Kerry The Bright Scholar, and Bush The Dunce . . . No, Wait, Maybe Not

Check out this Boston Globe article in which G.W. Bush and John Kerry are shown to be equally average students in college. After the way the MSM covered the race, who'da thunk it?

Hmm, where have we seen this before? Back in 2000, it was Gore the heady intellectual against Bush the dummy. (After all, Gore wrote Earth in The Balance!) No mention of Gore's mediocre Harvard grades and washing out of both divinity school and law school. No credit to Bush for completing Harvard Business School. Yada, yada, yada.

By the way, about Kerry's photo in this Globe article . . . well, I don't know about you, but it inspires a little pity in me. Ouch!

UPDATE: James Taranto's Best of the Web Today has some incisive comments on this news:

So Kerry was almost as distinguished a scholar as the schoolmate who went on to become president of the United States. That doesn't seem so bad--but for candidate Kerry, it would have been devastating. After all, much of Kerry's appeal, such as it was, rested on intellectual snobbery. His supporters described him, in the words of a March 2004 New York Times report, as "an intellectual who grasps the subtleties of issues, inhabits their nuances and revels in the deliberative process." In this view, Kerry's nose for nuance contrasted favorably with Bush's simplisme.

But what if Kerry simply lacked the ability to express himself clearly? Consider his answer when asked in a September 2003 debate to reconcile his vote for Iraq's liberation with his subsequent opposition: "The vote is the vote. I voted to authorize. It was the right vote, and the reason I mentioned the threat is that we gave the--we had to give life to the threat. If there wasn't a legitimate threat, Saddam Hussein was not going to allow inspectors in. Now, let me make two points if I may. . . ."

He went on in this vein for 248 words (quoted in full here), and only someone with a superior intellect and too much time on his hands could possibly have made sense of his answer. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," IQ expert Linda Gottfredson told the Times' John Tierney last year. The revelation that Kerry was no better a student than Bush suggests that this is just what happened.

I remember Kerry's vacuous circumlocutions well. He never got in trouble in the MSM for them, however, because he was thought to be the bigger brain of the two candidates.

This will happen again because of the general conceit of the chattering classes that liberals are inherently smarter and more intellectually gifted than conservatives. Wait and see.