Is Jim Webb the Anti-Clinton?

William Haskins said:

peddle your ageist bullshit elsewhere, peter pan...

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CassandraW said:

peddle your the-best-is-yet-to-be, I'm-not-dead-yet bullshit elsewhere, methuselah

I'm sure a contender or two will emerge. The question is whether they'll pose a serious threat to Clinton in the primary race.

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Karen Junker said:

Gah. One is so torn -- on the one hand, a woman for president. I mean, I voted for Dixy Lee Ray (first woman governor of WA), who was a Democrat but who wound up alienating many liberals because of some of her policies on energy and the environment, etc. So these supporters of Clinton have some thinking to do.

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Webb was a Marine who boxed Oliver North and served in Vietnam. He churned out interesting, if occasionally overwritten, books. “Fields of Fire” was one of the best ever written about Vietnam. And before he became a politician, he said things about liberals that make “Macaca” sound like a term of endearment.

“Jane Fonda can kiss my ass,” he once told a radio interviewer of Hanoi Jane. “I wouldn’t walk across the street to watch her slit her wrist.”

Bill Clinton could kiss Webb’s ass too. “Every time I see him salute a Marine,” he said of our smarmy 42nd president, “it infuriates me.”

When Clinton finally left office in 2001, Webb gave him a goodbye kick in the pants on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page: “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.”

For over 20 years, Webb said he wouldn’t shake John Kerry’s hand over the Massachusetts senator’s anti-Vietnam activities. He resigned as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy because the Gipper wasn’t spending enough on national defense.

Webb extolled the virtues of Southern culture as “the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether” and the biggest “obstacle to the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness.”

He even honored the Confederate war dead: “I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery.”

Webb called affirmative action “a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/26/americas-most-disappointing-senator/#ixzz3D45vF1rm
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That 2006 Webb campaign had the feel of a forced march, a mood that very much reflected the candidate himself. His public appearances had all the spontaneous joy of a line inspection at Camp Lejeune. Webb spoke with a flat, matter-of-fact voice, always in earnest tones. He possessed none of the innate muscle memory of a natural pol—the ready banter, the easy saunter, the reflexive hand-to-shoulder intimacy. His campaign smile usually seemed the product of considerable exertion.

Webb’s moment was short-lived. The heart of his Senate term, the middle two years, came at a time when Democrats, heady with electoral triumph (owing at least partly to the recruitment of such centrist figures as Webb), were governing insistently from the left. Webb personally warned President Obama that the all-out push for health-care reform would be “ a disaster” for the party. Webb’s sort of Democrat fell from favor within the party during the course of one senatorial cycle, and became a vanishing breed by last November.

When Webb declared himself out of a re-election run, it was widely supposed that he had little chance of winning anyway. This is probably true. His likely opponent in 2012 would have been George Allen, who only narrowly lost to Webb in 2006 even after running a campaign that was a classic of self-immolation. But Webb’s closest friends believe that it wasn’t the fight Webb dreaded, it was the prospect of another victory—and having to spend another term in the Senate.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...er-ends-peter-j-boyer-on-the-real-reason.html

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