Campaign 2000: Why Bush Doesn't Like Homework

George W. Bush knows the question is coming. He is sitting in the back of a silver Ford Windstar minivan, his compact frame unfurled across the bench seat, his left arm slung across the backrest. He appears completely relaxed, but when the question arrives--the one about whether he has the intellectual wherewithal to be President and whether it bothers him that this issue keeps being raised in the campaign--his body tenses. He turns his face forward, his eyes narrow, and he gazes out the windshield at the long road ahead. "You know," Bush says, his voice tinny but measured, "I don't really mind people picking on me. I know what I can do. I've never held myself out to be any great genius, but I'm plenty smart. And I've got good common sense and good instincts. And that's what people want in their leader."

Bush may be right about the American people. In 1992 voters threw his father out of office in favor of a Democrat with a potent intellect and an encyclopedic command of everything from GATT to the gap in wages. But Americans learned that Bill Clinton has far less command over his character, and that may have left them with a yearning for a less complicated President. In Texas, Bush is known as a skilled manager and a confident, crisp decision maker. He has pursued, for the most part, simple, understandable policy goals and has stuck to his agenda with remarkable discipline. But on the national stage these past eight months, a competing image of Bush has appeared--that of a cautious, staff-dependent candidate, likable but lacking gravitas, who sounds out of his depth on some of the most serious policy issues a President must consider. Last week reporters pounced on the fact that he failed an interviewer's pop quiz by not knowing the leaders of three out of four world hot spots--Chechnya, India and Pakistan.* (He got right the leader of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui.) But more troubling was the fact that when exposed to questions from real voters about, say, the impact of the Internet on rural America, Bush gets lost in verbiage, as if struggling to put meaning behind words.

And yet the truth about the Texas Governor's brain is that he is much smarter, at least in terms of raw, innate aptitude, than he lets on. When his purloined college transcript from Yale was published in the New Yorker last week, the news only confirmed what we'd already expected and what Bush had once suggested--that he had been a mediocre, C-average student. The surprise was that Bush's SAT scores, while not topping the charts, were better than his grades. (Out of a possible top score of 800, Bush got 566 on the verbal part of the test, 640 on the math.) It turns out Bush was an underachiever. He didn't do well in class not because he couldn't, but because he couldn't be bothered. The fear that continues to fester about Bush--as we read about his periodic foreign-policy gaffes and then hear him blithely assert that what he doesn't know he can learn from his advisers--is that at 53 he has the same cavalier attitude toward knowledge that he had at 21: he could learn what he needs to know, but he doesn't seem to think it's worth his time.