Low-Watt GOP Response

At least the President got a split screen. By the time Republican Congressman J.C. Watts began his response to the President's State of the Union address, most of the audience had switched to the O.J. verdict. Those who stayed for Watts got a plain vanilla dose of the traditional Republican message: reducing the power of government. "We believe first of all that the state of the union really isn't determined in Washington, D.C. It never has been and it never will be," Watts intoned. "But for a long time the federal government in Washington has been grabbing too much power and too much authority over all of the people. And it is those people, it is all of us who decide the real state of the union." Sprinkling in a few hometown Americans, a couple of homilies about family values and a reference to the hopes raised by Martin Luther King, Jr., Watts wrapped up a low-key, indeed low-watt, response for a television audience growing smaller by the sentence.