At the very end of MSNBC’s “NewsNation” hosted by Tamron Hall, immediately after President Barack Obama had wrapped up his much-ballyhooed economic speech from Cleveland on Thursday, MSNBC’s liberal-leaning pundits appeared to be less-than impressed.
According to Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Alter, formerly of Newsweek, the speech was too long-winded to be effective.
“I thought this honestly was one of the least successful speeches I’ve seen Barack Obama give in several years,” Alter said. “It was long-winded. He had a good argument to make. And at the beginning of the speech he seemed to be making it in a fairly compelling way but then he lost the thread and the speech was way too long and I think he lost his audience by the end.”
And CNBC regular Zachary Karabell of River Twice Research said although Obama seemed to be successful in batting down his opponents’ economic idea, he left much to be desired in defending his track record.
“Look I think he was very — the president was very effective in describing a position that his opponents’ hold he and many Democrats believe will manifestly not work,” Karabell said. “That was a very effective part of the speech. When he went way from offense to defense, which is from what we’ve done to what we’re going to do, it became unbelievably diffuse and in some sense as a political phenomenon it was very ineffective in that respect because it characterizes the opponents as this is not going to work but didn’t give you the sense of what will.”