Jim Webb's 'Culture' War
Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, feeling disrespected at CNN's Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, says he's dropping out to consider running as an independent. That's his right, but I wonder whether anyone will notice.
It is well known that Webb, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, former secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan and author of numerous books, has two flaws for an aspiring politician: He doesn't care much for campaigning and he really hates asking people for money.
As a result his polling numbers hover around an unimpressive 1 percent.
And, as we saw on the Las Vegas debate stage, he really hates to be ignored when he has more to say. Instead of using his valuable airtime to give millions of television viewers a good first-impression of himself, he wasted time by bellyaching that CNN's moderator Anderson Cooper was not giving him enough time.
Note to aspiring pols: It is not the amount of your airtime that matters; it is how well you use it.
Webb is more interesting than most also-rans this season. His conservative streak offers Democrats their best chance to lure the so-called "Reagan Democrats," mostly middle class and blue-collar white males, back to the Democratic Party that they used to dominate.
As Webb writes in his fascinating 2004 book, "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America," Democrats foolishly wrote off Southern white males in what Webb calls the mistaken belief that they were a necessary cost of President Lyndon B. Johnson's civil rights reforms.
"And for the last 50 years," Webb 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."
As a conservative Democrat, Webb properly belongs somewhere in-between the two parties. Unfortunately for him, as liberal Texas activist Jim Hightower likes to say, these days there's "nothing in the middle of the road except a yellow line and dead armadillos."
Republicans have flocked to Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carla Fiorina, each of which is notable for racing to the political right ideologically and for never having held elective office.
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