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While I was busy scooping the rest of the blogosphere with my precision commentary on the quasi-State of the Union address, I seem to have wildly missed the consensus on Bobby Jindal’s Republican response.

My first take was that Jindal delivered a competent back-to-basics conservative rejoinder to President Obama. Sure, his delivery was a little aw-shucks woody (Greg Veis at The Plank compared him to Kenneth from 30 Rock, and CJR rounds up a few other choice descriptors here). But as Veis goes on to say in the same post, the deck is always stacked against SOTU rebuttals:

“You arrive onscreen directly after the president, and the optics are terrible. Instead of addressing a joint session, you’re hanging out by yourself a room fit for a Bing Crosby Christmas special. Also, you’re consigned from the get-go into a defensive position, making it more difficult to pounce effectively. And by the time the president’s done speaking, the viewing public has endured about an hour of political oratory–well beyond most right-thinking people’s threshold. It takes a truly remarkable performance to stand out that late in the night.”

Against those long odds, I think the Jindal’s delivery was solid. He was folksy, accessible, upbeat, and thoroughly American. He scored a rhetorical victory by (somewhat opportunistically) criticizing the federal response Hurricane Katrina, putting a conservative face on what has been a signature liberal issue.

But the criticism of the speech  wasn’t limited to its rhetorical flair. Commentators both left and right thought Jindal wanted much in the way of substance and failed to present even the outlines of a forward-looking alternative Obama’s policies. The most impassioned case came from David Brooks, talking with PBS:

I can’t rightly disagree with Brooks on the merits. As I said, Jindal’s response was boilerplate Reagan-conservatism. He did, rightly, chastise Bush era Republicans for their own fiscal hypocrisy, but beyond that, his prescription for what ails the Republicans is essentially bloodletting. Atone for your sins and get back to basics. That’s a typical conservative response to adversity, but as Brooks rightly points out, its hardly a clear vision for the future that a panicked and pissed off American people can get behind.

I guess where I disagree with Brooks is in his assumption that Jindal could have been expected to accomplish anything more. Considering the low-leverage nature of SOTU opposition responses, the wild popularity of the President, the massive Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the fact that the stimulus package is law and the passage of rest of the President’s economic agenda a fait accompli, what exactly could Jindal have reasonably been expected to accomplish?

I think the Republicans saw this as an opportunity to distance themselves from the Bush era a bit (hence the Katrina-mongering and the scolding of congressional GOPers for their proflagate spending) and introduce the American people to a young Republican star–and one with the kind of complicated cultural identity that is all the rage now in college lit classes and electoral politics.

So I don’t Jindal’s performance was a disaster, nor will it hurt his rise through the ranks of the Republican party. Even if the response was subpar, do the Republicans actually want their boy wonder to peak a month into Barack Obama’s first term? 2012 is still a long way off. Jindal still more or less delivers the rhetorical goods when he’s away from the teleprompter:

If Jindal is going to be a contender in 2012, this is, almost literally, round 1. The fact that he didn’t knock out the sitting President of the United States is far less significant than the fact that he answered the bell.