‘One of the Least Successful Speeches’: Leftists Attack Liberal Newsweek Editor For Criticizing Obama
Newsweek Editor Jonathan Alter. (Source: MSNBC)
President Obama delivered a campaign speech Thursday in an attempt to reinvigorate his base and present a gleaming vision of America’s economic future.
How did it go? Well, considering the fact that even a very liberal MSNBC panel on “News Nation with Tamron Hall” agreed that the speech fell flat – it probably could’ve gone better.
“I thought this, honestly, was one of the least successful speeches I’ve seen Barack Obama give in several years,” Newsweek editor Jonathan 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.”
He continued, “And the speech was way too long and I think he lost his audience by the end.”
Zachary Karabell, Daily Beast columnist and economist, echoed many of Alter’s sentiments, saying the president started his speech well, but it quickly went off the rails.
“When he went, sort of, away from offense and on to defense, ‘what we’ve done and what we’re going to do,’ it became unbelievably diffuse and, in some sense purely as a political phenomenon it was very ineffective in that respect because it very well characterized the opponents as ‘this is not going to work’ but it didn’t really give you the sense of what will,” Karabell said.
While the panel was seemingly on the same page, Hall continually attempted to clarify and prop up Obama’s statements.
Halls argued that Obama was arguing that GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s policies would be the same as the ones “that resulted in the disaster that we saw with this economy.”
“And that’s a powerful argument to make,” Alter replied.
“It is,” Hall agreed.
“It didn’t work in 2010. But it can work, properly framed, in 2012,” Alter added.
Now most would say that Alter was genuine and honest in his critique of the president’s speech. But as is often the case, members the left have assembled and have apparently gone after Alter for daring to say anything critical of Obama.
The Newsweek editor soon took to Twitter to respond to some of the insults hurled at him.
“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,” he tweeted.
Read some of the tweets coming from annoyed Obama supporters:
Watch the MSNBC panel give Obama poor grades for today’s campaign speech:
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