Has the game of defining your opponents begun notably early after the election? Virginia Senator Jim Webb says yes:
NEW YORK In an interview with Deborah Solomon that will appear in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, the newly-elected U.S. senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, discusses his recent widely-publicized exchange with President Bush over an Iraq pullout.
At a recent White House reception the president had asked about Webb’s son, who is serving in Iraq. Webb suggested that troops should start coming home from Iraq, and Bush snapped back, “I didn’t ask you that.”
Webb calls the coverage of that “vastly overblown” but adds: “I think what I said was appropriate.” He also stated, “This was something that emanated from the White House. I did not say anything about this for two weeks. I said nothing publicly at all.”So why did the White House push the issue? “Probably as an attempt to try to define me between the election and the beginning of the Congress,” Webb replied “And that’s all I am going to say.”
We often tell people that it’s important to look at not only the content of a story that has a blind source but to try and determine the motivation behind the blind source’s comments.
And, indeed, Webb’s theory makes sense especially if a certain person is still calling the White House’ strategical shots. If you read this then you have to agree it could explain several things. A story like the Bush-Webb story — a story that provided fodder for high decibel discussions on talk radio and in the blogosphere — doesn’t just pop up out of the blue.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.