Hey, did you hear the latest Bushism? The master of verbal
gaffes was at it again recently when he tried to invoke the memory
of the Minutemen of Massachusetts, who, in the words of the poet
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “fired the shot heard ‘round the world.”
Except somehow the line came out “fired the shirt ‘round the
world.”
What, you missed it?
Maybe that’s because it wasn’t George W. Bush who said it. No,
it was Edward M. Kennedy who mangled the oft-quoted line from
Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” during his speech at the Democratic
National Convention. Kennedy, of course, has been fracturing syntax
in public for four decades, yet somehow his bloopers aren’t trotted
out as evidence of his dimwittedness. There’s no calendar of
Teddy-Twisters to re-assure jittery Republicans each morning how
much cleverer they are than the senior senator from
Massachusetts.
Then again, you probably also missed Hillary Clinton’s history
lesson a few years back during which she held forth on the life of
Sojourner Truth: “I really hope our children learn about Sojourner
Truth … because she did stand for truth and she did sojourn
in difficult places time and time again… She went through
swamps, she was chased by dogs. She was shot at … and she
found her way to freedom” whereupon, according to Clinton, our
heroine “turned around and went back. She would send out the word
to the plantations that she was coming back. And if people could
get there … in the trees or on the side of their swamp, she
would be there.”
The trouble is, Sojourner Truth never was a conductor on the
Underground Railroad. Hillary was recounting the life of Harriet
Tubman.
Now imagine if George Bush had given that speech.
The myth of the president’s stupidity is a curious psychological
phenomenon. It derives in part, I suspect, from Bush’s overt
religiosity — which many half-educated media types ridicule in
order to amuse their quarter-educated audience. There’s probably
also an element of regional snobbery at work. Bush speaks with a
pronounced drawl. As Victor Davis Hanson has noted, the New York
and Los Angeles elite will forgive a Southern accent, even find it
charming, if it comes from the mouth of a Democrat like Bill
Clinton or Jimmy Carter. But from the mouth of a Republican, it
connotes a character from Deliverance. Certainly, Bush is not as
linguistically adroit as his supporters would wish. But if you
stick a microphone in anyone’s face often enough, he’s going to say
silly things.
Now it’s true, for what it’s worth, that as a young man Bush
didn’t do especially well on his SAT exams — at least compared
with other Yale students. He got a 566 verbal and a 640 math,
relatively low by Ivy League standards, but the scores ranked him,
overall, around the 80th and 90th percentiles respectively. (His
combined 1206 is actually the equivalent of a 1280 in current SAT
scoring because the test was “re-centered” — read: dumbed-down —
in the mid 1990s.) Earlier this year, Linda Gottfredson,
co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for
the Study of Intelligence and Society, converted Bush’s SAT numbers
to an IQ score; she factored in high school norms from an
Educational Testing Service study done in the early 1960s, when
Bush took the exam, and derived an IQ of 125 — which would place
Bush in the 95th percentile. By comparison, John F. Kennedy’s IQ
was measured at 119.
To date, John Kerry has not released either his SAT or IQ
scores. And in truth intelligence is much more than a number — as
cognitive psychologists constantly reassure us. Still, it’s worth
pondering the quality of mind that came out with this doozy, from a
Democratic candidates’ debate last September: “If we hadn’t voted
the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of
going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect,
who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious
questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there
to enforce the effort to create a threat.”
Suddenly, a guy who garbles a few phrases doesn’t sound quite so
bad.
