Though Chris Matthews said the inaugural address delivered by President Obama yesterday was comparable to the Gettysburg Address, and David Brooks is calling it “one of the best inaugural speeches of the past half century,” the powers that be at the New York Times and the Washington Post are less enthusiastic.
At the Times, editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal mused, “I was, personally, upset that Mr. Obama did not discuss gun control. I hope that was not a sign of a lack of commitment on his part to the ambitious proposals he put forth last week.” (Though, it seems to me, the president did allude to the issue when he said, “Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.”) Rosenthal’s take on Beyonce’s mastery of the lip sync, however, was unequivocal: “She absolutely hit it out of the park.”
Over at the Washington Post, David Ignatius calls the president’s remarks “flat, partisan, and surprisingly pedestrian,” noting that “the only voice that really soared was Beyonce’s.” It was the president’s uninspiring foreign-policy pablum that irked Ignatius, who derided it as a “ritual assertion of internationalism” and observed that listeners wouldn’t know “a group called Al Qaeda still exists, let alone that it has left savage calling cards this past week in Algeria.”
But hey, the guy sure can draw the best lip-synchers in the world.