Univ. of Minnesota Study: Obama’s SOTU Address Least Intelligent Since FDR…
Wicked smaht supa genius!
Via University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics:
Although praised by many for the tone he struck in delivering his 2011 State of the Union address, many conservatives criticized Barack Obama’s speech for being high on rhetoric and short on substance.
As it turns out, Obama’s speech was historically short — both in sentence structure and the words he used.
Last year, Smart Politics calculated that Obama’s debut State of the Union Address tallied one of the lowest Flesch-Kincaid scores in modern political history, by constructing his speech with sentences that were approximately 20 percent shorter in length than the nearly 70 oral addresses given since Franklin Roosevelt.
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.
But Tuesday evening’s address beat even that.
A Smart Politics analysis of 69 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of Obama’s speech to have notched the second lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test recorded by a U.S. President.
Obama’s speech had a Flesch-Kincaid grade level score of just 8.1 — which is a half a grade lower than the 8.8 he tallied in 2010.
Smart Politics ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on each of the last 69 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 (by 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, the vast majority of State of the Union speeches were delivered in writing.
President Obama now has the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid score for State of the Union addresses of any modern president — with his 8.5 grade level falling just below the 8.6 score recorded by George H.W. Bush during his presidency.
By contrast — the speeches delivered by two of the most popular presidents in Republican circles in recent generations — Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — recorded average scores of 10.3 and 10.4 respectively — nearly two full grade levels higher than Obama.
Kennedy (12.0) and Eisenhower (11.9) delivered speeches that had a reading difficulty of three and a half grade levels higher than Obama.
Posted by ZIP on Thursday, January 27, 2011, at 1:00 pm | 
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I’m sure he thought we were too stupid to handle big words and long sentences. The first short-attention-span speech in history??
I didn’t even realize people wasted their time with this type of nonsense.
Either way since the U of M is left of most communists this is pretty surprising news.
Hahahahahahahaah!
He had to keep it simple so his dopey supporters could understand it.
Probably wrote it himself,thats the reason it did’nt make sense…..
Below BOTH Bushes? Black Brainiac’s gonna get all wee wee’d up!
Univ. of Minnesota Study: Obama’s SOTU Address Least Intelligent Since FDR
I’m guessing he wrote this one himself.
After all he took great lines from how many dead presidents to try and make him more ummmm errrrr presidential?
Even Poly Sci retards aren’t impressed.
Go Win That Future, Lil’Barry.
I hope I live long enough to see this schmuck fade into history and never even hear his name mentioned again.
B-b-but Zero’s grades were so good, right? I mean he’s a genius, right?
Oh…, wait!
“Why has Obama, for over 2 years, employed numerous private and government attorneys to avoid presenting a legitimate birth certificate and college records?”…Citizen Wells and millions of concerned Americans
I’m sure these numbers will be portrayed as hateful rhetoric.
maybe all those “silenced” reports that Obama was a “metiocre” student, at best, had some truth and substance to them, after all.
Now, I am waiting for the report from the Univ. of Minnesota, stating publicly that they are remorseful and embarrassed to announce that they may have misspoke, when they released a report saying that Obama’s speech was sub-par. It appears that the people who studied the speech were actually sub-par. Obama’s speech was Reaganesque and MLK-ish. Ignore this report. Nothing to see here. Move along!
What happened? Did Obama peg lower on the liars scale than usual? I haven’t wasted my time watching any of his b.s. speeches since before the 2008 election where he proposed nothing and said a lot about nothing, well at least nothing I believed was good for our country. There’s no reason to think that he has
‘changed’ in any way although some might ‘hope’ so.
If you don’t think that Comrade Obama is a most excellent speaker…just ask him!
Interesting how we can’t see his school records – it was obviously so so so important to see Pres. Bush’s records. obarmy is a G-damn embarrassment.
If the average member of the Union reads at an 8-9th grade level, why would you not write your speech to the Union at that level??
I want to see a President embrace technology and put on a Steve Jobs-esque State of the Union Presentation some year.
“many conservatives criticized Barack Obama’s speech for being high on rhetoric and short on substance.”
That can be said of every single Obama speech I’ve heard. He did it as a candidate, too, but the masses were too hypnotized by his “soaring” (tee, hee) rhetoric to notice he was just talking bullshit. Now everyone has heard his BS so much it’s hard for him to recapture the magic.
As someone who was never under the influence of Obama, all I can say is Morpheus’ line from the Matrix to the just freed Neo, “welcome to the real world.”
I suspect the latter POTUS’s have to dumb the speach down so the teacher union educated progressive audiences of today can understand it…… they still won’t understand or comprehend the context but at least they will know what some of the words mean and can be dazzled by Dear Reader smile
I found the speech to be similar in substance and presentation to the famed Luther Heggs
(Don Knotts) speech at the Rachel Kansas Kiwanas Picnic in the Ghost and Mr, Chicken.
obaMAO, Barney Frank, Big Sis, and the gay brigades all laughing their asses off at the joke of the little people being grouped at the airport.
“I KILL YOU!!!” obaMAO heard commenting about his cleaverness.
He was pitching to his core supporters who can’t handle anything beyond slogans and simple sentences.
Didn’t I read somewhere that his SOTU was a compilation of pieces borrowed from his other speeches? Remix-Redux?
Let’s face it, once you start removing sentences like “yes we can” and blaming Bush no longer works, his speeches fizzle.
Where’s the effing college records of this socalled genius?
waiting…………….