President Obama addresses Congress

The following is not a full transcript; for full story, listen to audio.

President Obama went to Congress last night and delivered an ambitious and hopeful speech to the nation. He touched on everything from health care to green energy to the war in Iraq. For the full recap, "The Takeaway" talks to Todd Zwillich, reporter for "Capitol News Connection" and Julie Mason, White House Correspondent for "The Washington Examiner."

In his speech, President Obama went straight after the sacred cows: "In this budget, we will end education reforms that don’t work. And end direct payments to large agribusiness that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate … the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq. And reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War era weapons systems that we don’t use. We will root out the waste and fraud and abuse our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier. We will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas."

Mason says of the President’s speech, "It was a speech for hard times. What struck me especially was how high a bar he set for himself here in terms of oversight and what he’s going to be able to do in a short amount of time. So for that, I thought it was a truly unique speech. And we’ll have to wait and see whether he can live up to all that he’s promising.

There was a lot of confidence in the speech, which was evident when the President said: "That’s why I’ve asked Vice President to lead an unprecedented oversight effort — because no one messes with Joe."

Zwillich on the reactions of Republicans and Democrats inside the chamber: "When the President said in his speech that they’ve already identified two trillion dollars of cuts over the next ten years that they’re gonna go for in this budget, there were audible gasps among the members, you can hear it …".

The President often said, ‘I get it’ in his speech, and one Republican wasn’t thrilled with that construction — Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican from Huntington Beach, California: "When I worked for Ronald Reagan, he intentionally had us cross out the word ‘I’ and put ‘we’ and always make it ‘we’ … I noticed that President Obama hasn’t learned that yet. It suggests that maybe he’s got some things to learn … about the fact that … if anything gets done here in Washington, it’s going to be ‘we’ and not ‘I.’

Go here to see full transcript of President Obama’s speech, and make comments.

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