The verdicts are now trickling in on what was essentially all but a State of the Union address by President Barack Obama — officially, a speech on his upcoming budget. And here’s one of the first from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

Matthews contends that Obama gave a meaty speech in which he laid out some clear positions and defined himself as “left of center.” Watch:

Decide for yourself. Read the full text of Obama’s speech.

UPDATE: As of this writing we can’t find an embed of the entire Obama speech. But Matthews was less-than-impressed with the GOP response by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Here’s Jindal’s response to Obama’s well-received speech, so you can decide for yourself if Matthews was accurate or way off base:

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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