NP: Not Suprising News ...

[Tim Strzechowski]

Report: President Bush Has Lowest IQ of all Presidents of past 50 Years

If late night TV comedy is an indicator, then there has never been as
widespread a perception that a president is not intellectually qualified
for the position he holds as there is with President GW Bush.

In a report published Monday, the Lovenstein Institute of  Scranton,
Pennsylvania detailed its findings of a four month study of the
intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush. Since 1973, the
Lovenstein Institute has published it's research to the education
community on each new president, which includes the famous "IQ"
report among others.

According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents
over the past 50 years, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush who were all
rated based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced
without aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several
other psychological factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain
system of intelligence ranking.

The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to
within five percentage points:

147 .. Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
132 .. Harry Truman (D)
122 .. Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
174 .. John F. Kennedy (D)
126 .. Lyndon B. Johnson (D)
155 .. Richard M. Nixon (R)
121 .. Gerald Ford (R)
175 .. James E. Carter (D)
105 .. Ronald Reagan (R)
098 .. George HW Bush (R)
182 .. William J. Clinton (D)
091 .. George W. Bush (R)

The six Republican presidents of the past 50 years had an average IQ of
115.5, with President Nixon having the highest IQ, at 155.  President
G.W. Bush was rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of  91.
The six Democrat presidents had IQs with an average of 156, with
President Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B.
Johnson was rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126. No
president other than Carter (D) has released his actual IQ, 176.

Among comments made concerning the specific testing of President GW
Bush, his low ratings were due to his apparent difficulty to command the
English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary
(6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other
presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA,
and an absence of any body of  work which could be studied on an
intellectual basis. The complete report documents the methods and
procedures used to arrive at these ratings,  including depth of sentence
structure and voice stress confidence analysis.

"All the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under
their belt, and most had written several white papers during their
education or early careers. Not so with President Bush," Dr. Lovenstein
said. "He has no published works or writings, so in many ways that made
it more difficult to arrive at an assessment. We had to rely more
heavily on transcripts of his unscripted public speaking."

The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton Pennsylvania think tank includes
high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in
human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R.
Lovenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F.
Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist.

This study was commissioned on February 13, 2001 and released on July
9,2001 to subscribing member universities and organizations within the
education community.