If you think the John Kerry-George Bush campaign was over, think again. The 2004 Presidential campaign is still being fought by partisans of both sides — and the latest revelation is not…ahem…complimentary to John Kerry since it shows that he was just as unserious a college student as George Bush.
The Boston Globe reports this:
WASHINGTON — During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.
But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.
In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.
Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D’s in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.
The grade transcript, which Kerry has always declined to release, was included in his Navy record. During the campaign the Globe sought Kerry’s naval records, but he refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file. Late last month, Kerry gave the Navy permission to send the documents to the Globe.
Kerry appeared to be responding to critics who suspected that there might be damaging information in the file about his activities in Vietnam. The military and medical records, however, appear identical to what Kerry has already released. This marks the first time Kerry’s grades have been publicly reported.
The transcript shows that Kerry’s freshman-year average was 71. He scored a 61 in geology, a 63 and 68 in two history classes, and a 69 in political science. His top score was a 79, in another political science course. Another of his strongest efforts, a 77, came in French class.
We’ll let you click on the link and read more details yourself because, quite frankly, at this stage we could care less about what kinds of grades Bush or Kerry got in school, what extra curricular activities they were in, how they scored on their SATS or how they scored at the prom.
Pundits and bloggers are now doing all kinds of analysis of these old grades — comparing who got what, offering theories on why they were held back during the campaign. Etc.
We’ll simply say this:
We never thought John Kerry was that smart.
The reason: Bob Shrum.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.