Re: McCain graduated 894th out of 899
It takes much more than academic skill to graduate from the Naval Academy. 1200 students are admitted every year, but only about 900 graduate. They have to endure 6 weeks of hyper-intense physical and mental training before the Freshman year even begins. You have to keep your cool and complete the task at hand even if you feel like your bladder is going to explode. They make you get up at 5am to work out even when you’re dead tired because it’s Saturday and you’ve been enduring 18 hours of this torment every day since Monday. It doesn’t get much easier after Plebe Summer ends, either. The entire Freshman year is brutal, and the upperclassmen don’t care whose kid you are, either. In fact, they’ll be harder on you if you think you’re something special. At Harvard, they try to keep you there. At the Naval Academy, the staff doesn’t care if you quit, and the upperclassman want you to quit. What they don’t want is graduates- officers- who aren’t 100% committed to being leaders.
BTW, Obama would never have been able to graduate from the Naval Academy, last in his class or otherwise, because they would have expelled him as soon as a single drug test came back positive. If you test positive for any illegal drugs, they expel you, no questions asked, no matter how well you do in class, how good of a leader you are, or how great you do on the Physical Readiness Test. You could be the President’s kid, and they’d still expel you.
