There are things that Jim Webb has said and done over the years that have rubbed me the wrong way, but better him than Hillary. He's an economic populist who is to the left of Hillary's foreign policy and someone who resides in Glenn Greenwald's Hall of Fame for integrity. That alone makes him preferrable to HC, but he will be branded by the cultural left as a cultural conservative, a Reagan Democrat, which means that he's not really a member in good standing of the Democratic tribe. It's not a tribe that many people want to belong to or care about anymore. I certainly don't, anyway.
I've written here with intense feelings of nausea ad nauseam about how the Democrats have alienated themselves from Main Street, from the people who talk about politics in churches and bars, in barber shops and union halls. In other words exactly who the Democrats have until recently represented against the interests of the moneyed elite. A guy like Jim Webb will have a lot of Main Street appeal, and he's right on the issues where HC just is not. HC is just another neoliberal elite.
In other words Webb is exactly what the country needs, someone who can transcend the culture war and who points the country toward the real issues, not the distracting ones. He's a Democrat who can speak credibily to what is legitimate in populist resentments without being a Tea Party moron.
Noah Millman has some intereesting things to say about how he might handle this kind of branding by the cultural left (my underscores):
So what can he do to make it more likely that he is read as challenging Clinton on foreign policy and economic policy primarily, which I believe is what he wants?
I think – and I admit, I’m in danger of committing the pundit’s fallacy here – that he needs to get out in front of this kind of positioning with counter-positioning.
He can’t simply disavow his past positions on these issues – first of all because in some cases he still believes them (in other cases, not), and second because that would vitiate a primary source of his appeal as someone who actually stands by what he believes. Rather, he needs to make it clear that he’s not running on them – that, in fact, he’s in part running against them as organizing principles of our politics.
He needs to say, in effect, that he used to be a Republican because the GOP seemed like the party of people like him: a Scots-Irish military man. But when he left the GOP, it wasn’t just because he’d decided its policies were wrong – though they were. He also left because he no longer was willing to respond to that kind of appeal, an appeal to identity. Because that appeal made it hard for him to see the ways in which the GOP’s actual policies were detrimental to ordinary Americans.
Heck, he can quote Thomas Frank if he likes. The point of saying all this is to say further: and I didn’t join the Democratic Party in order to adopt a new identity, or to keep fighting the culture war but now from the other side. There are issues, he can say, on which my views have changed. And there are issues where I respect that my party and I don’t agree 100%. And there are also issues where I will try to convince my party to change. (For that matter, there are issues where Webb didn’t need to change to be in the mainstream of the Democratic Party – like abortion – and issues where Webb is more liberal than many Democrats – like penal reform and executive power.) But I am not running to make the Democratic Party more appealing to people who look like me, or who have my cultural background. I became a Democrat because I realized that the Democratic Party already held the best promise of standing for ordinary Americans, and for rejecting the kinds of policies, foreign and domestic, that have done them so much harm. And I’m running for President to make sure the Democratic nominee keeps that promise.
Nothing is more important in our national politics than pushing back against the country's drift toward an authoritarian plutocracy. Elizabeth Warren is the political left's darling to play this role, and I would certainly vote for her before I would vote for HC if she should run. but even if EW were elected, she's an outsider, as Obama and Carter were, and would likely be as ineffective as they were. Webb understands how Washington works, and he will have credibility with the saner operatives in the Deep State in a way that Warren could not.
But too many Democrats in the primaries will think it's more important to get a woman in the oval office or that it's a step backward to get another white male in it when a qualified woman is available. That's what gets them juiced up--issues like wealth distribution, imperial foreign policy, and the surveillance state are important, but they are a snore compared to identity politics issues. That's precisely why the Democrats lose the "little" elections as they did earlier this month. The people on Main Street who actually vote don't like or identify with tribal Democrats. I usually vote for them because there is no saner alternative, but I don't identify with them.
I would love a gig as this guy's speechwriter. Or better Millman should apply for the job. And focus on the themes underscored above. If there were in the 80s Reagan Democrats, let's create a new political category for the next decade: Jim Webb Republicans, Republicans--even the saner Tea Party types--who find themselves supporting a straight-talking, populist Democrat. Now if some billionaire would adopt him, Webb just might have a chance.