MSNBC host Joe Scarborough panned President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Thursday morning, calling it “all showbiz” and that the speech shows “he can do no more.”
Scarborough made the remarks during the opening of Thursday’s “Morning Joe.”
“It was, in the words of John Lennon, it was all showbiz,” Scarborough said. “I’m not being negative but he can’t do anything. That’s the thing, the day after, hey, hey, boy, this is a great Barack Obama. Literally he can do no more.”
“You know what he did? He played to his ego, he played to his base, he played to everybody in the White House that has told him — a lot of them are friends — those Republicans are just bad,” Scarborough continued telling co-host Mika Brzezinski.
The former Florida congressman also railed against the idea that Obama’s speech showed he is now liberated since he doesn’t have to answer to the voters in another election.
“If you can’t do anything, that’s not liberating!” Scarborough said.
“That is the defeatist thinking that has surrounded this White House,” he continued. “Oh, we can’t do anything because Republicans are bad.”
“If the president said, ‘Here’s the deal. I want to get people that work hard $10 an hour minimum wage. You want a pipeline,'” he said. “Republicans might go, ‘We won’t give you $10, but we might give you $9.’ There’s always this defeatist thinking.”
“You really see the difference between a politician who spends his entire life surrounded by his own type, whether it’s Democrats around Democrats, Republicans — versus a Ronald Reagan who had to deal with Democrats in California or a Bill Clinton who had to deal with Republicans and conservatives in Arkansas,” he added.