printAs measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s State of the Union message was written at an eighth-grade level.”
I’ve long maintained—and explained in “‘You Can’t Fix Stupid'”—that Barry Soetoro is simple. Read more about the “Smart Politics” study that would seem to back that up.
I was going to say that the study deconstructs the president’s use of language. However, that structure was so basic that there was little to dismantle.
Don’t be fooled by Obama. He’s smarter than he looks. His eighth grade approach to the world is to communicate with the voters on the left. And, that includes the PHDs from Harvard and Stanford.
Well, in the Age of the Idiot people get the government they deserve. :-/
Tailored to the audience, delivered for posterity, remembered as an elegy to average – smart having passed away too long ago to recall.
Three points on simple vs. profound:
(1) There is the famous anecdote where some woman told Adlai Stevenson that he had the vote of “every thinking person” and he replied “that’s not enough, madam, we need a majority”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adlai_Stevenson
(2) The fundamental contract between the people and the Government, the Constitution (of blessed memory), was written in very simple terms. For example, the 10th Amendment is a mere 28 words limiting the Government to those powers granted by the Constitution. Sadly, we have idiot savants called “Supreme Court Judges” who write “profound” flowery prose how some grandma with a pot plant in her basement “interferes with interstate commerce”.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1454.ZO.html
(3) In physics, many of the basic rules like Maxwell’s Equations, the Schroedinger Equation, and the Einstein’s Law of Gravitation (or Netwon’s) are quite simple to write down. Sadly, it just happens that solving them is one hairy mess!!!
My objections to Obama’s Teleprompter Blather is that everything is WE WE WE (with him as the leader) – such as “We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before” – e.g. America is a collective fluid, not a nation of individuals. That is the poisonous philosophy of the right-wing and left-wing statists who propose to “lead the country”. The collectivist idea, however, simple or eloquent, is also morally obscene.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/24/state-of-the-union-address-full-text/