WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- A star was born Tuesday night, along with a pungent political theme that could carry a Democratic president to the White House next year. The new senator from Virginia, Vietnam war hero Jim Webb, delivered a sober but stunning rebuttal to President George W. Bush's State of the Union address that stole the evening.
Speaking with the authority of one of three generations of soldiers who had served the country overseas, and whose son has just seen his Iraq deployment extended yet again, Webb accused the president of taking the country into the Iraq War recklessly. That charge had been made often before, but Webb put it into a telling new context, stressing that "the majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military.
"Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues -- those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death -- we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way," he said.
"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," he said.
But even more telling in Webb's 9-minute speech was his argument that America's social contract was being broken, that the nation's wealth was not being fairly shared, and that "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," Webb said. "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.
"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," he went on. "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."
Republicans have traditionally dismissed this kind of charge as populism, the politics of class war that have traditionally found little resonance in an American electorate that would rather join the rich than just envy them. But the issue is becoming acute, with the massive publicity given to businessman Robert Nardelli getting a $210 million leaving gift from Home Depot -- even though he failed to lift its stock price or restore the company's fortunes -- and with Wall Street traders getting multi-million dollar bonuses while mainstream wages and salaries have stalled.
This kind of economic populism is likely to become the Democratic Party's stock in trade, after it worked so well in the swing state of Ohio in the mid-term elections last November. The Democrat Sherrod Brown took the Senate seat of Mike De Wine by campaigning more against the Hoover Company and the loss of jobs to China than against his opponent. Brown made his pitch on the red-brick sidewalk outside Hoover's HQ in Canton, Ohio, constantly repeating, "When we import sweatshop goods, we export Ohio jobs."
The issue is immediate, with a rash of bilateral free trade agreements now pending and with President Bush's fast-track authority to negotiate more trade deals due to lapse this June, just as a last push is being made to complete the Doha Round of world trade talks. The Democrats do not look at all likely to help Bush complete his trade agenda, and instead seem to be rallying around Webb's demand that the forces of globalization must be tamed and the American worker protected.
The new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, the liberal Democrat Congressman Barney Frank from Massachusetts is calling for a "grand bargain" between the friends and foes of globalization. Frank suggests trading Democratic support for international trade treaties in return for corporate backing of social welfare and pro-labor legislation and safety-net programs for American workers whose jobs get outsourced overseas.
But with the angry new mood among Democrats, Frank now counts as a moderate. Senators Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin have proposed a Balanced Trade Restoration Act that would dramatically restrict the amount of foreign goods being bought by issuing a limited number of import certificates. They claim it would end the current $800 billion trade deficit in five years flat. Of course, it could also bring about the kind of border-closing retaliation that crippled world trade in 1931 and brought about the Great Depression, but that is another story.
Economic populism, whether bashing globalization or demanding a higher minimum wage and ending tax cuts for the wealthy, is becoming the distinctive new message of the Democrats, but it has seldom been put as persuasively and with such patriotic credentials as in Senator Jim Webb's rebuttal speech.
As a former Navy secretary in President Ronald Reagan's administration, and now serving as a newly-elected Senator, Webb almost embodies the bipartisanship to which politicians routinely appeal. But there was nothing bipartisan about the quiet and dignified fervor with which Webb slammed Bush for ignoring the best military advice against the Iraq War, and for presiding over the growing division between the interests of Wall Street and of Main Street.
Webb, a novelist and historian, likes to present himself as "not a professional politician," but his performance Tuesday in squashing whatever little boost Bush may have expected from the polls has made him into an instant star for his party. And his political antennae are impressive. Bush's State of the Union speech had nothing to say about the still-hapless state of New Orleans nearly 18 months after Hurricane Katrina.
By contrast, Webb started with New Orleans, and he closed with praise for two Republican presidents. He hailed Teddy Roosevelt, for curtailing the power of the "robber baron" capitalists at a time when "America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines." And he saluted President Eisenhower for ending the Korean War. That is the way to play the bipartisan card to maximum partisan advantage.
