POLITICAL POINTS
Secret Weapon for Bush?
By JOHN TIERNEY

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.



http://www.nytimes.com/pages/politics/trail/