Dallas Rep. Jeb (Jim?) Hensarling has a “D” next to his name – d’oh!

by Rich Hancock of Rational Broadcasting

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It only takes a couple of minutes in the national spotlight to come away looking like a doofus.

DALLAS — When Dallas Republican Congressman Jeb Hensarling was given the final question last Friday for embattled President Barack Obama, he probably thought he was going to be a star.

But it only takes a couple of minutes in the national spotlight to come away looking like a doofus.

When Obama accepted last week’s invitation to the Republican Caucus’ gathering in Baltimore — a challenge many thought was intended to be “for political style points only”— folks like Dallas Rep. Pete Sessions, who runs the national GOP congressional campaign committee, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who holds a similar post for the Senate Republicans, probably thought they were going to be the beneficiaries of billboard material for this year’s campaign to take back control of Congress. You can just imagine them thinking “If he doesn’t show, he’s chicken — and if he does, we’ll nail ‘im!”

The president surprised the minority leadership by accepting their invitation … So now what!?!

They knew they couldn’t boo and hiss, or shout “You lie!” as Rep. Joe Wilson did in an address to congress last year. That would look bad, and the press cameras would be rolling.

With the mid-term congressional elections coming in November — and the early boost provided by winning a seat in the Senate formerly held by liberal icon Senator Ted Kennedy, Republicans have been riding a wave. It has been a wave of fear and confusion over health care reform, anxiety over the budget deficit, animosity over John Edwards’ infidelity, and frustration over the lack of jobs created by the stimulus bill.

A chance to emasculate the man who had trounced their party just one year ago was too good to pass up, but the only way for Republicans to win the media battle was to be civil — something Congressional Republicans are not particularly good at — or by winning the war of ideas. The good old days of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay, the Sugarland, Texas, pit bull who never seemed to care how his heavy-handedness was perceived in the media, were gone. To invite the president, and then openly attack him, would have defeated the purpose.

The GOP caucus attendees certainly were civil, giving the president every opportunity to speak his mind, and they soon found that this was not working out in their favor.

Obama was without teleprompter and without equal in a room where he chastised Republicans for gratuitously demonizing him and the Democrats in the debate over health care reform, reminding them of their culpability in the enormous deficit spending of the Bush Administration and generally taking them to the political woodshed — so much so that FOX News cut away from the live broadcast with 20 minutes left to begin their in-studio right wing spin cycle before Obama could do any more damage. This was not how it was supposed to be.

Enter our hero, Dallas Republican Congressman Jeb Hensarling: This Young Turk of the ideological right was given the last question for Obama — the last chance to nail him to the wall on his evil “tax-and-spend” ways — and poor “Jim,” that’s what the president called him (several times!) was not quite up to the task.

Hensarling started out by reminding the president of a conversation they shared last year about their young children, and how they didn’t want to saddle their kids with an enormous federal deficit in the future. But before the Darling of Dallas’ Democrat-haters got around to an actual question — and we’re talkin’ three minutes and change of right-wing filibuster, chuck-full of fudged factoids and electioneering — Hensarling was gently cajoled by Obama with the helpful suggestion “I know there’s a question in there somewhere…”

Hensarling settled on a question which didn’t live up to the hype — and how could it? — and Obama handled it as deftly as he had the entire hour of give-and-take with his ideological adversaries.

It was so bad that Fox News’ three top shows, The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Glenn Beck, spent about four minutes combined talking about the entire event that night. If Jim or Jeb came out of this event as anybody’s hero, they weren’t making a lot of noise about it.

So, will Jim — I mean, of course, Jeb — Hensarling bounce back?

History shows us that presidential candidate and then-Texas Governor George W. Bush survived numerous attacks on his intellect, including a scathing interview in which a Boston TV reporter named Andy Hiller found that Bush couldn’t name a litany of foreign leaders, and that didn’t stop ol’ Dubya from going all the way.

Bill Clinton was practically booed off the stage after a painfully-long speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention, and he won it all in 1992.

Will this stop Jim/Jeb Hensarling from finding a spot on the national stage?

As a lifelong Democrat, I certainly hope so.

Rich Hancock is the host of Rational Talk with Rich Hancock on rationalbroadcasting.com. Email him at rich@rationalradio.org.

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