Jim Webb for Vice President?

Posted June 3, 2008 Comments(0)

Jim Webb spoke to the National Press Club yesterday, just a block from my office, but I couldn’t attend because I was occupied with Dick Cheney’s egregious address to the same at roughly the same time. Nevertheless, here is an eyewitness account of Webb’s speech to the Press Club.

-Webb might not be Obama’s choice for VP, but he’s going to be one of his most important surrogates on the campaign trail. His biography is too compelling to pass up–and he knows it. He referred several times both to his and his father’s service in the military. He’s going to be the go-to guy whenever McCain dings Obama on national security issues.

-If he WAS picked for VP, Webb would bring some rich, creamy gravitas to the Democratic ticket. He talked about his desire to be an “intellectual politician” in the model of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The focus of his speech was foreign policy, and he mostly aligned himself with Obama’s views: we need a “diplomatic umbrella” in the Middle East, we need to compete with China, etc., etc.

-Webb could use some of the hope Obama’s selling. His presentation was gloomy, especially regarding the economy. He did John Edwards one better by talking about “three Americas,” with a “permanent underclass” oppressed by new robber barons. As a solution, he proposed a “Jacksonian democracy” that will take on an “unfairly entrenched aristocracy”–an idea that could be simplified into a major Obama theme. A redux of “the people versus the powerful,” only now the people have the government on their side.

-One last point: Webb said he once favored the draft, and he still spoke about it nostalgically. At first I thought that was a big blow to his VP dreams, but then I remembered that one of Obama’s big themes is “national service.” And in today’s NYT, Bill Kristol hit Obama for not including the military under that designation. Could Webb protect Obama’s flank on that subject? Obama wouldn’t have to talk about the scary draft, but Webb could cover him by praising military service to high heaven.

-Webb apparently has three tattoos. If elected, would he be our first tattooed VP since Millard Fillmore?

Of all the choices out there, Webb is the most interesting. He’s more daring than General Wes Clark because Webb is not close to the Clintons, he has led a colorful personal life, and he might offend some feminists in the party. On the other hand, as the eyewitness points out, he’s got a great life story to tell, is from a key battleground state [Virginia], and his status as a former Republican and Navy Secretary under Ronald Reagan coincides neatly with Senator Obama’s post-partisan appeal.

Read More at 3BlueDudes.com