Ronnie and Jim Webb…
Centrist Anger vs Liberal Hope
All this buzz about Jim Webb being Obama’s running mate is annoying me. I get it: He offers military experience and is a fellow New New Democrat. But the guy is a centrist, former-Republican; a freshman Senator with a staff stocked with amateurs. Webb’snot the man Obama wants as his Cheney, his Gore.
I trudged through Elizabeth Drew’s admiring Webb profile in the NYRB. Drew says Jim Webb can write, ”Fields of Fire [Webb's 1978 Vietnam novel] has often been called the best book about Vietnam and likened to the war writing of Norman Mailer and Stephen Crane.” In an interview, Drew found Webb friendly despite his prickly reputation. And one must respect Webb’s focus on reforming the GI Bill and veteran care, and his pushing for a GI Bill of Rights.
Yet by the end of Drew’s piece I didn’t feel like the guy has the same vision for America as a liberal like myself, or Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) for that matter. After all, “Webb defends the Vietnam War as strategically necessary,” says Drew. Webb also wrote a famous essay called “Women Can’t Fight” against allowing women to serve in the military—hardly equal opportunity stuff.
Also this week, TNR’s Eva Fairbanks weighs in with a long Webb piece:
Jim Webb’s anger would seem to make him an especially powerful vice-presidential choice for the refined and white-working-class-alienating Barack Obama. But the researchers vetting Obama’s shortlist must be vexed by a question: Is Jim Webb a vessel for the kind of righteous indignation the Democrats need–or is he just too angry to be vice president?
Is “anger” without the liberal views to back it up really what we want? On the war, Webb is great, but on everything else he’s to the right of Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and the Democrtic Party. Webb’s centrist anger contradicts Obama’s hopeful liberal optimism.
TNR writes about Webb’s book about his Scot-Irish ancestry:
Their hero was William Wallace, who “learned early to hate–and to fight–the local English authorities.” In the sixteenth century, writes Webb, the Scots-Irish could be found taking part in “unending blood feuds” in Scotland; by the seventeenth century, they were writing “no surrender” in their own blood during the siege of Londonderry in Ireland; by the eighteenth, they had become “daring moonshine runners” in the colonies; in the nineteenth, they were peopling the “frequently impatient, always outnumbered … wildly and recklessly Celtic” Confederate army against the “plodding” Union force; and, by the twentieth, they were mounting KKK rallies out of “bitterness at being dominated.”
The KKK and Braveheart?
I’ve spent time in Webb’s home base of southwest Virginia. It’s a beautiful place of dense boreal forest, rambling farm fields, and stubby mountains, filled with hard-nosed folk who love work, dogs, fishing, bluegrass (underrated music for sure), and hate commercial development and yuppies. But it’s homogenous, not cosmopolitan like the rest of America. TNR:
Lower-class whites, he believes, have every right to be as angry at Republicans after Bush as they were at Democrats after Johnson. “He was right,” Webb tells me of Barack Obama’s infamous comment that rural whites are “bitter.” “They’re mad.”
The good thing about Hillary was that she got the white-working class vote without betraying her New York, east coast liberal base. Meanwhile, a “mad, bitter” ex-Republican like Webb does not translate to working-class votes:
They [Obama and Webb] appeal to the same voters, wine-track Democrats who come out in unprecedented droves to vote for a black man or a hillbilly white because they want their party to be bigger than themselves. While you’d expect Webb to attract poor, rural beer-trackers, in his 2006 Senate race he didn’t do any better than the previous Democratic candidate had among Appalachian voters in southwestern Virginia; instead, he was propelled to victory by Northern Virginia suburbanites–Obama’s base.
Webb is hardly the “fellow outsider,” as TNR calls him, Obama—or America—needs. He’s not populist enough to get blue collar votes and he has written negatively about women. Or, Webb offers no help with the voters Obama has yet to fully convert. Obama should chooses a populist, someone with a little more national experience than one Senate term.
TAGS: Barack Obama, beer, BOOKS, dog, Hillary, Hillary Clinton, Music, NATO, New York, NPR, obama, Politics, Race, Republicans, war
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