Should we elect the smartest presidential candidate?
Interesting debate from Mankiw:
In today’s Washington Post, Eugene Robinson discusses Al Gore’s new book and concludes:
we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher’s pet with perfect grades.Robinson intimates that this is someone like Al Gore.
In fact, according to the Washington Post (March 19, 2000), “Gore left St. Albans ranked 25th in a senior class of 51.” And then:In his sophomore year at Harvard, Gore’s grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush’s transcript from Yale. That was the year Gore’s classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana. His grades temporarily reflected his mildly experimental mood, and alarmed his parents. He received one D, one C-minus, two C’s, two C-pluses and one B-minus, an effort that placed him in the lower fifth of the class for the second year in a row.
So who is the brainiac Robinson is looking for? Well, I know of one candidate who graduated as his college valedictorian.
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June 1st, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Not a bad idea.
A while ago Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) proposed that we elect Bill Gates president. He seems to like Bloomberg now.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I think only the smart candidates should be president, so I’ve created this web site to show the GPA and education for every candidate. http://www.onlysmartpresidents.com