It probably won’t be a big shock to anyone that I was thoroughly underwhelmed by Bush’s speech, especially considering the reality that this lame duck President isn’t known for actually achieving many of his State of the Union proposals. And with his approval rating currently in the toilet and 21 GOP Senators up for reelection next year, Bush has considerably less legislative pull than he once did.
Jim Webb, formerly a Republican (and Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan) and now a freshman Senator from Virginia, gave a great response which can be read in its entirety here.
I disagree with his position on Iraq: I respect the fact that unlike me he was against the war even before it started, but I really wish now the former Marine would support a phased redeployment beginning tomorrow. His point about a withdrawal leading to chaos in the region is undercut by the fact that our continuing occupation of a Muslim country smack in the heart of the Middle East is already putting both our soldiers and our homeland at an increased risk of terrorist attack.
This is a problem I’ve been wrestling with, as an immediate troop draw-down will obviously lead to increased instability in Iraq, but maintaining our military presence there is doing nothing but fueling the flames of anti-American hatred among the Iraqi people, many of whom now explicitly support insurgent attacks against our troops. This is the natural result of a four-year military occupation that was fought in large part to secure that country’s oil resources as opposed to, say, bringing freedom and democracy to the region or preventing Saddam Hussein from selling his imaginary WMD to terrorists.
This is truly a lose-lose proposition courtesy of the administration and the Senators from both parties who abdicated their constitutional responsibilities and gave Bush a blank check to overrun Iraq.
On the other hand, the domestic/economic part of Webb’s speech was fantastic. Allow me to quote at length:
When one looks at the health of our economy, it’s almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.
Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.
In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also. And they expect, rightly, that in this age of globalization, their government has a duty to insist that their concerns be dealt with fairly in the international marketplace.
In the early days of our republic, President Andrew Jackson established an important principle of American-style democracy that we should measure the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street. We must recapture that spirit today.
This is a flashback to the op-ed he wrote for the Wall Street Journal right after he was elected, which sounded similar economic populist themes.
So in short, while I disagree with his position on redeployment in Iraq, I think he makes a powerful spokesman for the newly-empowered Democratic majority in Congress for critical issues like health care, economic inequality and globalization.
By the way, I think John Edwards had the critical importance of redeployment exactly right in this op-ed he wrote for the Washington Post way back in November 2005, one of the reasons why I’ll be voting for him in the primaries. (He also gets kudos for admitting his vote for the war was a huge mistake. While some might argue that this was too little, too late, I am far more forgiving due to my own misguided initial support.)
Thanks for posting the excerpts from Webb’s speech…you know I was glazed over from watching Cheney sleep through the address…I agree that his economic portion was great, but I go back and forth between your position on Iraq and his. I can’t decide which is the better option for us. Regardless — go Edwards!