Jim Webb isn’t even a U.S. senator yet, but boy, is it difficult not to like him already.
A Vietnam veteran and former Navy Secretary in the Reagan administration, last month Webb unseated Republican George Allen by a margin of fewer than 10,000 votes. This week, Webb made his first visit to the White House as senator-elect and gave President Bush a giant vote of no confidence.
At a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, Bush approached Webb and asked, “How’s your boy?” Webb’s 24-year-old son, Jimmy is presently serving in Iraq.
Avoiding the question, Webb told the president he’d like to get our soldiers out of Iraq.
“That’s not what I asked,” Bush bristled. “How’s your boy?”
Webb basically told Bush: None of your damn business, Mr. President.
Bush may be at the top of the younger Webb’s chain of command, but Virginia’s new senator had every right to pull familial rank on the commander-in-chief.
If the president wants a field report on the state of the troops — or one troop in particular — he can call the Pentagon. As president, he’s not entitled to a field report from any parent on how his or her son or daughter is doing — even if that parent is a newly elected senator visiting the White House.
Even if Bush was trying to express genuine concern — and there’s no reason to believe he wasn’t — given Webb’s reaction, the president needed to back off. After all, he was sufficiently warned.
That’s right: Not widely reported by the national media is the fact that, before the event, White House briefers told Bush that Lance Cpl. Jimmy Webb had recently witnessed a nearby vehicle blow up, killing three Marines. The president was cautioned that Webb might be especially sensitive,given the recent trauma his son had experienced.
But for the president, the discomfort and pain of others is secondary to his own need for proper respect and deference. Hence Bush’s briny response.
Of course, once word of the exchange went national, conservatives rushed to do the only thing they seem capable of doing any more with any degree of effectiveness: express outrage.
The nation’s outrager-in-chief, Bill O’Reilly, who of course has never served in the military, called Webb “rude” and “disrespectful.” Columnist George Will, another non-veteran with no children in harm’s way, tarred Webb a “boor” and a “pompous poseur.”
From such sources, the bandying around of such descriptors is the equivalent of Britney Spears offering the head mistress of a finishing school a stern lecture on debutante etiquette.
America has now been fighting in Iraq longer than it fought World War II. The number of Americans killed there already exceeds the number who died on Sept. 11, 2001. The costs to the national treasury so far, which do not include continuing expenses well into the future for physical and psychological therapy, have eclipsed $300 billion and expand each day.
And yet, a week before the administration — which, incidentally the very same George Will told us in January 2001 represented a restoration of government by “grown-ups” — had to swallow a report produced by the political confidante to the president’s far more politically mature father, a duly-elected senator and decorated veteran who has a son in combat dared to express an opinion shared by a majority of Americans. The temerity!
For this, he is “boorish”? The boor in the conversation was the president who, when finally confronted face-to-face with the expressed wishes of the American public, couldn’t suffer one sentence’s worth of critical advice.
Webb’s offense was that he spoke truth to power insidea White House which believes more in power than truth.
Thomas F. Schaller is associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.”
