Jim Webb's Veep Tour Comes To Manhattan
Senator Jim Webb -- whose new book has stirred talk that he's raising his profile in an effort to bring about an Obama-Webb ticket -- continued his veep tour last night, hobnobbing with a bunch of high-profile liberal writers and media types at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, where he took questions.
Judging by an account by The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel, he went over extraordinarily well with this crowd...
Jim Webb can make the Four Seasons seem like a diner in Owensboro, Kentucky. It's that kind of blue-collar street cred that may be just what it takes to propel the first term Senator from Virginia onto the Democratic ticket as Vice-President...When asked tonight, by the New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg, what he thought of those who opposed the Vietnam war, Webb said "I never had a problem with those who properly opposed the war. I had a problem with the way vets were treated when they got home."
The case for Webb, a Vietnam vet who has a son in Iraq, is that he might put Virginia in play and could credibly make an anti-war, and populist, case to the blue collar whites that voted for Hillary over Obama.
Webb could also help defuse the inevitable GOP efforts to cast the antiwar Obama as ungrateful for the troops' service, making it tougher for the GOP to turn the election into a re-litigation of the sixties, as Republicans have done in pretty much every election since then.
For these and other reasons, Webb -- as the above account suggests -- is fast emerging as one of the veep candidates of choice for the liberal intelligentsia.
Comments (309)