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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (3253)	10/20/2000 1:47:35 PM
From: Slugger	Respond to of 10042

Bush ekes out slight lead in Fox News Poll. George W. Bush has eked out a small edge over Al Gore, according to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll released Friday. Bush had 45 percent, according to the poll of 900 likely voters, with Gore at 42 percent. The margin of error was +/- 3 percentage points, meaning that the race is still a statistical dead heat. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader had 4 percent, the poll said, while the Reform Party's Pat Buchanan had negligible numbers. Friday's poll was a slight reversal from an Oct. 6 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, which put the Democratic vice president at 43 percent, with the Republican governor of Texas at 42 percent. And 42 percent of those polled now expect Bush to win the Nov. 7 election, with 36 percent expecting Gore to win. This represented a shift from the previous poll, which had 44 percent favoring Gore to win, with 31 percent predicting a Bush victory. The poll showed voters saying Gore would be more likely than Bush to lie or distort the truth in order to win (42 percent vs. 26 percent). That was another switch from a poll a month earlier, in which 38 percent said Bush would be more likely to lie, and 33 percent said Gore would. more--> foxnews.com

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (3253)	10/20/2000 3:16:42 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

Is AlGore smart enough to be President? "....the chattering class should re-read David Maraniss's story from the March 19, 2000 edition of the Washington Post. Headlined "Gore's Grades Belie Image of Studiousness; His School Transcripts Are a Lot Like Bush's," the article proves beyond any question that Al Gore was not the smartest kid in the class. He wasn't even close to being the smartest kid in the class. From ninth through twelfth grade at St. Alban's School in Washington, Maraniss writes, Gore "earned an equal number of C's and B's in English, but no A's. In history during those four years, he also moved between C's and B's until his senior year, when he broke through with an A-plus in Sacred Studies, a religious history course. He pulled steady C's for all three years of high school French. The one course in which he received straight A's was art, which he took all four years of high school." What makes Gore's lackluster grades all the more interesting is that he was, by all accounts, a hard worker. He had to apply himself to be mediocre. And he didn't do much better at Harvard, making a C and a C-minus in his first two English courses. In his sophomore year, Maraniss writes, "Gore's grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale." That year, Gore received one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses, and one B-minus. Maraniss reports Gore improved in his junior year and earned a B, a B-minus, and an A-minus in three government courses. After college and the Army, Gore went to Vanderbilt for graduate work in religious studies. Maraniss says Gore "failed to complete any of the three courses he took in the fall of 1971, and those incompletes eventually lapsed into F's. He returned for another semester in the spring of 1972, when two more incompletes turned into F's." At that point, Gore enrolled in Vanderbilt's law school, where his course grades ranged from a high of 81 (in Legal Writing) to a low of 69 (in Civil Procedures). He dropped out in 1976. Which leads one to ask: Just where does the image of Al Gore as the smartest guy in the class come from? Contrary to the opinion of so many analysts, Gore's demeanor in debate stems not from any ingrained habits of academic diligence but is, rather, the product of his intense political aggressiveness. The problem is not that Gore is so smart that he just can't help himself. It's that his impulse to kill is so strong -- and obvious -- that it strikes many people as repellent. He's not the smartest kid in the class; he's the class bully. Of course, none of this is meant to suggest that Gore is not intelligent enough to be president. But it is to say that the question might just as easily be asked of him as it is of Bush. If political writers insist on bringing academics into the equation, they should remember this: One candidate was an average student at an Ivy League school who later flunked out of graduate school and dropped out of law school. The other candidate was an average student at an Ivy League school who later earned a graduate degree from another Ivy League school (and became a jet pilot, to boot). Can one be absolutely certain that Al Gore comes out on the top of that comparison? So call the vice president whatever you want -- just not the smartest kid in class." spectator.org