Often times I hear my students complain about the current President, saying things like 'He's so dumb!' or 'How could we elect a C student as a President?' (Bush's average was a 77 during his stay at Yale). But a quick look at US History (my major at college) will tell you that, given a choice between an obvious intellectual and a simpler, less educated person, America almost always avoids the smarter person. Let's take a look at the last 60 years of Presidential elections:

1948: This contest was between Thomas Dewey, a graduate of University of Michigan and Columbia Law School and Harry Truman, who was a haberdasher who didn't attend college. Winner: Truman.

1952 and 56 : two contests in which Dwight Eisenhower, West Point General, ran against Princeton graduate Adlai Stevenson. Ike won both.

strong>1960: Richard Nixon, graduate of Whittier College and Duke Law, runs against John F.Kennedy, Harvard grad. Kennedy wins by a tiny margin (about 100,000 votes) amid charges of voter fraud in Chicago.

1964: Lyndon Johnson, graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers' College (now Texas State University-San Marcos), defeats Barry Goldwater, who graduated from Stanton Military Academy and attended the University of Arizona. Huge mitigating factor: the nation is still reeling from JFK's tragic death.

1968: the aforementioned Nixon defeats Hubert H. Humphrey, University of Minnesota grad who also earned a master's degree from Louisiana State University.

1972: Nixon defeats George S. McGovern, who graduated from Dakota Wesleyan University and earned a Ph.D in history from Northwestern University, by a colossal margin, 60%-38%.

1976: Jimmy Carter,who went to Georgia Tech and Georgia Southwestern State University before attending the United States Naval Academy (where,in 1946, he received a Bachelor of Science degree) defeats Gerald R. Ford, University of Michigan and Yale Law School grad. Ford earned his LL.B. degree, graduating in the top 25 percent of his class. Carter was often described as a peanut farmer, which in fact he was.

1980: Ronald Reagan, graduate of tiny Eureka college, defeats Carter.

1984: Reagan crushes Walter Mondale, a grad of University of Minnesota (both the college and the Law School) by a vote of nearly 60 to 40 percent.

1988: George H.W. Bush, who graduated as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity from Yale in 1948, defeats Michael Dukakis,who graduated from Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School. Pretty much a draw, since both were Ivy League affiliates.

1992: William J. Clinton, Georgetown University grad, Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School alumnus, defeats Bush, 43-37.4. Huge mitigating factor: third party candidate H.Ross Perot saps nearly 19% of the vote, mostly from Bush.

1996: Clinton beats Bob Dole,who attended the University of Arizona from 1948 to 1951 and earned his degree from Washburn University, by 49-40 percent. Slight mitigating factor: third party candidate Perot performs less successfully, but still pulls 8.4 percent.

2000: George W. Bush, Yale U. and Harvard Business School grad, narrowly defeats Al Gore, who went to Harvard University and graduated with a B.A. in government (cum laude), then studied law at Vanderbilt, but earned no degrees. This, as you all remember, was one of the most bitterly fought and narrowest elections in history, as Gore won the popular vote by half a million and Bush won the crucial electoral college.

2004: Bush defeats fellow Yale classmate and Boston college Law grad John F. Kerry by three million votes. Kerry famously said 'I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot', but Bush actually was the better student at Yale, winning average grade over four years by one point, 77-76.

Only Kennedy's narrow win in 1960 and Clinton's 1996 victory show a Presidential candidate with a clear educational advantage come out on top. The arguably less educated man won ten of the last fifteen contests ('48,52,56,64,68,72,76,80,84,00), with 1988 and 2004 deemed a draw, and 1992 affected by the potent effect of Perot.

So now we have John McCain, graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis against, in all probability, Barack Obama, who graduated with a B.A. from Columbia and a magna cum laude degree from Harvard Law.

If I were Obama, I'd start brushing up on my bowling.