Newt Gingrich slams Obama’s ‘sad’ State of the Union as empty rhetoric

The Ticket

Newt Gingrich thought President Obama's State of the Union speech on Tuesday was "terrific" rhetoric, but that's where his appreciation ends for his would-be opponent.

"He has a lot of good rhetoric," Gingrich said in an interview with the "Today" show on Wednesday. "I like a lot of his rhetoric. You can watch a clip from his appearance above.

"We are in a state of unemployment, where houses are worth less than mortgages, where foreclosures are a problem," the former House speaker continued. "The rhetoric is terrific. His actions haven't been. I find the gap between Obama's words and his deeds to be astounding. He ran on 'Yes We Can.' Yet last night he seemed to set up a year of divisiveness, of getting nothing done. I thought it was a sad decline from the hope and optimism he ran on in 2008. I think it reflects the last couple of years."

Gingrich's also slammed the president's failure to address what he said were other empty promises:

With President Obama you never know what the gap is between the speech and what comes up later on as policy. He did nothing last night, for example, to explain why he vetoed the Keystone pipeline which killed at least 50,000 jobs and may have driven Canada into a partnership with China, which would make no sense at all. He didn't explain the price of gasoline, which is the highest in American history. He has no proposal to lower that price. After the failure of Solyndra and other government investments, he went back to the same model. He said really smart bureaucrats will make the right decisions about new technologies. We don't have evidence that it works. I think what you saw the president do is lay down a campaign speech which [shows] how he's going to run this year. He's going to run as a left-wind populist on class warfare and try to say big government is a better solution than free markets. I think that will bve a dividing line over which the American people will make a gigantic decision in November.

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