How can a Dem president tell that his SOTU was a for-real floperewski? When even Andrea Mitchell pans it. Yet that's precisely what NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent did on Morning Joe today.
What was particularly unkind about Andrea's cut was that she criticized both the form and the substance of the speech. After observing that Pres. Obama's oratory lacked "energy" and "passion," Mitchell opined that "it doesn't add up. The dollars and cents don't add up." Ouch.
Before Andrea's assessment, the rest of the panel, with the notable exception of Howard Dean who managed to defend the speech, took turns lampooning it, with Joe Scarborough contributing a particularly brutal basketball analogy.
View video after the jump.
Check out Andrea's surprising SOTU critique.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I'll be honest with you: I loved the theme. The words were pretty good, but it was one of the flattest speeches I've seen, and I've sat on the floor watching 10 or 11 of them . . . You watched it at home. What was your impression of it?
WILLIE GEIST: Yeah, it didn't come across on television, I have to say, as terribly inspiring.
SCARBOROUGH: Barack Obama famously said "I'm LeBron, baby" when it comes to these things. But if he was LeBron, then this was Game 7 of the NBA championship and he scored nine points before fouling out three minutes into the third quarter.
ANDREA MITCHELL: As much as I like civility and don't want to be the person sitting here and saying, oh, let's have a racuous State of the Union--you certainly don't want a 'you lie!' moment--but it did lack energy. It lacked passion.
PAT BUCHANAN: I think it was very flat . . . There seemed to be no energy, no inspiration. Frankly, I thought, is it me watching this thing, but what came to mind was that phrase about Harding's speech: an army of pompous phrases marching across the landscape in search of an idea.
MITCHELL: The problem that I have with it is the flip side of that: which is, that it doesn't add up. That the dollars and cents don't add up. And when you fact-check it, when he's talking about increasing our exports, he's really recycling something that he said last year. When he talks --
HOWARD DEAN: It's still important!
MITCHELL: It's important, but it's not a new way to do it. He's not explaining how to do it, how is that going to happen, nor is he explaining how he's going to take away the subsidies from the oil companies. That's something that he also proposed in the past. There's no path from A to B.
