Barack Obama's absolutely worst speech ever!

Although the leaked details of Barack Obama's new economic team were quite impressive and inspire great confidence, his announcement today was his absolutely worst speech ever! Not only was he simply reading from a written script, he was botching it left and right, stumbling even on relatively simple text. I was not sure whether to laugh or cry when he struggled with "macroeconomic." Sigh. He picked a great team, so why did Mr. Eloquence give such a poor presentation? Why did he waste so much time going into boring details about his nominees that can be found on a simple Wikipedia page? And why did he give such long-winded answers to very simple questions by reporters? Unfortunately, the obvious answer is that he simply is not comfortable with economics, finance, and economists. Fortunately, he has picked a strong team so that he can be hands-off and let them do their thing.

To be fair, this was not a speech per se. But seriously, major announcements need to be made with much more crispness and confidence, especially when the topic is of such a serious concern to all Americans.

The Dow was up almost 400 points today. I am convinced it would have been up 800 points or more if Barack had not given such a crappy speech.

-- Jack Krupansky