During the February 2nd airing of This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Bill Kristol said Senator Mike Lee’s (R-UT) Tea Party response “[was] more substantive” than President Obama’s State of the Union speech (SOTU).
Kristol said Obama’s SOTU was “a strikingly uninspiring speech, sort of a litany of small, liberal ideas, without any overarching narrative or theme.”
Donna Brazile responded:
[With Republicans] having nothing else to talk about, because there are no new ideas coming from the Republican Party, they downgrade modernizing schools, rebuilding our manufacturing sector, giving the American people a raise. They call it little, small, liberal ideas when most Americans just want to see Washington get something done. I think the President hit all the right bases [in his SOTU speech]… [and gave] benchmarks to what he can accomplish without Congress, and I think that’s the most important thing.
As Brazile finished, Kristol rebutted that Senator Mike Lee’s Tea Party response was “more substantive, [had] more reform ideas, and [was] more candid in discussing inequality. [Lee] said we have an inequality crisis, we have a mobility crisis, [and] here are conservative reform ideas [to address these].”
Kristol summed it up thus: “Mike Lee had more ideas in his Tea Party response speech than Barack Obama had.”
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.