Rare News Desk
When President Obama speaks the people react, the media offering some of the more rapid and incisive of those reactions. Thus, I present a rundown of the top five reactions to SOTU 2014:
Videos by Rare
1) Associated Press
Nancy Benac: Obama’s State Of The Union Address Was Full Of “Modest Proposals.” “The president’s State of the Union address Tuesday was an amalgam of modest proposals designed to chip away at some of the same problems he’s been working on all along: persistent unemployment, middle-class insecurity, lagging schools and more.” (“Analysis: Obama’s Agenda More Bite-Sized Than Bold,” The Associated Press, 1/28/14)
2) National Journal
Ron Fournier: The “Modest Agenda” Of The State Of The Union Address Was “Delivered By A Diminished Leader.” “It was a good speech about a modest agenda delivered by a diminished leader, a man who famously promised to reject the politics of “small things” and aim big—to change the culture of Washington, to restore the public’s faith in government, and to tackle enduring national problems with bold solutions.” (Ron Fournier, “Good Speech, Modest Agenda, Diminished Leader Americans May Have Already Tuned Out Barack Obama,” National Journal, 1/28/14)
3) CBS
Norah O’Donnell: Obama’s Agenda Has Shrunk From Grand To Granular: “I think the rest of his speech really just proved, that Obama’s proposals have gone from grand to granular. Right? From these grand sweeping proposals at the beginning of his second term to the granule, kind of more modest scaled back proposals.” (CBS News, 1/28/14)
John Dickerson: Obama’s SOTU Proposals Filled With “Very Small Bore Stuff.” “If you look at the specifics of what he’s going to do – he’s going to raise the minimum wage for companies that work with the federal government. Well that’s a very small amount. He’s gonna set up a special thing at the Treasury Department, a savings account. That’s a very small thing. He’s going to convene C.E.O.s., he’s going to meet with college professors, he’s going to cut some red tape and take care of some permitting blockages. That is very small bore stuff compared to the claims the President made tonight and his aides have been making in terms of his acting.” (CBS News, 1/28/14)
4) Fox News
Kirsten Powers: White House Oversold SOTU Speech, Obama Had No Urgency. “I don’t know if the White House has made any secret that he was going to mention polled well. The things he listed off, whether it’s student debt or Pre-K funding are things that he brings up all the time because they poll very well. But the speech was definitely oversold by the White House in the sense that we were told to expect sort of this urgency. I really did not hear any urgency, I was expecting more of a, you know, we’re in really dire straits and that’s why I have to pull out my pen, and why I have to take things into my own hands. And that was really missing from the speech.” (Fox News, 1/28/14)
5) The Washington Post’s Fact Checker
Glen Kessler: Obama Was “Cherry-Picking” The Number Of Jobs Added Under His Presidency. “The president is cherry-picking a number that puts the improvement in the economy in the best possible light. The low point in jobs was reached in February 2010, and there has indeed been a gain of about 8 million jobs since then, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But the data also show that since the start of his presidency, about 3.2 million jobs have been created — and the number of jobs in the economy still is about 1.2 million lower than when the recession began in December 2007.” (“Fact Checking The 2014 State Of The Union Address,” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, 1/28/14)
