President Obama conjugates his verbs

By GottaLaff

Via Greg Sargent:

Mike Allen flags a fascinating moment from David Remnick’s new Obama book, in which Obama explains why he had an easier time than the previous generation’s African American pols in calibrating his “dialect” for different audiences:

“The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster’s voice — there’s no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences. And there’s no doubt that when I’m with a black audience I slip into a slightly different dialect. But the point is, I don’t feel the need to speak a certain way in front of a black audience. There’s a level of self-consciousness about these issues the previous generation had to negotiate that I don’t feel I have to.”

Um, about that phony George Bush twangy cowboy act-- that was just fine with the GOP. They bought into the brush clearing, the strutting around in flight suits, "mission accomplished"... but conjugate verbs?

Verbs??

That's positively criminal.

Obama Press Conference Answers Three Grade-Levels Higher Than Bush's First

Nice to see the evidence, but I think most of us already knew this. You can see the charts here.

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.

Obama Expected to Drop Business Tax Credit

By GottaLaff

He listens. He responds:

On the stimulus, as a show of good faith as negotiations unfold, Obama is expected to drop his least popular proposal, a $3,000 tax credit for companies to create new jobs. Many Democrats have criticized the incentive, touted by Obama on the campaign trail, as ripe for abuse and of dubious merit.

"We've always said we're open to other ideas. This was never set in stone," said a senior Obama adviser of the tax proposal and Obama's stimulus proposals in general.

When Little Georgie Bush used to say he "listened", he really meant he would sit impatiently with his blankie and rock back and forth sucking his thumb, drooling, and dozing off during important meetings.

When P.E. Obama listens, he mulls, he evaluates, he analyzes, he uses his powers of forethought, and then he responds. All without a blankie.

UPDATE: Krugman's ideas. He's a good person for Obama to be listening to.

Last week President-elect Barack Obama was asked to respond to critics who say that his stimulus plan won’t do enough to help the economy. Mr. Obama answered that he wants to hear ideas about “how to spend money efficiently and effectively to jump-start the economy.”

O.K., I’ll bite — although as I’ll explain shortly, the “jump-start” metaphor is part of the problem.

First, Mr. Obama should scrap his proposal for $150 billion in business tax cuts, which would do little to help the economy. Ideally he’d scrap the proposed $150 billion payroll tax cut as well, though I’m aware that it was a campaign promise.

Follow the link for more.