President Obama’s Speech Gets A Thumbs Down From Political Press Corps
By Hunter Walker 5:19pm
politicker.com
Prior to President Barack Obama’s marathon 54 minute speech in Ohio today, the Obama campaign sent our several statements promising the speech would be a major address framing the campaign going forward. Despite the hype, the speech was mainly a rehash of themes and ideas from the president’s recent stump speeches and his remarks were widely panned as overly long by the political press corps.
In the speech, President Obama outlined his view that this election is a choice between “two fundamentally different views of which direction America should take.” He characterized Mitt Romney’s vision as being the same as the “policies of the last decade,” specifically deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy while he described his own “vision for America” as boiling down to five things: “Education. Energy. Innovation. Infrastructure. And a tax code focused on American job creation and balanced deficit reduction.” President Obama also stressed that the economic crisis began during the Bush administration and that is “started growing again” after he took office and has since “continued to grow.”
All of these points have already been featured in the president’s other recent speeches. Between the pre-speech hype from the campaign, the lack of new material and the overall length of the speech reporters were clearly dissatisfied with end result. Read on for a sampling of Tweets from the political press slamming the president’s speech.
Tweets about speech from assorted reporters:
Before the speech was over, Politico’s Mike O’Brien begged the president to stop.
In terms of politics, this speech could have ended about 20 minutes ago. Drive your message, take your ball, go home.
On the air, MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter said it was “one of the worst speeches I’ve ever heard Barack Obama make.” He refused to back down.
Just cheerleading BO doesn't help him. He needs a sharper, more cogent message with some memorable lines. I ain't walking my criticism back
ABC News reporter Devin Dwyer felt like we were all being lectured.
Obama speech in Ohio felt more lecture or courtroom arg than rally. He streamlined pitch, imbued urgency, said voters will break stalemate.
John Hayward of Human Events compared the speech to a filibuster.
This Obama speech is so long-winded it might be the first attempt to filibuster an election.
Yahoo! News White House correspondent Olivier Knox took note of the massive word count of the speech (for the record, the official White House transcript clocked in at just under 6,500 words).
I ask colleague for CQ transcript of Obama speech. Response: "Sure, but it looks like they only have the first 45,000 words."
In America we don't quit til we've spoken for 54 minutes
Buzzfeed’s Zeke Miller was clearly unimpressed.
There is nothing new in this speech. Follow Hunter Walker via RSS. |
