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Obama’s Press Conference Answers Three Grade-Levels Higher Than Bush’s First
Mark Nickolas, Political Base: So, I just finished comparing the transcript of President Obama’s first presidential press conference this evening with the very first one that former President George W. Bush conducted back on February 22, 2001.
I copied each full transcript into separate Word documents. After doing that, I deleted the introductions by both men (since those are largely or fully scripted) and then deleted all reporter questions from the transcripts. What you have left are simply the answers that each president offered, off-the-cuff and unscripted, to all questions.
Then I ran Word’s readability tool. Guess what? Bush’s answers were spoken at 7th grade level. Obama’s at a 10th grade level.
