Smart Politics is reporting that Barack Hussein Obama, our most brilliant and intelligent President ever, rates an 8th grade score for his State of the Union address Wednesday night.
George W. Bush would receive a 10th grade score based on the same grading scale.
Barack Obama's ability as a public speaker since his 2008 presidential campaign has been alternately viewed, often depending on whether or not one is an Obama supporter, along various dyads: being inspirational versus being aloof, intellectualizing versus lecturing etc.
Along those lines, in her first month as a commentator for FOX News, Sarah Palin criticized Obama's first State of the Union Address on Wednesday night as "lecturing" the American public.
Unlike the criticisms hurled at his predecessor, however, few have ever charged that the current President, a former senior lecturer in Constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, has written or spoken too simplistically or catered his words to the lowest common denominator.However, a Smart Politics analysis of nearly 70 oral State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of Obama's speech on Wednesday evening to have one of the lowest scores on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test ever recorded by a U.S. President.
The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores.
Smart Politics ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on each of the last 68 State of the Union Addresses that were delivered orally by presidents before a Joint Session of Congress since Franklin Roosevelt. Excluded from analysis were five written addresses (Truman in 1946 and 1953, Eisenhower in 1961, Nixon in 1973, and Carter in 1981) and two addresses that were delivered orally, but not by the President himself (Roosevelt in 1945, Eisenhower in 1956). Prior to FDR, most, but not all, such Addresses were delivered in writing.
Obama's Flesch-Kincaid grade level score of 8.8 for his first State of the Union Address was the fourth lowest score since FDR's first Address in 1934.
Read the rest of the article here.
8 comments:
you know, when Obama was running, and both sides of the isle were saying, "he's a gifted speaker"... he's good at presenting his message.."
i didn't see it.
i thought for awhile there, it was my bias, so i tried to open my mind, void of bias judgment, regarding his abilities in delivering his message.....and still, among his hyper/bossy word pronunciations, to the lack of emotion (when it came to anything other than him winning) to the uhs, stammering duhhhs- i never did get it.
glad, it wasn't just me.
I find him very condescending; he often sounds like he is intentionally talking down to people. I think he truly feels he is better than the rest of us.
I find more attacks here than objective analysis of the issues that are facing our country. Obama has been in office one year, and the right is hysterical with disrespect and sweeping generalizations. Limbaugh and the like never gave him a chance. We have a young president. Limbaugh's accusations are about Limbaugh, not Obama. No one has torn us apart like Limbaugh.
UP. This cat would get respect when he learns to give a little. until then.....
while this may sound like an insulting score, the best marketing is on a seventh to eighth grade level. Considering obama is the product of clever marketin, I am no surprised.
I would rate him a kindy garden baby play school score, what with all his whining and pouting.
He is an embarrassment and a jerk.
I'm with Bunni :)
Well, he didn't write it himself of course. Maybe he had that 27 yr old punk author it - who wrote pretty much all of his campaign speeches.
"This will be a time when the oceans begin to recede and Unicorns take to the air." "We are the ones we have all been waiting for." aahahaha
Now that zero has been screwing up at every turn, his speech write, in an adolescent fit of frenzy found it necessary to spend much of the time, finding fault in every corner of America except for zero himself.
I'm with Bunni. Kindy Garden !
All -
What Bungalow Bill stated is exactly correct, as the rest of the article points out.
However, the purpose of the post was to show another point the article made, which is the fact that the "professor" as compared to the "cowboy" actually graded lower.
What's the difference? Honestly, who cares. As we've all learned over the past week, much of what was said during the address was partisan, the "spending freeze" doesn't amount to a freeze at all, and it was one of the longest SOTU addresses in history. Boring...
However, I can't help but laugh...
"No one has torn us apart like Limbaugh."
He's a talk show guy, for God's sake...
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