Last Sunday, The Washington Post reproduced Mr. Gore's Harvard transcript as well as his grades and scores at the elite St. Albans high school and later at Vanderbilt University's divinity and law schools. In a word, the transcripts reveal that Mr. Gore's post-secondary academic performance was rather dismal, particularly in the field of science.
Now, admittedly, education is a lifelong process, and Mr. Gore may well have learned a thing or two since he dropped out of Vanderbilt twice. It is well-worth noting, however, that throughout middle-age, Mr. Gore has shown unmistakable signs of being a slow learner still. After all, it did take him three decades to understand the health consequences of smoking, a period during which Mr. Gore received thousands of dollars in contributions from tobacco companies and the Gore family farm profitably grew tobacco as a cash crop. Still, all caveats aside, Mr. Gore's grades do offer a tantalizing peek at his formal economic and scientific education.
Despite Mr. Gore's image as star pupil, the kid most likely to be the first to raise his hand in class, it seems that Mr. Gore barely applied himself during his years as an undergraduate and graduate student. Indeed, his sophomore year at Harvard, The Post notes, was "the year Gore's classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana." Please, take a moment to appreciate the scene painted in that one sentence.
In introductory economics, the only economics course Mr. Gore ever took, he received a C-, which goes a long way toward explaining his December remark that he would consider raising taxes should the economy fall into recession.
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