George W. Bush
In the past, many of his detractors have dismissed him as a "lightweight." A chump. A joke. Many of them still do. And it's easy to see where they got this impression. Whenever he gives a speech, he invariably comes off sounding like some kind of ignoramus, who experiences difficulty wrapping his lips around the words that scroll across the Teleprompter. And when he has to work off-the-cuff, his folksy demeanor makes him seem more like the store manager of a Radio Shack than the President of the United States.
But George W. Bush is fully aware of how his enemies perceive him, and this is precisely how he wants them to react. His personality and mannerisms are actually the result of deliberate effort. This is not to say that it's all an act, but he does emphasize these elements of his personality for the benefit of the press and general public. And yet these affectations continue to be astonishingly effective; his act still manages to fool even his political opponents, who really ought to know better. After all, the basis of Bush's phenomenal political career has been people's underestimating him. As his political advisor Karl Rove said in 2002: "I can't explain why they underestimate him, but they do. Whatever the reason, I hope they keep doing it."
Dubya has managed to cultivate the look and feel of a down-home good ol' boy. He acts like your wisecracking neighbor or maybe brother-in-law. This is no small accomplishment for someone who grew up with every possible advantage: born into a family of immense wealth and political influence, attended a prestigious prep school, then Harvard and Yale. George became a millionaire in his own right at a very early age; while he was playing in Little League, the boy personally owned a million shares of his father's oil company. And yet, implausible as it may sound for someone born into such tremendous wealth and privilege, Bush somehow manages to pass for middle class.
A major factor in his success is Dubya's apparent mediocrity. The man is at best a lackadaisical administrator, a "big picture" guy who delegates all of the detail work to subordinates and only wants to be bothered with final yes-no decisions. He's a weak public speaker, underprepared for debates and press conferences, clearly uncomfortable citing specific facts, figures, and sometimes even proper names. The man also appears to be congenitally undignified, evidently incapable of going ten minutes without his trademark smirk or a full-blown shit-eating grin, regardless of the situation.
All of which combines to make him seem much dumber than most elected officials. Even many of his most ardent supporters presume that Dubya possesses an I.Q. bordering on 100. But -- counterintuitive as it may seem -- this idea is actually comforting to his political base. These are people who would like nothing more than to believe that the problems of governance are easily solvable, if only we can somehow avoid overthinking them. One of Bush's biographers put it this way:
"There is a group of people who feel that '[the President of the United States should] be smarter than I am on just about every issue I can think of.' But there is also a large group of people who don't feel that way. They want the President, in this modern era, to be something they can relate to. Someone who they don't think is intellectually intimidating. Someone who isn't really lost in the big fog of intellectual ideas and the world of words."
Ultimately, these voters are working from a gut feeling. Their assumption is that all we really need to clean up the mess in Washington is somebody possessing the courage of his convictions, and a healthy appetite for some old-fashioned hard work. And although neither of those criteria actually applies to George W. Bush, he manages to fake them well enough.
Yale, Vietnam
As a young man, George discovered that he was perfectly suited to the "good old boy" network. He was funny, outgoing, and enjoyed socializing. He was good at telling jokes, and he had a knack for remembering people's names. So when he got to Yale, Bush joined Delta Kappa Epsilon, an Animal House-style fraternity known for hard partying. In time he became DKE's president. He was also inducted into the secret society Skull and Bones, following in the footsteps of both his father (Yale class of '48) and grandfather (class of '17).
Bush had been admitted with an SAT score of 1206 (566 verbal, 640 math) which was low for Yale but perfectly respectable anywhere else. This would correlate to an approximate I.Q. of 129. In fact, a 1300 on the SAT would have been sufficient to join MENSA. So 1206 is a far cry from stupid.
Nevertheless, many of Bush's critics have become fixated on his mediocre class ranking at college, since he wound up somewhere below the middle of the pack. They take this as evidence of his low-to-moderate intelligence. In doing so, they fail to recognize that we're talking about Yale here, not some diploma mill. Mediocre at Yale is pretty damn good; it requires brains. More importantly, they're assuming that George was working hard to get on the Dean's List. And that's just not likely.
