On 1/13/2016 2:43 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Don Y:
When you *can't* find a claim to that affect, you can reread:
The [candidates of the] right thinks their base are idiots and dumb
down their rhetoric to simplistic ideas that they *hope* their base
can swallow, without thinking.

In the documentary movie "Nixon's The One" - where actors re-create oval
office scenes using the exact, precise dialog from the Nixon tapes -
there was an encounter between Nixon and an financially-successful
religious entertainer named Oral Roberts.

Both agreed that, when they were talking to the public, they were
addressing the 12-year old ("Reading comprehension of the
seventh-grade") mind. This is at about 12:40 of Episode 4.

A general guideline when *writing* is to target 6th grade comprehension.
OTOH, is 6th grade *today* what it was years ago?? :

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2015/10/21/speech-analysis-shows-donald-trump-speaks-voters-fourth-grade-level/dDo1Lr66kzKcRtTG7HFCmO/story.html

“Make America Great Again.” Those four simple words represent the
easy-to-grasp message of Donald Trump’s campaign.

That simplicity isn’t out of the ordinary for Trump. According to
an analysis by The Boston Globe , Trump’s presidential announcement
speech was written on a fourth-grade level, the simplest to understand
of any opening presidential speech this year.

The Globe tested each announcement speech using the Flesch-Kincaid
readability test, which looks at word choice and sentence length. It
then spits out a grade-level analysis of each speech.

Like Trump, Ben Carson’s speech came in just below a sixth-grade level,
the third-easiest to understand. The emphatic sound bites from Trump and
Carson — for example, “We are going to build a wall” and “I would not
just stand there and let him shoot me,” respectively — have them atop
most polls in the Republican primary.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton spoke at near an
eighth-grade level, while Bernie Sanders spoke at just above
10th grade.

http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-hello-you-people-know-lot-about-trucks-363077

Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump talks like a 4th grader,
according to a linguistic analysis performed by Politico's Jack Shafer.
Shafer ran the text of Trumps' responses in the recent Republican debate
through the Flesch-Kincaid test, designed to determine how difficult a
given passage is to understand for English readers:

Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses
score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty
advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning
9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at
the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a
5th-grade score.

According to Shafer, Trump's remarks at an August 11 news conference in
Birch Run, Michigan, put him at an even-lower 3rd grade level (in the
United States, 3rd graders are typically eight or nine years old). Trump
is 69 years old.

As I said, elsewhere, the republican candidates seem to think their
base are idiots. Or, maybe the candidates THEMSELVES are idiots??

Scroll to 12:30 and you'll ease right into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlHZGoVx0vg