Bush vs. Kerry

Bad things happen when I have too much free time. When I finally was able to pry myself away from playing Snood, I got this weird idea. Compare the grade level Bush and Kerry's interviews and see if Bush speaks on a lower level. Tim Russert of meet the Press interviewed both guys for quite a while so I chose those two interviews. The Bush transcript, and the Kerry transcript. I tested them using Microsoft Word. It has an analyzer that checks readability and the grade level.

I took out what Russert said and took out the "President Bush:" and the "Sen Kerry:" at the beginning of each paragraph --gotta love the replace feature in Word. Here's what I found.


Readability level (the higher the easier it is to understand)
Bush: 66.1
Kerry: 64.8

Academic grade level
Bush: 7.9
Kerry:7.7

Conclusion: According to the test, Bush was easier to understand and spoke on a higher grade level than Kerry. The difference is ever so slight, but it's certainly measurable. Also, Russert didn't engage Bush on a higher level (grammatically at least) because the scores actually went down when Russert and Bush/Kerry were analyzed together.

What does this mean? Probably nothing, other than I've got too much free time. I guess it could give a black eye to people who feel Bush is this big idiot that can't speak English.

I wonder if Russert interviewed Clinton and how those numbers would pan out....