He's not using his platform to massage interest groups.
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.
Forget about trying to knock him. He's got a kevlar resume.
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 résumé.
And a clearsighted understanding of who owes what to whom.
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.
All of which stands in contrast "Bush’s speech, its principal merit was that it provided a pretext for Webb’s." All he does is throw the ball into the opposition's court.
In a Saturday radio talk before the State of the Union address, the President said, “Those who refuse to give this plan a chance to work have an obligation to offer an alternative that has a better chance for success.”
What? You're still protesting that the Democrats "don't have a plan"?
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is in its fourth week of hearing such suggestions. The Iraq Study Group has a plan. Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb have a plan. The Center for American Progress has a plan. But what all their plans have in common is that they recognize that what remains is the search for the least bad of a bad bunch of options. Implicitly, they recognize that Bush’s policy—and, therefore, Bush—is a failure. And so, rather than looking for a policy that might be within our means and might mitigate the disaster, Bush is betting all his chips—all our chips—on the only choice that allows him the fantasy that in the end people will say: Bush was right. He is sending twenty thousand because twenty thousand is all he has. Next to nothing in the way of ground forces remains for other contingencies. His Presidency and his “legacy” are in ruins anyway, so he imagines he has nothing to lose. If only that were true of the rest of us.
