Peter Boyer: The strangest Senate race of the year is Virginia's
... The unifying theme of [Senate Democratic candidate James] Webb's fiction, his popular history of the Scots-Irish, and, especially, his opinion journalism has been that of put-upon people (the military, Southerners, white men) suffering the smug disregard of a hostile élite. In the Webb reckoning, much blame resides in nineteen-sixties-era liberalism, which has influenced the Democratic Party for a generation. That he now finds himself a Democratic candidate in a pivotal U.S. Senate race is a development that proceeds, by its own stubborn logic, from this insistent theme. Webb's candidacy is partly a quest to reclaim the Democratic Party for what he sees as a natural constituency.
When Webb deployed to Vietnam as a raw second lieutenant, in 1969, he had no particular political leanings. His mission was to protect the tactical space in front of him, and to bring back as many of his men as possible. Returning home, he felt that he and others like him had been driven from a Democratic Party that had, he believed, sacrificed a broad populist tradition to the passions of the intemperate margins. Webb proved to be a natural polemicist. He denounced "the ones who fled" the war, and inveighed against the acts of the Watergate Congress, which, elected after Richard Nixon's disgrace, in 1974, halted funding to South Vietnam, hastening its doom. (The plight of the Vietnamese boat people came to have particular meaning for Webb. A girl named Hong Le was among those fished from the water by the U.S. Navy and transported to this country. She became a lawyer, practicing in Washington, and a year ago she became Webb's third wife. She travels with him on the campaign trail, and is expecting their first child in December.) Webb declared Jimmy Carter's blanket pardoning of draft resisters a rank betrayal and an abuse of Presidential power. When President Clinton left office, he wrote, "It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career."
Webb reserved a good portion of his pique for the "activist Left and cultural Marxists" and their efforts to effect "what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness." He saw the Pentagon's prolonged investigation of the Navy Tailhook sexual-abuse scandal in the nineteen-nineties as a political witch hunt, driven by a radical-feminist agenda to undermine the masculine culture of the military. Affirmative action, he posited, quickly became a means of victimizing white men through "state-sponsored racism."
In "Born Fighting," Webb developed the thesis that has become the rationale for his Senate run. Democrats, he argued, had foolishly written off the Southern white male, in the mistaken belief that it was a necessary cost of the Party's leadership in the civil-rights era. Southern rednecks thus became a convenient symbol of all that impeded progress. "And for the last fifty years," he wrote, "the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America's future growth." In alienating the South, Democrats ceded the region to Republican strategists, who took the trouble to cater to its culture. Webb, who had been a nominal Democrat in his youth, knew this from personal experience. According to Robert Timberg's book "The Nightingale's Song," Webb was recruited into the Reagan Administration by a Republican official who had once heard him being interviewed on the radio. The interviewer, talking to Webb about "Fields of Fire," mentioned that Jane Fonda was in town and asked Webb whether he might wish to meet her. "Jane Fonda can kiss my ass," Webb replied. "I wouldn't go across the street to watch her slit her wrist." The Republican official, John Herrington, who later became Reagan's personnel chief, championed Webb's appointment, in 1984, as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs and, in 1987, as Secretary of the Navy.
Webb also believes from experience that the Republican hold on the South is not unshakable. His own political remigration began when he was working on "Born Fighting" and realized that his culture's natural home is the party of Andrew Jackson. His people don't hate the government; they hate governmental intrusion. It is the government's job to build dams and highways, not the perfect society.
"It's a bottom-up culture that has been manipulated," he told me one day. "Really, that's one of the big reasons that I decided to go ahead and do this--test the theory, because I believe it."
This is, of course, a thought that has occurred to other Democrats. It's what Howard Dean was trying to get at in 2003, while campaigning for the Presidency, when he said, in a characteristic display of unfortunate phrasing, "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." Dean's point (and Webb's) is that Democrats cannot succeed in the South until the Party broadens its tent, becoming less insistent on such matters of current Party orthodoxy as abortion, gun control, and gay marriage. "You know, it's been a hard thing to get through the heads of many Democrats," Webb says. "They have to rethink a piece of something that's become fundamental to them, which has hurt them in ways they don't understand."...
Read entire article at New Yorker
When Webb deployed to Vietnam as a raw second lieutenant, in 1969, he had no particular political leanings. His mission was to protect the tactical space in front of him, and to bring back as many of his men as possible. Returning home, he felt that he and others like him had been driven from a Democratic Party that had, he believed, sacrificed a broad populist tradition to the passions of the intemperate margins. Webb proved to be a natural polemicist. He denounced "the ones who fled" the war, and inveighed against the acts of the Watergate Congress, which, elected after Richard Nixon's disgrace, in 1974, halted funding to South Vietnam, hastening its doom. (The plight of the Vietnamese boat people came to have particular meaning for Webb. A girl named Hong Le was among those fished from the water by the U.S. Navy and transported to this country. She became a lawyer, practicing in Washington, and a year ago she became Webb's third wife. She travels with him on the campaign trail, and is expecting their first child in December.) Webb declared Jimmy Carter's blanket pardoning of draft resisters a rank betrayal and an abuse of Presidential power. When President Clinton left office, he wrote, "It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career."
Webb reserved a good portion of his pique for the "activist Left and cultural Marxists" and their efforts to effect "what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness." He saw the Pentagon's prolonged investigation of the Navy Tailhook sexual-abuse scandal in the nineteen-nineties as a political witch hunt, driven by a radical-feminist agenda to undermine the masculine culture of the military. Affirmative action, he posited, quickly became a means of victimizing white men through "state-sponsored racism."
In "Born Fighting," Webb developed the thesis that has become the rationale for his Senate run. Democrats, he argued, had foolishly written off the Southern white male, in the mistaken belief that it was a necessary cost of the Party's leadership in the civil-rights era. Southern rednecks thus became a convenient symbol of all that impeded progress. "And for the last fifty years," he wrote, "the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America's future growth." In alienating the South, Democrats ceded the region to Republican strategists, who took the trouble to cater to its culture. Webb, who had been a nominal Democrat in his youth, knew this from personal experience. According to Robert Timberg's book "The Nightingale's Song," Webb was recruited into the Reagan Administration by a Republican official who had once heard him being interviewed on the radio. The interviewer, talking to Webb about "Fields of Fire," mentioned that Jane Fonda was in town and asked Webb whether he might wish to meet her. "Jane Fonda can kiss my ass," Webb replied. "I wouldn't go across the street to watch her slit her wrist." The Republican official, John Herrington, who later became Reagan's personnel chief, championed Webb's appointment, in 1984, as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs and, in 1987, as Secretary of the Navy.
Webb also believes from experience that the Republican hold on the South is not unshakable. His own political remigration began when he was working on "Born Fighting" and realized that his culture's natural home is the party of Andrew Jackson. His people don't hate the government; they hate governmental intrusion. It is the government's job to build dams and highways, not the perfect society.
"It's a bottom-up culture that has been manipulated," he told me one day. "Really, that's one of the big reasons that I decided to go ahead and do this--test the theory, because I believe it."
This is, of course, a thought that has occurred to other Democrats. It's what Howard Dean was trying to get at in 2003, while campaigning for the Presidency, when he said, in a characteristic display of unfortunate phrasing, "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." Dean's point (and Webb's) is that Democrats cannot succeed in the South until the Party broadens its tent, becoming less insistent on such matters of current Party orthodoxy as abortion, gun control, and gay marriage. "You know, it's been a hard thing to get through the heads of many Democrats," Webb says. "They have to rethink a piece of something that's become fundamental to them, which has hurt them in ways they don't understand."...