Have you read his tweets? The misspellings, word salad, ranDom Capitalizations, etc? The guy doesn’t even know the difference between a hyphen and an apostrophe.
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I think it might be skewed by choice of language. The best politicians choose language which best matches that of their electorate.
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I recall running some of my high school essays through a Fleisch Kinkcaid algorithm and scoring 15-18. This would not have made me a better president.
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The difference between the Bush rankings is also puzzling. 
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Hence Obama polling ‘lower’ than Carter or Hoover, who both had the advantage of being President when the general electorate was more literate themselves.
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“SCOTUS has ruled, Mr. President. We have to comply with the subpoenas.”
“Enough Mr. Nice Guy! Call out the ‘Bikers for Trump!’ We’re taking out Congress.”
“Uh . . . sorry Mr. President. They’re now the ‘Bikers for Stringing the Traitor Up by his Balls.’”
“Pack my suitcase.”
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Or if not that, at least expected and accepted more literate and complex speech from their political leaders.
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Biff’s emotional development was arrested at age 10-11, so his intellectual development being arrested at about that age wouldn’t be surprising. I recall that he once cited All Quiet on the Western Front as his favourite book, probably because it was a middle-school assignment that was the last full book he read in his life.
When I started out as a TV news writer back in the late 80s/early 90s, I was told to assume our lowest-common-denominator broadcast audience had an 8th-grade reading comprehension level. It shocked me as a young man, but I strongly suspect that these days they’re writing for the 6th- or 7th-grade level.
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And I suspect you are being overly generous.
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I’m surprised W is higher the HW.
And Ford is up there. Maybe he had better speech writers? I figure with HW and Kennedy that the use of of a more direct messaging style ranks them lower?
Interesting data!
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Short term = small sample size. All he had to do was say “verisimilitude” once and his rating jumped 5 grade levels.
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A Voter of a By-gone Age (say, around 1970), “Ah dunno whut ‘e’s sayin’, but it sounds right gentrified an’ important. He’s gonna git mah vote, an’ no mistake!”
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Are you looking for a job?
Please say yes.
God I’m sick of this argument. It makes no sense if you know what Flesch-Kincaid actually is:
It’s not an intelligence test or even a test of literacy or vocabulary. Basically, if you speak in short sentences with simple words, you will have a high Flesch-Kincaid score, corresponding to a low grade level. In other words, clear concise sentences do not require much education to understand. This is a good thing.
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Yes, but not in politics.
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I think the Reagan line is what explains this for some but not all presidents. It looks, like Obama, Carter, and probably Hoover wrote their own material to a greater degree than others. The rest generally delivered prepared speeches carefully targeted to be easily understood. Reagan and Shrub were no geniuses, but they could deliver a speech. Reagan could deliver a speech spectacularly well because he spent his life learning to do it.
Trump is just an idiot.
We could blame him for pushing cigarettes, too, by that metric. 
Christ, what an asshole.
#teamleemarvin
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I don’t understand that sentence? Do you mean that I was blaming Reagan for something? Who’s the asshole you’re talking about? Reagan, me? Just trying to follow your statement, not trying to be clever.
It was about the speechmaking and actor training, I infer that he generally used the skill for (whitewashed) evil instead of good.
When they were actors, Lee Marvin saw through the b.s., and was definitely not on good terms with him, hence the hashtag.
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Ah. Gotcha. I didn’t know about that. Good to know. Lee Marvin’s always seemed cool to me.
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