ASHINGTON - The buzz is that George W. Bush isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. That his grades at Yale were mediocre. That he can't pass a pop quiz naming the leaders of Chechnya, India, Pakistan, and Taiwan. That he doesn't know Slovenia from Slovakia, and that he can't tell a Greek from a "Grecian."
The grades are great grist for the late-night comics. And the quiz indicated that Bush may be vulnerable in a foreign-policy debate. But opponents who try to exploit the issue of braininess should beware: Americans like their presidents smart, but not so intellectual that they can't reach down from their ivory tower.
On that score, this political season offers them quite a choice: Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley come off as a studious, cerebral pair, the dutiful students who retain to this day a passion for policy detail.
Meanwhile, across the political campus are Bush and John McCain, the two leading Republicans, who admit that in college they often walked right by the library to find the best fraternity party or touch football game, or girls who wanted to have fun.
So what will it be, America? A wonk or a gentleman's C?
That has been a complex question for voters through the years, and with reason: There is no clear correlation, in presidential politics as in corporate life, between good study habits and leadership success.
''Overachievers don't do very well in the White House,'' said Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis who wrote a book about what makes presidents great. ''Remember how annoying Jimmy Carter was, always preaching and acting smarter than everybody else?''
This year's crop of presidential postulants seems to remember. Some of them, in fact, seem to be appealing directly to an anti-intellectual strain that political scientists have long identified in the American electorate. McCain frequently jokes about his fifth-from-the-bottom finish at the US Naval Academy.
Even Gore, in going back to his roots, some days seems to act more like a Tennessee hayseed than a Harvard man. And Bradley says his pro basketball career was more life-shaping than was the Princeton pedigree.
Then there's Bush, who certainly ranks in the Ivy League elite, with his degrees from Yale and the Harvard Business School, but who also has asserted that he was put off at both places by ''intellectual arrogance.'' At Yale, Bush passed every subject, but he has made no secret of the fact that he frequently put football, baseball, and his fraternity ahead of academics.
Last week, the New Yorker magazine published what it said was Bush's Yale transcript. He had highs of ''88'' in philosophy and anthropology, a low of ''69'' in astronomy, and many mid-70s scores in between.
A Bush campaign spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that the New Yorker ''stole'' the report, but then discounted it as ''irrelevant'' to the presidential campaign.
''It's an unimpressive academic record,'' said Alan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University. ''If it shows that Bush is intellectually incapable of doing any better, then I'm not sure he is the kind of person I want in the Oval Office. If it indicates he was simply interested in other things at college, then the grades really don't matter.''
Warren Bennis, a business professor at the University of Southern California, has spent 20 years studying what makes top corporate leaders tick, and he is sure it is not their grade-point average. ''Unless you are a moron, there is zero correlation between grades or IQ and success in life,'' Bennis said.
Ditto on SAT scores. Bush's, according to the New Yorker, were in a respectable but not spectacular range: 566 on the verbal score, and 640 for math, out of a possible 800 in each.
''The SAT is a remarkable judge of how well a student will perform in college, but nothing beyond that,'' said Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, which conducts the SATs. Caperton, a former two-term governor of West Virginia, says he is a good example of how grades don't make the man. He became a successful politician despite his dyslexia, a reading disability.
''The skills that really help you in politics are having a huge amount of energy and knowing how to get along with people,'' Caperton said.
Academic achievement is not totally irrelevant, since it can be a measure of focus, ambition, and discipline. But taking Bradley as an example, Bennis said his success as a politician may have more to do with the qualities that made him a great basketball star - his timing, his intensity, his drive - than with his Rhodes Scholar intelligence.
Gore, who graduated with honors from Harvard, may not derive great political benefit from what voters perceive as his superior intellect. In a recent debate, Gore said his biggest mistake was saying he invented the Internet.
''Candidates who come off as some awe-inspiring Einstein will be at a disadvantage if voters think they are too brilliant to work with the masses,'' Simonton said. Gore may alienate people by seeming so smart on issues like technology and science that confound average Americans, he said.
Academic achievement has produced some unpopular presidencies - Carter's (Naval Academy) and Woodrow Wilson's (Princeton, Johns Hopkins) spring to mind. Some of the nation's favorite presidents, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, despite his degrees from Harvard and Columbia; Ronald Reagan; and Harry S. Truman, seemed to show that scholarship isn't required for leadership.
President Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, yet he played up his good-old-boy background in Arkansas.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded the Allied invasion of Europe in World War II, was no dummy, but his stump rhetoric was deliberately homespun. He sometimes spoke in a deliberately inarticulate way to confuse critics and make himself a more appealing candidate. And for all his intellectual modesty, Eisenhower certainly had no difficulty in twice trouncing Adlai Stevenson, the self-consciously cerebral Democrat.
Once, while campaigning, Stevenson was flattered by a woman who had told him he would get the vote of every thinking person. ''But madam,'' Stevenson replied, ''I need a majority to win.''
History also shows that presidents can get into big trouble when they surround themselves with really smart people - the ''best and the brightest'' are sometimes blinded by their own intellectual firepower.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, who seemed to have an intellectual inferiority complex, leaned on the corps of advisers he had inherited from the Kennedy administration - men like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara - with disastrous results. Reagan put his national security adviser, John Poindexter, first in his class at the Naval Academy, in charge of the Iran-Contra arms sale episode.
McCain was in the same Annapolis class, but at the bottom. He writes in his memoir, ''Faith of My Fathers,'' that two things brought his class rank down: terrible grades in math and science, and very bad behavior. ''John wasn't intellectually sloppy,'' said Frank Gamboa, who roomed with him at the academy, ''but he deliberately did not try to excel.''
McCain's story, however, did not end at Annapolis, but continued to Vietnam and into a Hanoi prisoner of war camp. He came back as a hero, proving himself and rising above his undistinguished academic career.
''Voters are looking, above all, at authenticity because they are fed up with handlers, pollsters, focus groups, and politics as performance art,'' said Richard Norton Smith, director of the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Mich. ''There is something refreshing about candidates who seem real, don't make exaggerated claims, and seem perfectly comfortable in their own skin.''
