For once, there's legitimate excitement about the response speech that follows a president's State of The Union (SOTU) address. Tomorrow night's Republican rebuttal to President Obama's first SOTU of his second term will be delivered by Marco "I'm not a Savior" Rubio.
The freshman Senator from Florida has reportedly been studying tapes of past SOTU responses, specifically Bobby Jindal's memorable 2009 turn, so as not to repeat what made those speeches so horrible.
Of course, part of the problem lies in the fact that while the president is talking to a live audience of members of Congress, Supreme Court justices (some of them anyway) and members of the public invited to a once in a lifetime event, the speaker from the out of power party is usually sequestered in an empty room devoid of anything but set dressing and a teleprompter.
But nobody expects Rubio to be dull Tuesday night.
Following Rubio on we hope at least one cable network will be the Tea Party response, brought to you by none other than Rand Paul. The Kentucky Senator explained to CNN's Candy Crowley why there's a need for such a response:
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2013.