Sunday, March 19
Today Al Gore's SAT scores and IQ were reported in the Washington Post. Gore is bright, though nothing unusual for Harvard, and I would guess not even in the top half of the Senate. But I wished this little invasion of privacy had been done to Clinton — whom I would bet had scores up at the really narrow edge of the curve. (Sorry, it's this post Bell Curve world we live in, where one now has license to treat all this as a substantive subject, instead of mere amusing gossip.)
Pat's first week out got a lot of attention, save for the fact there hasn't been a report on his SAT's yet. A grinding series of TV programs, a dynamite appearance at Harvard: the students came loaded for bear.
As the campaign expands, the staff get stretched, and testy—for the first time in months, you can hear people losing their tempers (I did this week, which seldom happens.)
At some point we'll do some serious polling, but I learned something from Bay that really tickled me. She said that when Pat began moving up in the polls last time, the GOP establishment began deriding him as "isolationist" and "protectionist" — Then, all of a sudden, they stopped using "protectionist." You see, they polled and found the word didn't have a negative connotation — you could see the change like the turning off of a switch, Bay said.
Somehow I doubt that "xenophobe" – a word I once tried in a New York Post column to appropriate and render positive, will ever poll well, though the sentiments behind it do.
Pat's schedule still brutal, and it's only March. This week he has an evening address at an antiwar conference in San Francisco, then one at Reform Convention in Virginia the very next day. You know how you do that? The dreadful red-eye, which makes even younger people feel drained and washed out.
