Arianna appeared on MSNBC's "Countdown" Wednesday night to discuss President Obama's Ohio speech from earlier Wednesday, in which Obama refused to consider extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and dared Republicans to keep fighting for them.
"I wish he had been as fired up for the last 20 months as he was today. This was definitely the best speech we've gotten from him since he's been in the White House," Arianna told host Keith Olbermann. "There's no question that he drew a clear line in the sand. It was really more like a moat that he filled with man-eating crocodiles."
However, Arianna said, "one speech does not change the narrative." Obama needs to "keep making it clear that he is for the middle class, and the Republicans are not," she said, noting that "during the campaign, Obama said the middle class was his North star -- that was really the essence of his campaign."
"I've spent a whole year writing this book on the assault on the middle class," Arianna added, "making it very clear that nobody, not even the super-rich that John Boehner supports, would want to live in a country that is really a third-world country when the middle class crumbles and you have the super-rich and everyone else, the super-rich living behind gates with their kids protected by security guards against kidnapping. I mean, that's not America, that's not the America of upward mobility, of the American dream."
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