In the News

Reprinted with permission from San Francisco Chronicle

Researchers Score Bush, Gore Debate at 7th-Grade Level

Friday, October 20, 2000 - Al Gore and George W. Bush did a lot of talking about education in this week's presidential debate - but according to the folks at yourDictionary.com., most of the talk was at the seventh-grade level.

How's that for dumbing down the voter?

"Everyone has been complaining about how political discourse has been declining ... Well, it is," says Paul Payack, CEO of the Danville YourDictionary dot-com.

To back up that statement, Payack and his researchers ran more than 30 years of presidential debates through a computer program based on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Scale, which was developed years ago to help tell parents what books are grade-level appropriate for their kids.

Their findings: Bush, who went to Yale, wavered between the sixth and the seventh grades in his speech, while the Harvard-educated Gore scored slightly higher, floating between the seventh and eighth grades.

Whatever you think of the two candidates, it's a far cry from the 12th-grade level of the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Not that Gore or Bush are totally to blame. The fact is the level of vocabulary, sentence construction and complexity of thought has been steadily dropping at presidential debates since they started televising them back in the 1960s.

Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan temporarily arrested the trend, by at least bringing the level back to the 12th grade.

"Because while Reagan was always accused of talking in sound bites - apparently, they were well-thought-out and well-crafted sound bites," says YourDictionary's Payack.

These days, the rule seems to be "the shorter, the better."

"It seems that the person who uses the fewest words wins the debate," says Payack.

"For example, Gore's answers in this last debate had 15 percent fewer words in them than his answers the first debate - and people seem to think he won."

Yeah, but we have to add that most people are grading these guys on a very low curve.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle