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Barack Obama has a 116 IQ?

That's pretty... middling decent.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  April 26th, 2011 at 08:43 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Thought that would get your attention: anyway, Ace of Ace of Spades HQ is having a little fun hacking his way through the deliberately-produced tangled thicket of weighting and changes in methodology and redefined standards that goes into Harvard academic rankings.  Conclusion?  He estimates that the President has an IQ somewhere between 110 and 120… which dovetailed neatly from this estimate of 116 from 2008.  Which is perfectly respectable, of course…

…for mere mortals.

But is it fair?  Bless your heart, but why should I care?  If the President’s refusal to release his college transcripts require us to go out and calculate Obama’s (apparently not all that impressive) intelligence by hand, as it were – well, that’s his fault, not mine.  You see, in the 2004 election the existing narrative regarding Bush vs. Kerry was that the Senator from Massachusetts was clearly the more intellectual of the two… a narrative that persisted up until 2005, when it came out that in point of fact John Kerry actually had slightly worse grades in college than George Bush did.

So.  116 IQ.  If the President wants to push back on that, he’s welcome to release his college transcripts – and maybe give the right-blogosphere one heck of a black eye in the process.  Lord knows he could use a win right now…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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COMMENTS

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  • http://teapartisan.wordpress.com Loren Heal

    116 qualifies as better than Middling Decent. I mean, that’s a full point into Slightly Above Average.

    Which sort of explains “leading from behind”.

  • http://travismonitor.blogspot.com Freedoms Truth

    Oh, and Trump is right, you don’t get into Harvard with that brain wattage unless … you had affirmative action.

  • 6eorge Jetson

    It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. To take the test, applicants were supposed to be college graduates, or on track toward a four-year degree, or be high scorers on the IQ test for enlisted men, the AFQT. The average IQ of a college graduate is typically close to one standard deviation above the national mean, over the 80th percentile. Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, told me that, in the huge National Longitudinal Study of Youth that was featured in his book, the average college graduate’s IQ, as measured by the AFQT, was 114.

    (A quick summary of IQ scoring: Scores are assumed to fall according to a “normal distribution,” or bell curve, with the average score at 100. Each standard deviation is 15 points. So, a 115 IQ falls at the 84th percentile and a 130 IQ at the 97.7th percentile.)

    The article was referring to the prior Democratic genius, John Kerry

    Moreover, the article continues

    Bush’s 1206 SAT score on the college entrance exam and his C average at Yale have been public knowledge since the last election.     Slate on W’s scores
    [snip]

    What kind of IQ does Bush’s 1206 SAT imply?

    Linda Gottfredson, co-director of the University of Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society, told me:

    “I recently converted Bush’s SAT score to an IQ using the high school norms available for his age cohort. Educational Testing Service happened to have done a study of representative high school students within a year or so of when he took the test. I derived an IQ of 125, which is the 95th percentile.”

    Which leads to an inescapable conclusion:

            Obama: Dumber than Bush

    IQ Percentile and Rarity Chart

  • aesthete
  • http://travismonitor.blogspot.com Freedoms Truth

    A liberal head-exploding factoid: If Palin’s IQ is > 120 …
    http://www.halfsigma.com/2008/08/whats-sarah-palins-iq.html

    and Obama’s IQ = 116,
    Palin’s IQ is higher than Obama’s.

    There has been no evidence based on the performance of either of them to suggest this is not the case.

  • http://908StraightSt.wordpress.com/ mbecker908

    POTUS qualifications. Nor, frankly, are college grades. I prefer accomplishments.

  • azaeroprof

    principles and the courage to make difficult decisions. Dwight Eisenhower runs circles around Abe Lincoln in pre-Presidential “accomplishment”, and we all know how *that* worked out.

    And for that matter, Richard Nixon was one of our most “accomplished” presidents in terms of pre-presidency.

    Obama’s biggest problem is not (just) that he lacked accomplishments, but that he has no character and all the wrong principles.

  • uselogic

    You have to have most of your stuff together to process all that input and not suffer extreme deceleration trauma. Barack can’t even figure out to put gas in a car. Don’t need a university researcher to figure out who’s more intelligent. Slick, is another matter though.

    I figure if BHO hadn’t been handpicked by the Chicago machine he’d be making a living as an oily used car salesman, styling in a plaid polyester jacket. Might be pretty successful too…. were it not for his lack of work ethic.

  • uselogic

    You have to have most of your stuff together to process all that input and not suffer extreme deceleration trauma. Barack can’t even figure out to put gas in a car. Don’t need a university researcher to figure out who’s more intelligent. Slick, is another matter though.

    I figure if BHO hadn’t been handpicked by the Chicago machine he’d be making a living as an oily used car salesman, styling in a plaid polyester jacket. Might be pretty successful too…. were it not for his lack of work ethic.

  • http://seekingliberty.wordpress.com fmaidment

    …seems most appropriate to me.

    A fool who has accomplished much will make no great President, nor will a genius who has done nothing with his gift. A principled man who lacks intelligence can make the tough decisions but may not consider their ramifications, while an unprincipled intellectual may waffle over the whys and wherefores.

  • ATG

    of cognitive ability.

    I was re-tested some time ago to measure diminished capacity as part of medical testing, (despite a large point drop I still came out well above the Ace determined presidential number lol) and while I may feel seriously diminished and self conscious, in many ways I’m a happier and more satisfied person today than I was previously.

    If anything has had an impact I would say that it’s the certainty of the results of a decision that has caused me the most anguish and perhaps it’s one of the things I see plaguing the president, he appears uncertain and full of self doubt, despite his public persona. This clearly shows in his off teleprompter performance, of which I find the most revealing, he is often incoherent and buffoonish. Does this relate to IQ? I’m not so sure…

    In my mind I imagine I could still produce what I believe would be brilliant thought and arguments but these days it’s just so damn hard to do, that I just can’t be bothered and perhaps the president is in the same boat. It’s one thing to be able to see all sides of an argument but another altogether to actually present it publicly, hence his preference to vote “present” so often. Like me, I think he’s just too lazy to do the work at his ability level.

    I imagine that if I had lived most of my life at current ability I would have adapted to it and found out how to make it work for me but there is hardly a day goes by where I don’t feel I lost something precious.

    Ok well this is why I have essentially stopped posting here at Redstate despite a relatively high IQ I have no idea what I’m talking about. Talk about frustrating!

  • http://Blackberrybear.etsy.com knitwit

    I won’t presume to know what had happened to you, but I work in rehabilitation, and I do know how frustrated my stroke survivors are by the loss of the ability to receive and identify language, process a reply, and communicate in general. Best of luck, and much sympathy!

  • http://Blackberrybear.etsy.com knitwit

    I have often had a conversation with my mom about the frustration and unhappiness we note in one of my siblings, especially, who is above average but not by much, and far behind the (smarter but less attractive) sibs. It must be terribly frustrating to be around people who seem to do important and interesting things with ease, when you are just smart enough to figure out what they did but not smart enough to do it yourself. It builds in a level of such envy, and can lead to not-so-suppressed anger at the unfairness of life that would let you see the shining ones through the window but never be able to join them! And, even if you steal what they have, you can’t maintain it without them…..Classic O’bama, wouldn’t you say?

  • DonPMitchell

    Guessing someone’s IQ indirectly seems very fishy and prone to bias, I wouldn’t assume that 116 is even remotely correct. He got to be president of the Harvard Law Review, which does not suggest meager intelligence and probably was not about affirmative action.

    In any case, how much does IQ mean? At Caltech, Richard Feynman told our class that his IQ was 122. And he won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering quantum electrodynamics.

    But my biggest objection to IQ is how it can be misused. You test a kid and then tell him he has an IQ of 100. It’s like saying, “Sorry Johnny, you probably won’t amount to anything special” You know how you tell if a kid will amount to much? You give him an education and opportunity and freedom to persue whatever he wants to do…and then you see if he amounts to much.

  • aesthete

    It’s that he knows so much that isn’t so.

  • http://westforwestwing2012.com heartlander

    Very insightful indeed. I once knew a guy who managed to get a job, wife, friends, etc., all by pretending to be much smarter than he really was. He had to build ever more entangled webs to try to keep up the deception. He was constantly, profoundly out of his depth in his job, but had to keep up the facade at all costs.

    Eventually the whole thing started unraveling — and boy, was it ugly. Several lives were ruined in the process.

    Every time I look at Obama, I think of that guy — only, instead of ruining the lives of a small circle of people, Obama impacts hundreds of millions of people, here and around the globe. What a mess.

  • http://westforwestwing2012.com heartlander

    I hope you won’t be a stranger around here!

  • azaeroprof

    and Obama is proof that an unprincipled, intellectual fool with no accomplishments make a quadruply horrible president!

  • Old_Crow

    Mainly for kicks, when I was retiring from the military, I submitted a job application to Google and had to take an IQ test to ‘qualify’ for an interview during one of their NY recruiting trips.

    I got the interview and was surprised how high I scored since I’ve had memory and other mental issues after nearly getting blown up in Iraq.

    Needless to say, I didn’t really fit in with the group I was interviewing with. Me being a conservative, soon to be retired military, older, church elder kind of guy. But it was an interesting experience. The ‘kids’ were trying so so hard to impress, often masking their intelligence with eagerness.

    I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get a job offer.

    Honestly, I don’t know how much intelligence has helped or perhaps hindered me over the years. I can figure spacial stuff like mechanics, electronics, physics, etc out pretty easily.

    In day-to-day life though, motivation, a solid value system, and social skills probably have more effect than IQ in most jobs.

  • glaucon

    Who cares what the IQ is of a puppet? He doesn’t need to think, the special interests do that for him. ;)

  • http://www.voteforteri2010.com teridavisnewman

    Mine is 167 according to my school records–I was tested on my first day of kindergarten when I was 4 years old and the teacher discovered I could read– which are short since I graduated from High School at 15 and finished with college at 18. MENSA said I tested at 166 on their exam. 116 is not genius level by a long shot–far less than I would have expected from the exalted Obamasiah. What a disappointment–I was expecting so much more from His Regal Genius-Hood. His whole life is nothing but a scam with all America as his victims. He conned all the liberals who though he was just SO smart and what he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. I’d like to buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth and then I could stop worrying about how I’m going to retire when bread is $60 a loaf. P.T. Barnum was right–there’s a sucker born every minute, and then sadly, they register to vote. God help us.