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Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Celebrity High-Q

Today we learned that John Kerry's undergraduate grades at Yale were actually worse than George W. Bush's. During the 2004 campaign, my friend Dean Barnett's blog, soxblog.com, offered up a number of very useful insights about Kerry that Dean gained from years and years of being unimpressed by Kerry's Massachusetts political career. Dean introduced me to the idea that voters were not going to warm up to Kerry because he just isn't a particularly likeable guy. This proved to be exactly true. If Kerry could have garnered even a few percentage points of "I love Kerry" votes in addition to the 48% he picked up as "Not Bush," he would be President today.

Dean also speculated correctly that Kerry's college grades were lousy. For me, the red flag was always the fact that Kerry, educated at Yale and St. Paul's School (if you have to ask . . .) and the recipient of the Silver Star, ended up attending Boston College Law School. I have nothing against BC, mind you, but it's a "one of these things is not like the others" situation.

We certainly can't discount the possibility that Kerry chose harder courses than Bush, or even that Bush sought out a bunch of famously easy courses. Perhaps Kerry is dyslexic too. Who knows? What I do know is that in all likelihood neither of them would be admitted to Yale today, even as family "legacies." Possibly due to the family angle, but without it there would be little chance. Even as legacies, they would be competing against a lot of other legacies with better grades. Assuming high-school grades on par with their Yale grades (a fair assumption given that high-school GPA is the best predictor of freshman-year GPA), their college counselors would have been actively discouraging them from applying to a place like Yale, the better to maximize the schools' credibility and the chances of stronger applicants. Actually, I seem to recall someone did try to get Bush to lower his sights a bit, but he turned out to have a better read on the situation than that person.


posted at 4:34 PM

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