The American Spectator

p> NANCY’S RUDE RUBES br> So by final count, 20 Democratic House members staged a planned walkout on the President’s State of the Union speech, while two Democratic presidential wannabes sent out critiques of the president’s speech well before he’d even finished. Talk about lives of lonely desperation. /p>

Unknowing reporters might imagine Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. John Edwards furiously taking notes on PDA’s during the SOTUS and e-mailing them off to them from their seats. After all, the comments of both White House aspirants about Bush’s speech were available in journalists’ e-mail boxes more than ten minutes before the president finished his gripping address.

In fact, the canned comments from Gephardt and Edwards were written and approved even before the two men entered the joint session of Congress. “If you want your man’s thoughts to get play after the fact, then you’ve got to get them into the media’s hands in a timely manner,” explains a Gephardt staffer. “If we waited until after Bush was done, we’d never get play.”

Gephardt and Edwards were naturally supportive of Bush’s Iraq policy, but slammed him on domestic issues. Big surprise.

After Bush’s speech and the Democratic response, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, as well as Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, were inundated with complaints about the party’s responder, Washington Gov. Gary Locke. Democratic leaders selected Locke after the party’s governors demanded a larger role in the national party’s activities in Washington. But acts like Locke’s will quickly have them back playing in Peoria.

“He was an embarrassment,” said one moderate Democratic House member. “Bush gave a great speech, our response only made his words seem more powerful. Why do we bother?”

The walkout, staged by mostly liberal Democrats, occurred about ten minutes before Bush’s speech ended. According to one House leadership source, the walkout was approved beforehand by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who saw nothing wrong with members of her caucus behaving rudely, and is said by other Democratic staffers to have encouraged her caucus to react visibly to Bush’s speech whenever emotions moved them.

“It says more about the respect her caucus has for her that they asked her if they could do it,” says a House Democratic leadership staffer. “They’d never have bothered to ask Gephardt.”

p> BURR IN EDWARDS’ SADDLE br> The White House has hit on the candidate in North Carolina it wants to run for the Senate in 2004: Rep. Richard Burr