Obama Speeches Dumbest Of All Presidents: STUDY

[kalm]

A more reasoned explanation from the Atlantic Monthly for those interested.

2. Complex speeches aren't better speeches. In fact, they're worse.

The most memorable lines in modern rhetoric—"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"; "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; —are remembered precisely because they're simple enough to understand, memorize, and talk about. Practically every modern sage of language—George Orwell, Steven Pinker, William Safire, Strunk & White—advises non-fiction writers to express themselves with simple language. Even if you like purple prose in your long-form narrative non-fiction, you'll agree that it's pleasing to hear complex policy points in clear sentences and parallelisms. (It's hard to rule out that the dense language of the 19th century was pleasing and cogent in its own time.)

3. Even if you think that democratization and simple language aren't always good, there is no chance you want presidential candidates talking like George Washington.

Here is the beginning of President Washington's first inaugural address, which he delivered to a joint session of Congress, where there were no recording devices to beam the words to a broader audience. The Flesch reading-ease formula ranks it as one of the most difficult speeches in American history. We'll go sentence by sentence. (Warning: These are absurdly long, excruciatingly overwrought, unforgivably dense sentences)

Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month.

Okay so: "I received a letter a few weeks ago that made me conflicted."

On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years: a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time.

"You interrupted my exquisite and much-needed retirement by electing me as your president."

On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my Country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens, a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence, one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.

"Folks, it's hard to be the president."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... me/381410/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[travelinman67]

Dumb is better?

Really?

Wow!

Wouldn't want to confuse them dumb voters with, "college level rhetoric".

[AZGrizFan]

A more reasoned explanation from the Atlantic Monthly for those interested.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... me/381410/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The dumbing down of America(ns) is almost complete.

[kalm]

Dumb is better?

Really?

Wow!

Wouldn't want to confuse them dumb voters with, "college level rhetoric".

In an age where nuance is frowned upon, yes.

[houndawg]

-
George Bush had higher grades at Harvard

But Obama wrote his own papers.

[travelinman67]

Dumb is better?

Really?

Wow!

Wouldn't want to confuse them dumb voters with, "college level rhetoric".

In an age where nuance is frowned upon, yes.

[AZGrizFan]

-
George Bush had higher grades at Harvard

But Obama rolled his own papers.

[kalm]

In an age where nuance is frowned upon, yes.

You prove this point with each post.

[travelinman67]

You prove this point with each post.

That's my line.

You flatter me.