“[Bush] disregarded warnings from the national security advisor during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the Army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs,” Webb told the country. “We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable — and predicted — disarray that has followed.” Webb said he hoped Bush would chart a way out of the war, but if he didn’t, Democrats “will be showing him the way.”

In fact Democrats showed the country a new way Tuesday night — a new way for party leaders to handle Bush, a new way to lead the nation with passion, dignity and steely resolve. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set the tone, graciously accepting the president’s warm tribute — and then using her hour on camera behind him remarkably well, clapping, standing and, occasionally, very effectively, sitting silently while Republicans stood, as the president tried to win back a skeptical country and Congress.

Then, after the speech, on various news shows, Democratic presidential front-runners Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards represented the party admirably, each of them striking a balance between respecting the bipartisan ritual of the evening — yes, we want to get some work done and we’ll act like the president does too — while making clear they would continue to fight Bush hard on Iraq. Webb was the night’s standout, but his performance was also a tribute to the new and frankly unfamiliar P.R. savvy of Democratic leaders, who were smart enough to choose the military veteran to rebut the president.

Or so I thought. It turned out that on television, there was a zero-sum game of political credit for Democrats, so Webb’s win meant that others lost — and mainly that seemed to mean liberals and women, especially liberal women like Nancy Pelosi. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews and Mike Barnicle were tripping over themselves to laud the manly Webb, and thank their lucky stars that the Dems hadn’t picked somebody who’d have used his or her time to fulminate over gay marriage or other effete concerns. “He didn’t mention a woman’s right to choose. He didn’t talk about civil unions,” Matthews gushed. Barnicle called Webb “a member of the Democratic Party of my youth, of your youth, Chris,” and went on to mention a list of men, men, men.

I happen to love Matthews on “Hardball.” He is what he is, an old-school political junkie, an insider’s insider who was wrong about impeachment but right about the Iraq war, who likes his men tough and his ladies pretty, and doesn’t bother to hide it. He can get silly with women guests, but never sillier than when he’s fawning over manly men. (I’ll never forget the way, after savaging Vice President Al Gore through the whole 2000 campaign, he lost it over Gore’s sad, dignified concession speech when Antonin Scalia made George W. Bush president, gushing over Gore’s “sublime masculinity.”)

On “Scarborough Country” the men on camera with me were just as gaga as Matthews over Webb, if a little bit less goofy. Pat Buchanan and Scarborough paid tribute to the Democratic military vet. But again the undercurrent was that Webb was standing alone in the Democratic Party, the lone man (and ex-Republican) with the cojones to stand up to Bush, lost in a sea of Nancys and Hillarys. Watching TV Tuesday night, you’d have thought Jim Webb had to manhandle Nancy Pelosi into letting him speak, that maybe he hogtied her and put her in a closet somewhere so he could deliver the prime-time address, rather than having been the happy choice of male and female party leaders.

It could be a long two years.

You could dismiss some of this as the nightly blathering of talking heads (I do my share; it isn’t always pretty), except there’s a bigger conversation going on here. A lot of men seem strangely spooked by the rise of Nancy Pelosi, and the lead Hillary Clinton currently holds in the Democratic presidential field. The normally sane and sober Ryan Lizza summed up the boys vs. girls theme in a silly New York Times piece two Sundays ago, “The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat.” Afraid Pelosi’s leadership means the Dems are now “the mommy party”? In fact, Democrats had elected a ton of menfolk with testosterone to spare — flat-topped rancher Jon Tester of Montana, who’d lost three fingers in a meat grinder, former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler of North Carolina, and military men Chris Carney, Joe Sestak and Patrick Murphy.

It seemed like the self-congratulatory confection of some Democratic consultant afraid men were going to get scared away by all the estrogen in the air, and it was. John Lapp, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who apparently helped find “this new breed of candidate,” bragged to Lizza, “[W]e went to C.I.A. agents, F.B.I. agents, N.F.L. quarterbacks, sheriffs, Iraq war vets. These are red-blooded Americans who are tough.” Lapp dubbed them “the Macho Dems.”

Memo to Lapp and Lizza: Personally, I like alpha males; I like Nancy Pelosi, too. I’m thrilled by Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill. To paraphrase the crazy evangelicals, who used to remind us God gave us Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve — well, in 2007 God gave the Democrats Jim and Nancy, not Jim and Tim. Interestingly, the one Democrat who came to my mind as the sharpest contrast to Jim Webb wasn’t a woman, it was John Kerry. Both men are decorated Vietnam combat veterans, but they couldn’t be more different in the way they stood up to Republican bullies. Poor John Kerry let the Swift-boat hucksters neuter him; Jim Webb will never let that happen. Ironically, or not, I think Kerry saw the same thing I did. On Wednesday morning he announced he would not seek the Democratic presidential nomination — more excellent news for Democrats.

Meanwhile, Republicans are showing they fear Jim Webb by savaging his speech. In a breathless “special to Newsweek” Op-Ed, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson proclaimed it full of clichés:

“Whenever a politician puts out to the media that he has thrown away the speechwriters’ draft and written the remarks himself (as Webb did), it is often a sign of approaching mediocrity. This was worse. Senator Webb made liberal use of clichés: the middle class is “the backbone” of the country, which is losing its “place at the table.” I am not even sure there is a literary term for a mixed metaphor that crosses two clichés … It is, perhaps, a good thing that James Webb earned a job as senator. As a speechwriter he would starve.”

It is a good thing. And as a senator, Mike Gerson would starve, so everyone should hold on to his day job. The Republicans know Webb’s the real deal, and that jokes about his speech won’t cut it. Democrats need to learn how to savor victory and build on it, rather than join pointless battling about who wears the pants in this party. Leadership diversity is a strength, not a weakness, and it would be a shame to let pundits lure party leaders into a battle of the sexes.

Additional reporting by Jonathan Vanian.

Today’s news? The FBI has just raided the home of Weldon’s daughter as well as five other locations in Pennsylvania and Florida as part of its investigation into whether Weldon helped his daughter and one of his closest friends get $1 million in lobbying contracts from two Russian companies and a Serbian foundation between 2002 and 2004.

Say what you will about that whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing, but Weldon’s “no investigation” defense seems to be history now. Weldon said last week that talk of an investigation was “crazy.” Now that he can’t deny that an investigation exists, he says that it must be politically motivated. “What I find ironic, if there is an investigation, is that no one would tell me until three weeks before the election,” the AP quotes Weldon as saying today. “This incident was two-and-a-half years ago.”

We’re not sure we understand why the Republican-controlled Justice Department and the Republican-controlled FBI would be out to help Democrat Joe Sestak beat Weldon in November. If the congressman offered any explanation for that theory today, the AP isn’t sharing those insights with the rest of us.

So no one was surprised when Weldon arrived Friday at the Drexelbrook County Club in a fighting mood. The occasion was his first one-on-one debate with his Democratic challenger, Joe Sestak, a former Navy admiral who recently commanded a Navy battle group in the Persian Gulf, and who has pulled even with Weldon in recent polls.

“It is not easy to fight the government, but you know what? I do it every day,” Weldon told the crowd, a bipartisan group of activists and politicos from surrounding Delaware County. “That’s why you sent me down to Washington. You didn’t send me down there to go along. You sent me down there to fight the battles, whether it’s fighting the CIA, whether it’s fighting Don Rumsfeld.”

His pitch seemed perfectly attuned to these days of political disillusionment. In the midst of an unpopular war in Iraq, a fresh congressional sex scandal, and abysmal approval ratings for President Bush, voters appear to be looking for outsider candidates who will rock the status quo. But at the one time in his career when he would appear to prosper as a free-thinking independent, Weldon finds himself unable to escape the current taint of the Republican Party.

A late September poll by Franklin and Marshall College laid Weldon’s problem bare, even before the Mark Foley scandal riled Congress. Although 58 percent of voters in Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district consider themselves Republican, only 43 percent said they planned to pull the lever for Weldon in November. Sestak is an unknown quantity for half of local voters, yet the Democrat was supported by 44 percent of those polled. The numbers were surprising to Pennsylvania political watchers, who note that Weldon has won election to Congress 10 times in a row with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Local political scientists say the suburban district leans to the moderate side of social issues — a tilt that helps explain the past two presidential elections: Gore carried the district with 51 percent of the vote in 2000 and Kerry won it with 53 percent in 2004. At the same time, experts say there’s one overriding reason that voters now favor an unknown admiral over Weldon. “You and I wouldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t have the war in Iraq,” explained G. Terry Madonna, a professor at Franklin and Marshall, who oversaw the poll. “Sestak wouldn’t be running. It would be over.”

A third of voters in Weldon’s district rate the war in Iraq as the most important issue in the campaign, while another 14 percent say they are most concerned about the U.S. campaign against terrorism. Weldon, who has consistently supported the war as a member of the Armed Services Committee, has tried to address voters’ discontent by distancing himself from the Bush administration. “We shouldn’t cut and run,” Weldon said at the debate. “What we should do is not allow the decisions not to be made by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld,” he said. The president, he continued, should announce a withdrawal plan decided on by the generals on the ground in Iraq.

Such subtle distinctions are likely to be lost on voters. By most accounts, when they look at Weldon they don’t see a spirited maverick who bucks his own party, opposes NAFTA, earns the support of local labor leaders and even supports the occasional environmental initiative. They see a Republican incumbent serving in an unpopular Republican Congress. “I am a firm believer that sometimes change is good,” said Rick Lacey, who described himself as an independent Republican real estate agent, who had come to watch the debate. “I have a strong belief that we should have term limits.”

Weldon’s fortunes have been worsened by the national attention that Sestak has been able to drum up for the election. Just a day before the debate, former President Bill Clinton came to town to stump for Sestak, who worked for Clinton as a national security advisor. “I will not make a single stop in this campaign season that means more to me than this one,” Clinton declared, according to a front-page story in the Delaware County Daily Times. Sestak has also received support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and liberal bloggers, who have helped to raise nearly $100,000 for him online.

So far, Sestak has succeeded by appearing affable and competent. The former admiral, who earned a Ph.D. in political economy and government at Harvard, has a stiff but sincere delivery style on the stump, centered around simple, repeatable phrases. “I am not a political careerist, I am a military guy,” Sestak said at the debate. He did get in one testy dig at Weldon for his “conspiracy-theory fantasies.” A minute later, Sestak addressed the audience and the television cameras with what is turning out be the central question of the 2006 elections. “Why give your vote to a president who has taken you into a tragic misadventure in Iraq?”

With less than 30 days left until the elections, Weldon has yet to find a clear and convincing answer to that question. What he offers instead is a litany of the things he has done for Delaware County in his 20 years of federal service to the district, preceded by his years as a local schoolteacher and volunteer fireman. For decades, this has been enough to assure Weldon’s reelection. But times have changed.

This September alone, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in Iraq, the highest toll since November of 2004. Over three days last week, 13 American soldiers were killed in combat in Baghdad. Even if Weldon uncovered a hidden stockpile of Iraqi chemical weapons tomorrow, he still couldn’t make voters forget the tragic facts of the war in Iraq.