Rachel Maddow: ‘Heart’ of SOTU Was Addressing Obama’s Supporters

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow stated that “the heart of the speech [President Obama’s State of the Union] was something that I think he was addressing to people who voted for him, to people who are Democratic-minded, people who believed in him” during MSNBC’s special coverage of the State of the Union on Tuesday.

“The long focus at the beginning on, what he called ‘middle class economics,’ usually presidents save the personal story about a family that’s been through hard times, or a person who’s been through hard times, and save that till the end, till the tear-jerking part of it. In this case, the president put that right up front…it seemed to me that the heart of the speech was something that I think he was addressing to people who voted for him, to people who are Democratic-minded, people who believed in him. He talked about the speech that made him a national figure in 2004, said ‘just over a decade ago, I gave a speech in Boston where I said there wasn’t a liberal America, or a conservative America, a black America, or a white America, but the United States of America.’ He said ‘over the past six years, pundits pointed out, more than once, that my presidency hasn’t delivered on this vision,’ and then he essentially took on that criticism right in the face. He said, ‘I know how tempting such cynicism may be. I still think the cynics are wrong,’ and he defended that vision over again, saying he had not only lived it, but he had seen it as president. And for people who voted for him, and who thought that his presidency would and could be a transformative thing, that is the question of whether or not his presidency is a success is about whether or not he bascially was able to bring us to a transformative moment in our politics.” she said.

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