President Barack Obama's speech on the Gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.
Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin-Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.
Sooo....a professional language (read: advertising/marketing/trendmongering) consultant finds an opportunity to toot his own horn by nitpicking a preznitential speech. Count me in as shocked, but kudos to CNN for providing the free advertising, even if the implicit message is "Americans are morons who can't relate to oratory beyond that of a fifteen-year-old". Awesome.
Incidentally, the original piece has some more illuminating tidbits:
Flesch-Kincaid Grade-Level – 9.8 Grade Level. This is the highest of any major Obama speech. Obama’s closest match among recent presidents is Ronald Reagan, whose speeches generally ranged from the 9th to 10th grade levels. (President George W. Bush usually spoke at a seventh grade level.)
Wow, that high, eh? Guess the flash-card practice and repeated readings of The Pet Goat really paid off.
You know, Obama deserves a certain level of abuse for his diffident response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, most notably the sheer amount of time he gave BP to dick around with a bunch of Rube Goldberg "solutions" to a problem that was caused by corporate negligence. And his tepid throat-clearing about finding an ass to kick, six or seven weeks down the line, fooled no one.
But the idea that Obama's not dumbing it down enough for us, that we need to be talked to like we're slow third-graders (i.e., Glenn Beck viewers) just confirms the notion that we usually get the government -- and the media -- we truly deserve.
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