mr. Sailer estimated from Mr. Bush's SAT score (1206) that his I.Q. was in the mid-120's, about 10 points lower than Al Gore's.

Mr. Kerry's SAT score is not known, but now Mr. Sailer has done a comparison of the intelligence tests in the candidates' military records. They are not formal I.Q. tests, but Mr. Sailer says they are similar enough to make reasonable extrapolations.

Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

Many Americans still believe a report that began circulating on the Internet three years ago, and was quoted in "Doonesbury," that Mr. Bush's I.Q. was 91, the lowest of any modern American president. But that report from the non-existent Lovenstein Institute turned out to be a hoax.

You might expect Kerry campaign officials, who have worried that their candidate's intellectual image turns off voters, to quickly rush out a commercial trumpeting these new results, but for some reason they seem to be resisting the temptation.

Upon hearing of their candidate's score, Michael Meehan, a spokesman for the senator, said merely: "The true test is not where you start out in life, but what you do with those God-given talents. John Kerry's 40 years of public service puts him in the top percentile on that measure."

A Nader Nibble From the Right

The commercial made its national debut on Thursday on the Fox News Channel, aimed directly at Mr. Bush's Republican base. It starts with a middle-aged man disgustedly dropping his Wall Street Journal on the kitchen table. "What kind of conservative runs half-trillion-a-year deficits? Gets us into an unwinnable war?" he asks his wife, but adds helplessly, "I can't vote for Kerry."

"Then don't," she says, cheerily suggesting an alternative who is not quite yet a household name: Michael Badnarik, a computer consultant from Austin, Tex.

Mr. Badnarik is the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, which says he could "Naderize" Mr. Bush. A recent Zogby/Reuters national poll showed him tied with Ralph Nader at one percentage point each - not much, but possibly critical. Unlike Mr. Nader, Mr. Badnarik is on the ballot of every battleground state except New Hampshire.

"If we have a rerun of Florida 2000 in Pennsylvania, Michael Badnarik could be the kingmaker by drawing independent and Republican votes from Bush," said Larry Jacobs, director of the 2004 Election Project at the Humphrey Institute of the University of Minnesota, which has been tracking third-party candidates.

Mr. Badnarik, reached by telephone on Thursday while campaigning in Michigan, said that polls commissioned by his campaign showed him at 2 percent in Wisconsin, 3 percent in Nevada and 5 percent in New Mexico.

He dispatched quickly with most of the major campaign issues. Foreign policy? "I would be bringing our troops home from Iraq and 135 other countries." Taxes? "I would eliminate the I.R.S. completely." Health care? "Of all the things I want the government out of, health care is probably the first thing."

The only issue he ducked was abortion. Although the Libertarian platform supports abortion rights, he said, the party is almost evenly divided on the question. "It's not a religious issue," Mr. Badnarik explained. "It's a property-rights issue: at what point does the baby take ownership of its own body? I do not have a clear-cut answer."

Vote Your Way to a Fat Wallet

The most widely advertised lie this election is probably the one coming from the earnest campaigns imploring you to turn out on Election Day. Your vote matters, they keep saying, but it doesn't. No matter what state you live in, you have a much better chance of being struck by lightning on the way to the polls than of casting a decisive ballot in the presidential election.

Then why will Americans spend millions of valuable hours casting individually meaningless votes? Are these commercials deluding them into violating the basic economic principle of self-interest?

Not at all, says Robert Frank, a Cornell economist who analyzes such supposedly irrational behavior in his book, "What Price the Moral High Ground?" Most people vote, Professor Frank says, not because they fail to grasp the logic of self-interest, but rather because they consider it their civic duty to do so, and that is a profitable instinct.

It may seem odd that the people most likely to vote are the most affluent and most educated, presumably the ones whose time is most valuable and who understand most clearly how little their vote means. But their enthusiasm for voting is one reason they are affluent, Professor Frank says. People who like to engage in civic-minded activities tend to do better in business because they are perceived as trustworthy, he says.

"We're pretty good judges of character," Professor Frank said, "and none of us would ever want to hire the homo-economicus stereotype that populates most economic models." So even if your vote doesn't matter in the election, it could pay off in other ways.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/politics/campaign/24points.html