WEBBCAST.(The Talk of the Town)

For more than forty years, it has been the custom for the President's State of the Union address to be followed by a formal televised response. In 1966, the leaders of the Republican minority in Congress, the florid Senator Everett Dirksen and the stolid Representative Gerald Ford, appointed themselves to deliver the first of these, after one of Lyndon Johnson's lordly extravaganzas. The Ev and Jerry Show, though charming in a ramshackle way, was less than a monster hit, and nearly all the subsequent post-SOTU presentations have likewise been little noted nor long remembered. Senator Bob Dole, with characteristic bleak wit, evaluated his response to President Clinton's 1996 address thusly: "I gave a fireside chat the other night, and the fire went out." It was different this time. This time the fire was on, and it was the rebuttal that had something truthful to say about the state of the union.

James Webb is a writer, the highly acclaimed author of six densely textured novels of men in battle. As of last Tuesday evening he had been a United States senator for all of twenty days. He was an unusual choice to deliver the Democrats' reply to President Bush's address, and, as it turned out, a canny one. Normally, the replier speeds through a miniature of the traditional SOTU laundry list, administering quick shoulder massages to as many interest groups as possible. Webb, pugnacious of temperament, chose instead to use his nine minutes to speak of "two areas where our respective parties have largely stood in contradiction." The first was the ballooning of economic inequality at home. The second was Iraq, where, he said,

this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world.

Webb was able to speak bluntly ("The President took us into this war recklessly") not only because he writes that way but also on account of a Kevlar resume. In addition to having served--in the Reagan Administration, no less--as Secretary of the Navy, he is a decorated Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. So is his brother. His father flew B-29s during the Second World War. His son is a marine, too, now serving in Iraq. Mentioning that history, Webb noted that he and his kin, like many other soldiers,

trusted the judgment of our national leaders. . . . We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

None of that, he made plain, has been forthcoming from the present Administration.

As for Bush's speech, its principal merit was that it provided a pretext for Webb's. The President began with some graceful words for Nancy Pelosi, the new (and first female) Speaker of the House, and then spoiled the effect with a reflexive slur: "I congratulate the Democrat majority." ("Democratic majority" were the words on his teleprompter, but he apparently couldn't help himself.) Still, he went easy on the social-issue red meat: no stem cells this time, no abortion, no gay marriage. Instead, he served up a thin menu of, so to speak, Democrat veggies: rhetorical recognition that health care, education, and energy are problems, with a side dish of timid proposals, mostly drawn from the conservative think-tank cookbook, that the new Congress is sure to send back to the kitchen. What had been heralded in advance as a dramatic ...