Yahoo! News! has a story! about Democrat! Jim Webb!
“I’m not running against Hillary Clinton,” Jim Webb told me this week, when I tried to draw him out on the presumed Democratic front-runner. “I’m not even running at the moment, and she isn’t, either.”
That’s all technically true, but Webb’s recent announcement that he was taking the first official step toward a 2016 presidential bid nonetheless set off a round of commentary about the contrast between him and his former Senate colleague. On the FiveThirtyEight blog, Harry Enten concluded that Webb could be “the ideal Clinton challenger.” Al Hunt of Bloomberg News said Webb could be Clinton’s “worst nightmare,” while William Greider wrote in The Nation that Webb might become “a pivotal messenger” for the left.
Such predictions are easily made and seldom remembered. They don’t tell you much about whether Webb, who has as varied an experience in public service and foreign policy as anybody else out there, can really mount the kind of semi-serious challenge to Clinton that Bill Bradley did to Al Gore in 2000, or whether he’ll end up being something more like this year’s Wesley Clark.
Webb has some things going for him, starting with unusual courage for a politician. He went through Vietnam, and he loves his second career as a writer of books and screenplays, and those two things have always seemed to make him more impervious to the consequences of conviction than most other politicians, who cling to their seats with a kind of irrational tenacity.
To Webb, there are worse things in life than losing an election or even being drummed out of your party, and that counts for a lot when you have a looming presence like Clinton who’s going to scare away most of her more obvious challengers.
And despite what he may say about not comparing himself to Clinton, Webb has the beginnings of a two-pronged progressive critique. On economic policy, Webb will say the party — personified by the Clintons — has been too much in the grasp of big financial institutions and too little beholden to wage earners. He’s a little like Elizabeth Warren this way, only with more backwoods steel than Cambridge preachiness.
He’s also a sharp critic of the foreign policies pursued by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which he says have led us into wars — and kept us in them — without clear objectives or strategies. This puts him squarely at odds with Clinton, the former secretary of state, who was known to be one of the administration’s more ardent interventionists.
All that will sound pretty enticing to liberals looking for some viable alternative, and it should. But then you come around to Webb’s long-held and thoughtful views on the party’s core theme of social justice. And here’s where that whole savior-of-the-left thing gets a little complicated.
Democrats, as you probably know, have been losing white voters, and especially white male voters, by pretty staggering margins in recent elections, particularly in rural parts of the country. According to exit polling, the party’s candidates won only 34 percent of white men last November; the 30-point spread between the two parties was the largest in 20 years.
Go to any activist meeting or liberal dinner party, and chances are you will hear a pretty consistent narrative to explain this trend. Basically, it goes like this: White men, and especially Southern white men, are just inherently racist and afraid of social change, and so they’re easily manipulated by Republicans and have turned their backs on Obama. But that’s really OK, because the demographics of the country are rapidly shifting, and very soon there will be enough black and Latino voters — not to mention women of all races — to tip the balance of any national election into the Democratic column.
Webb finds this theory downright offensive. In his view, Democrats have focused so much of their rhetoric and their programs on racial minorities that they’ve basically forgotten about all those white, working-class voters who face some of the same economic hardships but feel like all the focus is on the poor.
“I think this is where Democrats screw up, you know?” Webb told me. “I think that they have kind of unwittingly used this group, white working males, as a whipping post for a lot of their policies. And then when they react, they say they’re being racist.”
Back in 2010, under a Wall Street Journal headline that referred to the “myth of white privilege,” Webb called for an end to federal affirmative action programs that aren’t need-based, saying they no longer helped African-Americans and only served to embitter white voters. More recently, including in our conversation, he has obliquely assailed “interest groups” that divide the parties by race.
Twice I asked Webb which interest groups he had in mind, but he demurred. “I think it’s pretty clear, if you look at the policies of the Democratic Party, how they shape their strategic agenda,” Webb said. I was left to conclude that he was talking about the influence of civil rights or pro-immigration groups (which seemed odd, really, since in reality those groups have about a tenth of the power that teachers, trial lawyers and organized seniors exercise over Democratic politics).
Before anyone on the left attacks Webb as a former Reaganite and closet conservative, it’s worth remembering that he isn’t saying anything all that different from what Bill Clinton told the liberal base on cultural issues in 1992. In fact, as a candidate, Barack Obama made a similar case for winning back white voters.
The thing is, both of those men had the luxury of running after their party had lost consecutive presidential elections, and when activists were willing to hear some hard truths if they added up to a winning strategy. This primary season will be a lot more like 2000, when the party’s liberal base was nearly erupting with pent-up fury from having to endure eight years of governing and all the ideological compromise that comes with it.
The last thing liberals want to hear right now (and especially after the recent uproar over police brutality) is that they’re too focused on racial equality and aren’t being solicitous enough to rural white men.
Breitbart adds:
In a 2010 Wall Street Journal column, Webb noted that affirmative action programs have “expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.”
“These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived,” he wrote. “Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.”
When the mainstream press and Democrats were rushing to judgments about Michael Brown’s death and politicizing it before all the facts were out, Webb was one of the few Democrats who said liberals should be very careful about rushing to judgments. Webb also said that Obama’s executive amnesty, another issue Democrats have used to try to gin up the Hispanic vote while dividing the country, would be an unprecedented overreach of presidential authority.
Because salad-bowl ethnic interest groups dominate politics on the left, Webb has no shot at winning the nomination should he enter the contest. But because he was against the Iraq War before Howard Dean and spoke about income inequality long before anyone knew that Elizabeth Warren had claimed to be “Native American” throughout her career, Webb, I argued, would be the candidate Hillary Clinton should fear the most.
Robert W. Patterson adds:
Ten years ago in his only nonfiction book, Born Fighting, James Webb came to the defense of red-state America, standing unapologetically for the marginalized Scots-Irish stock that heavily populates the South and Midwest. On the wrong side of the cultural divide since his Naval Academy days in the 1960s, the decorated Marine of the Vietnam War identified blue-collar workers, the military services, the Bible Belt, and country music as the heart and soul of America.
Two years later, Webb upset Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia. But the moment Webb took his seat in the U.S. Senate, the quintessential Southern partisan lost his William Wallace-like fighting spirit and became a reliable cog in the Democratic machine, pleasing his tony Arlington cosmopolitan neighbors, not his embattled Appalachian country kin. As the Daily Caller’s W. James Antle noted, Webb may have talked like Pat Buchanan but voted like Harry Reid on racial preferences, immigration policy, Wall Street bailouts, and ObamaCare. Perhaps sensing the disconnect, he chose not to run for re-election in 2012.
Now, in the wake of the midterms, Webb seems to be reverting to his better Scots-Irish side, blasting the Democrats last week for turning “into a party of interest groups.” Having just thrown his hat into the 2016 presidential contest, he charged: “The Democratic Party has lost the message that made it such a great party for so many years, and that message was: Take care of working people… who have no voice in the corridors or power, no matter their race, ethnicity or any other reason.”
Webb, of course, is lifting up the Democrats of long ago, particularly FDR, whose New Deal brought the South into the 20th century. As Born Fighting recounts, nation-building initiatives from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Tennessee Valley Authority delivered good jobs to the region, ending the meager existence that Southern families like his own — his mother was born in “utter poverty” in Arkansas — had struggled with for generations. Especially resonating with Webb: Roosevelt’s transformation of American industry into the Arsenal of Democracy, laying the foundation of victories not only in World War II but also the Cold War, conflicts that needed Webb’s rebel-yelling folk to win.
The consummate patriot surely knows that his economic and cultural populism will send the adversarial feminists, multiculturalists, and environmentalists who hijacked the Democratic Party a generation ago into a collective mass seizure.
Which means that although Webb has little chance of capturing the 2016 Democratic nomination, the winner of the Navy Cross and Silver Star in Vietnam could generate a lot of trouble for Hillary Clinton. As Tony Lee of Breitbart News observes, the former boxer — who battled with Oliver North in the finals of their Naval Academy tournament — could tie up Hillary better than any other Democrat, jabbing her to the right on cultural issues, and to her left on economic ones.
While that would help Republicans, the GOP would be shortsighted to limit the value of Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy to sabotaging Hillary. Webb’s voice and message offer so much more to a party seeking to build upon its midterm gains and reverse its muted performance in recent presidential elections. His advocacy for the American heartland, whose families sacrifice a disproportionate number of sons to fight our wars, would resonate not merely with red-state voters but also their kin in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
Moreover, Republicans should adopt Webb’s clear preference for New Dealers who valued family-wage jobs over today’s Great Society Democrats demanding more welfare and diversity. Indeed, both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan achieved their landslides by keeping faith with Americans in Webb’s orbit, whether as part of Nixon’s “great silent majority” or as Reagan Democrats.
The GOP could also learn from Webb’s prescient reservations about the Iraq War. He considered the 2003 invasion a costly blunder pushed by neoconservative intellectuals — sometimes called “chickenhawks”— who ignored strategic military advice, and a distraction from the long-term challenges posed by China, Russia, and Iran. …
Webb seems unaware that the New Deal architects, especially FDR’s labor secretary Francis Perkins, were the original social conservatives, and that the marriage and baby booms that their policies facilitated bolstered the emergence of the high-wage economy during and after World War II in America — and in the South. Nor does he seem to see the links between abortion-on-demand and gender-based affirmative action, articles of faith for Democrats, and the waning of America’s 20th-century golden age.
Nonetheless, Webb’s bold defense of the neglected working-middle class amid roaring stock markets would make good chapters in the GOP playbook for the 114th Congress — and the 2016 presidential contest. Indeed, if the party of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan listened more to fighting Scots-Irish patriots than to libertarian and neoconservative policy wonks, Republicans would discover that reclaiming the red-blooded Americans that James Webb once identified as the “secret GOP weapon” could re-create a center-right governing coalition that would seal their political power for a generation.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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