Obama DNC Speech Reactions: He Played Football and Baseball, With No Meat

Associated Press
[Senior Obama adviser Robert] Gibbs says being a president is a "humbling" thing and Obama understands that "we still have a long way to go" to rebuild the economy.

Stu Bykofsky, Philadelphia Daily News
Obama's speech a hit, not a home run

Patrick Martin, World Socialist Web Site
When Obama claimed US manufacturing is on the upswing "not because our workers make lower pay" but because they're more productive, he was telling a brazen lie. The auto bailout set the pace for wage slashing throughout corporate America, and against public employees as well.

Douglas E. Schoen, Fox News
As one of the advisers in the president's circle told me immediately after the speech, it was straightforward…and pedestrian. Meaning that there was nothing new, nothing bold and nothing in Mr. Obama's acceptance speech that will be remembered much past Sunday.

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
[Discussing Obama's one-liner, "Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!"] That's a good riff. But it came early in the speech, and after a couple of pro forma sentences about tax cuts for millionaires (he's against them) Obama was off an entirely unrelated riff about common effort, shared responsibility, and bold, persistent experimentation. Then he was off to the car industry. Then energy. Then a throwaway line about global warming. And all of these riffs were just that: short collections of platitudes with no real meat behind them and no promise of what a second term might bring.

Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press
Detroit's automakers played a prominent role throughout the Democratic convention, with speakers noting Obama's decision to invest billions of dollars in General Motors and Chrysler, both of which are now profitable and automakers as a whole have added 160,000 jobs since June 2009. Though government still stands to lose $19-billion or more out off the total $82-billion put into the companies, Democrats repeatedly said through the week it may have saved a million jobs nationwide.

Andrea Saul, Romney campaign spokesperson
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will deliver a new direction that jumpstarts our economy and helps the middle-class families who have been left behind under President Obama.

Spencer Ackerman, Wired
By word count, Obama devoted twice as much of his speech to national security as Romney did last week. But Obama failed to articulate an agenda for America on the world stage over the next four years.

Greg Sargent, Washington Post
He mounted a spirited, extensive defense of the safety net, and of the moral imperative of prioritizing it over more tax cuts for the rich. Core Dem constituencies — women, minorities, young voters — tend to respond strongly to messages about protecting the vulnerable. And he attacked Romney for wanting to increase defense spending — not something Dems have historically done — and crucially, he cast it as fiscally reckless.

Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast
This was the rhetorical equivalent, forgive the football metaphor, of running out the clock: Obama clearly thinks he's ahead and just doesn't need to make mistakes. But when football teams do that, it often turns out to be the biggest mistake of all, and they lose.

Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
Four years later the shooting liberal star, as we called him then, has come down to earth. What should have been a buoyant recovery coming out of a deep recession was lackluster to start and has grown weaker. The partisanship he claimed to want to dampen has become more fierce. The middle-class incomes he sought to lift have fallen. These results aren't bad luck or the lingering effects of a crash four years ago. They flow directly from his "transforming" purposes.

Marc Anthony ?@MarcAnthony
Será un gran honor cantar nuestro himno nacional hoy en el estadio lleno de partidarios de #Obama2002 en Charlotte. #DNC2012

Georgia State Sen. Emanuel Jones (D-Decatur), DNC delegate
The president laid out exactly what he's going to do in the next four years. What excited me the most was his passion, sincerity and convictions for America and Americans.

Joe Scarborough, ?@JoeNBC
The President said nothing in his speech tonight. But he said it so much better than Mitt Romney when he said nothing in Tampa.