O’Donnell on Christie: ‘I expected a better performance’

>> who is in the hall for the speech and can tell us again a little both for ann and chris christie .

>> i've seen chris christie give better speeches. i expected a better performance out of him. one key thing is after he stopped talking about his mother early in the speech, he never smiled again. they should have put a big smile up on his camera out there on the end of the teleprompter, a big smile sign because a lot of the rhetoric he was closing with was reagan-style soaring rhetoric about america and it was delivered with a very grim and angry face. that was not the way to deliver that message especially to an audience tonight, many of whom who out in america have never seen this man before and don't know him. in the two we saw there were only two government programs mentioned, one was an ann romney speech, the abigail adams scholarships in massachusetts that she's very proud that her husband helped create while he was governor, those are scholarships of government money to exclusively government-run institutions of higher learning . a pure government cycling of government money for the benefit of students. these are the kinds of people, students benefiting from that, that rick santorum was apparently condemning earlier tonight as being part of the client class of the american population, the so-called half of the population that just takes from this government and chris christie mentioned only one government program, it was the g.i. bill , at the beginning of his speech he said his dad grew up in poverty and two sentences later, rachel, his dad was on the g.i. bill , he put himself through rutgers university at night to become the first in his family to earn a college degree . many of us have told that story about our fathers. many of us have gratitude to our government and to our politicians' foresight to enable us to tell those stories about our fathers.

>> lawrence, thank you for that. i want to on the issue of the oratory, it's right to turn to the reverend al sharpton who has done this for his living as a minister and politician in terms of speaking to people and moving people. you remarked you felt like the applause lines and laugh lines weren't hitting at the right time, that it didn't seem like he was connecting.

>> i was, frankly, i thought that chris christie flunked tonight. i've heard him before. i don't agree with his politics, but i've seen him be very effective. i think that what he did probably as an orator is what i would do in 2004 when i did the democratic convention , he shouldn't have stayed on reading the teleprompter. if he had just been extemporaneous i think he would have done better. usually that's how he speaks. that might have been his problem because he was way off. he also was very contradictory. when you see the fact that mitt romney is sitting there, ann romney talked about love and here comes christie say forget love, it's about respect. do anybody read these speeches before they go? it was the exact opposite. he beat up on the teachers' union, he was like the ralph kramden if you're old enough to remember "the honeymooners," the ralph kramden of the republican republican -- ping, zoom, to the moon, alice. he had an opportunity to lay out a case for romney which he did not do, but to come being built up as the guy that could be the other side of what barack obama was who came with hope and be the guy saying, it's us against them, let me tell you about them, let me tell you about us and then let me tell you about romney will tell you the hard truth. he won't tell you about his tax returns. let me tell you the hard truth but he won't tell you what he did at