Veep Stakes: Webb

He's getting lots of attention, but is he really the best choice? for the record, Webb is largely right about the reasons most southeners joined up and supported secession, but i'm not sure his arguement will play as well nationally as it did in his senate run, and could alienate many of Obama more liberal supporters, who won't get the nuances.

[rquoter] Webb's rebel roots: An affinity for Confederacy
By: David Mark
June 11, 2008 07:29 AM EST

Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting team will undoubtedly run across some quirky and potentially troublesome issues as it goes about the business of scouring the backgrounds of possible running mates. But it’s unlikely they’ll find one so curious as Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb’s affinity for the cause of the Confederacy.

Webb is no mere student of the Civil War era. He’s an author, too, and he’s left a trail of writings and statements about one of the rawest and most sensitive topics in American history.

He has suggested many times that while the Confederacy is a symbol to many of the racist legacy of slavery and segregation, for others it simply reflects Southern pride. In a June 1990 speech in front of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, posted on his personal website, he lauded the rebels’ “gallantry,” which he said “is still misunderstood by most Americans.”

Webb, a descendant of Confederate officers, also voiced sympathy for the notion of state sovereignty as it was understood in the early 1860s, and seemed to suggest that states were justified in trying to secede.

“Most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery,” he said. “Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution and that it had never been surrendered.”

Webb expanded on his sentiments in his well-received 2004 book, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” which portrays the Southern cause as at least understandable, if not wholly laudable.
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“The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday’s America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today,” he wrote. “The greatest disservice on this count has been the attempt by these revisionist politicians and academics to defame the entire Confederate Army in a move that can only be termed the Nazification of the Confederacy.” As in the Confederate Memorial speech, Webb suggests in his book that relatively few Southerners were slaveholders and that the war was fought over state sovereignty, which in the eyes of many at the time included the right to secede from the national government.

“The states that had joined the Union after the Revolution considered themselves independent political entities, much like the countries of Europe do today,” Webb wrote. “The 10th Amendment to the Constitution reserved to the states all rights not specially granted to the federal government, and in their view the states had thus retained their right to dissolve the federal relationship.”

There’s nothing scandalous in the paper trail, nothing that on its face would disqualify Webb from consideration for national office. Yet it veers into perilous waters since the slightest sign of support or statement of understanding of the Confederate cause has the potential to alienate African-Americans who are acutely sensitive to the topic.

Ron Walters, director of the African American Leadership Center at the University of Maryland and a professor of political science there, said Webb’s past writings and comments on the Confederacy could dampen enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket, should he appear on it.

“Unless he is able to explain it, it would raise some questions,” Walters said.

Edward H. Sebesta, co-author of the forthcoming “Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction” (University of Texas Press), said Webb’s views express an unhealthy regard for a political system that propped up and defended slavery.

His book, in fact, will cite Webb as an example of the mainstreaming of neo-Confederacy ideas into politics, said Sebesta, a widely cited independent historical researcher and author of the Anti-Neo-Confederate blog.

“I don’t think people have thought through the implications of how his ideas have racial overtones, even if they are inadvertent,” Sebesta said.

Webb’s office declined to comment for this story.

Kristian Denny Todd, who served as communications director in Webb’s 2006 Senate campaign, said his remarks about the Confederacy should be viewed in the context of paying tribute to his Scots-Irish Southern forbears and his military sense of duty.

“He doesn’t defend the war at all or the practice of slavery. He does make arguments about why the South seceded,” said Denny Todd. “The individual Confederate soldier, for the most part, did not own slaves. They weren’t wealthy landowners. Webb simply talks about why these men — mostly poor and white — stepped up and answered the call to serve.”

The distinctions Webb makes, however, tend not to receive a full airing in the heat of political debate.
Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s praise for Southern Partisan magazine, a journal sympathetic to the Confederate cause, helped delay his confirmation early in the Bush administration.

Other issues related to the Confederate legacy have proved equally thorny for politicians on both sides of the aisle. Questions surrounding the Confederate flag contributed to the defeat of Gov. David Beasley (R-S.C.) in 1998 and Gov. Roy Barnes (D-Ga.) in 2002.

In the 2004 Democratic presidential primary campaign, Democratic candidates awkwardly struggled with an NAACP-led economic boycott of South Carolina that was designed to force the removal of a Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds. Later in the campaign, Democrat Howard Dean drew criticism for claiming that he wanted to be the “candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”

Four years earlier, in his first presidential run, Sen. John McCain wavered about the Confederate flag removal issue in South Carolina but later apologized for his equivocation. In advance of the South Carolina primary this year, he issued a full-throated call to take down the divisive symbol, joining the Democratic presidential candidates who took the same position.

Webb’s comments about the Confederacy already received some airing during his successful 2006 upset victory over then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), when a smattering of news outlets and blogs noted his past statements and writing about the Civil War era.

Most prominent was a May 2006 Richmond Times-Dispatch article revisiting Webb’s Confederate Memorial speech, which ran about a month before Webb’s Democratic primary victory and proved to be a one-day story.

In a different context, Webb’s record might very well have made a bigger splash. But it was largely overshadowed by other developments. At the time, it was widely perceived that Webb had more damaging exposure from his 1979 Washingtonian magazine article titled “Women Can’t Fight,” in which Webb, an ex-Marine, described one of the Naval Academy’s coed dorms as “a horny woman’s dream” and argued against allowing women to take combat roles.

Then the New Republic and other news organizations ran stories suggesting that Allen had his own racial insensitivity problems, featuring recollections by long-ago acquaintances of racial slurs, a noose that hung in his law office and a high school fascination with Confederate paraphernalia that continued into adulthood.

Webb generally remained silent during Allen’s Confederacy controversy, focusing instead on the Republican’s support for the Iraq war and other issues. Three months later, Allen’s caught-on-video reference to a Webb campaign volunteer as “macaca” took center stage and set in place a campaign narrative that dominated media coverage until his narrow defeat.

Webb won overwhelming support from black voters — 85 percent — who accounted for 16 percent of all voters, according to exit polls.[/rquoter]

two more good articles follow below.

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2193217/

[rquoter]Anyone but Webb
Why Jim Webb would make an awful running mate.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, June 9, 2008, at 6:41 PM ET

It's anybody's guess who Barack Obama wants to be his running mate, but the chattering class has fallen hard for Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va.

On paper, Webb is the perfect choice for veep. Is Obama too closely identified with the left? Webb is a former Republican who served in the Reagan administration. (Washington Times editorial, June 7, 2008: "[Webb] offers Mr. Obama … an opportunity to blur some hard-left positions that are certain to alienate large blocs of voters.") Did Obama lose big in the Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia primaries? Webb's family roots lie in Appalachia, and he's a bona fide expert on the flinty Scots-Irish who settled there, having published a well-received book about them in 2004. (Eve Fairbanks, the New Republic, June 25, 2008, issue: "Like Obama, [Webb] is not simply a member of a group historically important to the party; he is someone who embodies that group, someone who has turned that group's narrative into his own.") Is Obama too cautious and detached? Webb is famous for speaking his mind. (Elizabeth Drew, the New York Review of Books, June 26, 2008 issue: "Like a boxer or a military man, Webb decides on his targets and charges straight at them.")

It's this last characteristic that's the problem. Webb, 62, is a bit of a blowhard. Because he's a writer, he's left a paper trail. In a 1979 Washingtonian article, "Women Can't Fight," Webb wrote that it had been a mistake to open the military service academies to women:

[Women's] presence at institutions dedicated to the preparation of men for combat command is poisoning that preparation. By attempting to sexually sterilize the Naval Academy environment in the name of equality, this country has sterilized the whole process of combat leadership training, and our military forces are doomed to suffer the consequences. … [T]he system has been objectified and neutered to the point it can no longer develop or measure leadership. …

Asked two years ago on Meet the Press whether he still believed this, Webb said, "I'm fully comfortable with the roles of women in the military today." He also said, "There's many pieces in this article that if I were a more mature individual I wouldn't have written." As late as 1992, though, Webb complained (in a New York Times op-ed that called the Tailhook investigation a "witch hunt"):

Military leaders are at best passive and at most often downright fearful when confronted by activists who allege that their culture is inherently oppressive toward females and that full assimilation of women depends only on a change in the mind-set of its misogynist leaders.

Such piggy statements won't endear Webb to the white female Hillary Clinton supporters who are threatening not to vote in the general election.

As Navy secretary during the Reagan administration, Webb was an ardent supporter of President Reagan's goal to create a "600-ship Navy," an ambitious benchmark whose urgency was unclear even at the height of the Cold War. By 1988, with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika program well underway, justification for the rapid buildup was dwindling fast. But when Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci removed 16 aging frigates from an administration budget request, Webb went ballistic and resigned, grousing to reporters on his way out that Carlucci failed to provide "leadership" or "strategic vision." Even Reagan was taken aback, writing in his diary, "I don't think Navy was sorry to see him go." This episode doesn't inspire confidence in Webb's qualities as a team player.

Now that Webb is a media darling, able to make even The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel swoon like a bobby soxer over his "blue-collar street cred," the dominant narrative has it that Webb has finally soothed the savage beast within. But in his new book, A Time To Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, Webb compares the U.S. Senate to "100 scorpions in a jar" and writes, "The jar needs to be shaken." No sooner was Webb elected in 2006 before he picked an utterly pointless fight with President Bush. At a post-election White House reception, Webb, who had ostentatiously declined to stand in a receiving line, was approached by the president, who asked, "How's your boy?" (Webb's son was serving in Iraq, and Webb had spoken of him often while campaigning against the war.) Webb replied, "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President." When Bush replied brusquely, "That isn't what I asked. How's your boy?" Webb replied even more brusquely, "That's between me and my boy, Mr. President." Four months later, Webb's aide Phillip Thompson was arrested carrying Webb's gun into the Capitol. Asked at a subsequent press conference whether he, Webb, was in the habit of obeying a strict handgun ban in the District of Columbia, Webb replied defiantly, "I'm not going to comment in any level in terms of how I provide for my own security." They may love that in Appalachia, but is it wise to place on the national ticket a candidate who virtually boasts about violating the law? Even Webb's friend (and mine) James Fallows has expressed polite trepidation about a Webb vice presidency.

There is much to admire in Webb. He's smart, he cares about ordinary people, and I hear his novels are excellent. (I've never read any.) He recently pulled off a coup in the Senate by outmaneuvering John McCain on a veterans' benefits bill. Webb may yet turn out to be a great senator. (Though that raises another problem: He only arrived there last year! The Obama ticket doesn't need another rookie, and, setting aside Webb's deep knowledge and experience in the area of military affairs, Webb is a government rookie.)

But Webb's personal history has demonstrated time and again that he can't play well with the other children. A volcanic temperament is endurable in a novelist or an opera singer. It is not endurable at the bottom of a national ticket. Nominating Webb isn't worth the risk that he'll alienate important constituencies, embarrass Obama, or break with him outright, as John Nance Garner did with Franklin Roosevelt. He's trouble, and Obama's already had too much of that.

Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.[/rquoter]

 

James Fallows

[rquoter]Simple comment on Jim Webb as veep

29 May 2008 01:49 am

Since I am the last person within reach of a computer to weigh in about Jim Webb as a running mate for Barack Obama, I'll make up for the lateness with the simplicity of my point:

- Until 7pm November 4, 2008, Webb might well be a very strong addition to the ticket.

- On November 5, the troubles -- for Webb -- would begin.

About Webb's value up through election day, I realize that there's an argument: Would his credentials on national security and as an undoubtedly tough southern Populist offset, among other problems, the perceived slight to older women among Hillary Clinton's base? It's like a vector problem in physics. My belief is that, purely as a matter of electoral math, Webb would help Obama much more than he would hurt. But I know that's a judgment call, with countless ramifications to argue out.

The problem is what would happen if he did help Obama win. Having first met Webb nearly thirty years ago -- and having co-written an Atlantic cover story with him, and having broken my rule against giving money to political candidates two years ago when he began his Senate run -- I can't imagine a job he would enjoy less than the vice presidency.

Jim Webb has arranged his life so as to maximize his intellectual and personal independence, and minimize the things he "has" to do and the bosses he must answer to. Novelist, essayist, journalist, movie-maker -- through the two decades before his Senate race he's been his own boss as much as possible, and has clearly relished saying exactly what he believes. The federal government office that most nicely matches his previous life is the one he now holds: as a U.S. Senator. Especially a Senator of the model Webb has described as his ideal: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There are still lots of things Webb "has" to do -- fundraising, constituent service, party efforts -- to maintain this role. But in the big scheme of things, not that many.

The federal government office that least matches Webb's lifetime path is the vice presidency. Some wonderful people have held the job, plus some terrible ones. The ones who are happiest are those who can bide their time, bite their tongue, fly to foreign-dignitary funerals, and stick absolutely to the company line.

Webb -- who has not endorsed either Clinton or Obama - has often said during his recent VP mentioning-boomlet that he thinks he could help a new Democratic president best by staying in the Senate. (And holding that Virginia seat for the Democrats.) Whether or not that answer is coy, I think it's absolutely correct. He's a great person for the Senate; the Senate is a great place for him, and I hope it will be for a long time to come. [/rquoter]

 

Tom weighs in...