Anybody know what Walz or Vance scored on their enlistment tests?
In 2004, I evaluated the media's bias that Kerry had to be smarter than Bush.
Has anybody seen any evidence hinting at what J.D. Vance and/or Tim Walz scored on the Pentagon's AFQT / ASVAB enlistment test?
This is the second presidential election in a row in which the Democrats have responded to Trump’s populism by going pretty downscale academically with both of their nominees. Walz has a bachelor’s in education from Chadron State and a master’s in education from Minnesota State. (Thus, the Democrats’ junior high schoolish-accusations that the intellectual Vance of Yale Law School is “weird”.)
So, it would be interesting to get some hard numbers on the candidates.
Back in 2004, I did a lot of work to demythologize the controversy over the relative brainpower of the candidates George W. Bush and John F. Kerry, which led to a funny story that NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw told Don Imus about Kerry’s reaction to my research (which I will recount below).
In terms of credentials, 2004 candidates John Kerry (Yale BA in Political Science, 1966) and George W. Bush (Yale BA in History, 1968) struck me as almost ridiculously similar. E.g., both were of good blood - good bone New England families, and both were in the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale. (I don’t believe Kerry was personally involved in tapping Bush for Skull & Bones, although I might have that wrong. I think the Skull & Bones guys that Kerry had tapped to succeed him in turn tapped the two year-younger Bush.)
But the mainstream media’s assumption at the time was that Bush was a chimpanzee-like moron while Kerry was an unquestionably worthy intellect.
Twenty years ago, I found G.W. Bush's and John Kerry's Officer Qualification test scores as Yale seniors (Bush joined the Air Force Reserve to avoid getting sent to Vietnam, which would have hurt his enjoyable social life in Texas, but he did fly scary 1950s jet fighters, so he wasn’t lacking in courage; Kerry joined the Navy and saw combat in Vietnam). So they both had to take their branch’s officer qualification test, Kerry in 1966, Bush in 1968.
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