(DAILYCALLER) — “I believe in a smarter kind of American leadership,” President Barack Obama said at one point during last night’s 2015 State of the Union address. However, according to the most-widely used measure of readability, last night’s speech was only written at a ninth-grade reading level. (RELATED: AP Fact Check Tears Apart Obama’s State Of The Union Claims)
The Flesch-Kincaid readability scale tests how easy it is to read a passage by weighing the total words-per-sentence and syllable-per-words. A Daily Caller analysis found the State of the Union scored a 9.4 on the grade level scale, indicating that it is easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students.
Obama is only the latest in a long trend of dumbed-down addresses. The sophistication of the State of the Union has been on a steady decades-long decline as more and more Americans tune in. John F. Kennedy regularly gave State of the Union addresses at an undergraduate level, while Obama’s first-term average was the lowest of the televised era.
