Rep. Charles Rangel has adopted Senator Kerry’s “botched joke” about unsuccessful young people ending up in the military — only Mr. Rangel is not joking.

“If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq,” Mr. Rangel, a Democrat representing Manhattan and Queens, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“If there’s anyone who believes these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No bright young individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment,” the congressman said.

Mr. Rangel was responding to a question about a study by a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which found that those enlisting in the military tend to be better educated than the general public and that military recruiting seems to be more successful in middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods than in poor ones.

“He’s really, indirectly, insulting the troops,” the study’s author, Timothy Kane, told The New York Sun. “He doesn’t want to admit the fact that thousands and tens of thousands of young men and women are willing to make these sacrifices. More and more troops are saying duty and honor are motivating them, not college money.”

Mr. Kane, a former Air Force intelligence officer, said his study found that 97% of military enlistees were high school graduates, as compared with about 80% of Americans in general, and that the average reading level of military personnel is a full grade level higher than that of the general populace.

Mr. Kane acknowledged that in 2005 the Army, which was falling short of recruitment goals, began accepting more high school dropouts and more recruits with lower scores on intelligence tests. “It’s not a huge surge,” he said, noting that the increase amounted to a few percent at most.

Mr. Rangel is a long-standing advocate of reinstating the draft, but Mr. Kane said conscription would wreak havoc by drawing more undereducated and unintelligent people into the force. “A draft would almost certainly be a disaster,” the analyst said.

Mr. Rangel has said that his draft proposal has little chance of becoming law. However, he rejected the Heritage findings and insisted yesterday that a formal Congressional examination of the military’s demographics will prove him right.

“Once we are able to get hearings on this, everyone will see what they already know, and that is that those who have the least opportunities at this age find themselves in the military, as I did when I was 18 years old,” the congressman said.