Today's Top News Stories • Report: In U.S., record numbers are plunged into poverty - • VP's plane has minor electrical problem - • Israeli troops raid West Bank city - • Severe storms injure 27 in Arkansas - • Va. lawmakers pass slavery apology - • Add USATODAY.com RSS feeds

Who is smarter, Kerry or Bush? WASHINGTON (USATODAY.com)  While the general impression during the 2004 presidential campaign was that Democrat John Kerry was the intellectual superior to President Bush, it turns out that their grades while undergraduate students at Yale were remarkably similar. In fact, Bush's were a tad higher. His four-year average was 77; Kerry's 76. Both were C students. Kerry graduated from Yale in 1966; Bush in 1968. But last year, when Bush and Kerry were campaigning against each other, we only knew Bush's grades, revealed in 1999 during his first presidential campaign by the New Yorker magazine. Kerry's were widely assumed to be much higher, a notion his campaign did little to quell and much to promote. When Bush's grades were first made public in 1999, he was then the Texas governor and Republican front-runner for the 2000 presidential nomination. Vice President Al Gore was his likely Democratic opponent. Bush's mediocre college record was trumpeted by Gore backers as proof that the Republican candidate was a dummy. But in the spring of 2000, The Washington Post published Gore's college grades at Harvard. Like Kerry, he was hardly an honor student, either. Nonetheless, Gore backers kept up the "dumb Bush" mantra. Gore himself tried to lend the impression during his first debate with Bush that he was the smart one, often sighing and shaking his head in disdain when Bush answered questions. Post-debate polling suggested that the strategy might have backfired. Many of those surveyed said Gore came off as too arrogant. Some analysts consider that the turning point in the election. Going into the debates, Gore was ahead in the polls. After the debates, Bush, who polls showed came off as more human and more likable, opened a slight lead. But Kerry strategists and backers never seemed to pay much heed to that lesson of the past. They plunged headlong into painting Bush as the dummy and Kerry as the genius. Kerry himself apparently believed it. In April 2004, he was quoted in Newsweek as saying, "I can't believe I am losing to this idiot." The widely published remark was made in an aside to aides while watching a Bush news conference. That theme carried over after Kerry lost. Many of his backers publicly attributed Bush's victory to a dumb electorate. During the campaign, his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, underscored that feeling while promoting Kerry's health care plan. "Only an idiot wouldn't like this," she told the Intelligencer Journal in Lancaster, Pa. Kerry's grades were made public this past week by the Boston Globe, which found them in his U.S. Navy officer training school application. During the campaign, Kerry refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file, but gave the Navy permission to release the documents last month, the Globe reported. The transcript showed that he got four Ds in his freshman year, Bush received one D in his four years, in astronomy. At the time, Yale considered grades between 70 and 79 a C and 60 to 69 a D. "I always told my Dad that D stood for distinction," Kerry said in a written response to reporters' questions, the Globe reported. Bush, in an interview last Wednesday with Neil Cavuto on Fox News Channel, was asked what he thought about the release of the Kerry transcripts. He chuckled and replied, "I didn't think much about it. You know, I've always tried to lower expectations, and I feel like if people say, well, you know, maybe, you know, I don't think you (can) handle the tough job, and when you do, it impresses people even more. But my view is the campaign is over." Cavuto, however, pressed on: " Yes. He was billed as the intellectual, though, and you had better grades in college." But Bush did not jump at the opportunity to revel in it: "Yes. Well, as I said, I like to lower expectations."