When I came to Washington in the early 1980s, Jim Webb was best known as a vociferous spokesman for the movement to scrap the design for the Vietnam War Memorial -- or, as he and his fellow protestors called it, "the wall of shame." He was the prototypical Angry Vietnam Vet, convinced that the hippies and the campus radicals had stabbed him and his band of brothers in the back while they were fighting in jungle, then spit on them when they returned home.
He was, in other words, a died-in-the-wool reactionary -- the thinking man's Ollie North. Webb once famously refused to shake John Kerry's hand because of Kerry's role in publicizing alleged U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. Some of his fellow anti-memorial activists later went on to run the Swift boat campaign against Kerry in the 2004 election.
If you'd told me twenty years ago that John Kerry would eventually run for president, I would have expected Webb to be in there Swiftboating with the best of them. Originally a conservative Democrat in the mold of his first political patron, long-time Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, made his bones with the conservative movement by crossing party lines to support Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election -- supposedly because of his rage over Jimmy Carter's amnesty for Vietnam era draft evaders.
Webb was rewarded, eventually, by being named an assistant secretary of defense and then Secretary of the Navy in Reagan's Pentagon, where he became a fanatical advocate of a 500 600-ship Navy -- a defense contracting boondoggle so egregious even the Reagan Administration eventually abandoned it. When Webb quit, in a huff, I assumed he would end up pulling a seven-figure salary as a defense lobbyist and spend the rest of his days helping shovel pork down various congressional gullets and tending the shrine of St. Ronnie.
But instead, nearly two decades later, Webb's now the newly elected Senator from my native state (a stronghold of the Confederacy and the national "right-to-work" movement) who's lined up shoulder to shoulder with Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and is writing op eds for the Wall Street Journal explicitly calling for what the Republican chattering classes sneeringly condemn as "class warfare":
America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen.That's beautiful stuff. Paul Wellstone could have written it. So could Bernie Sanders, although Bernie actually might find it a little too radical for his tastes. But the last person -- well, almost the last person -- on earth I would expect to emerge as a tribune of good old-fashioned New Deal populism (or, dare I say it, democratic socialism) is fightin' Jim Webb, Ronald Reagan's favorite Marine.
Not only that, but Webb's now against the war -- just like us unreconstructed '60s (or, in my case, '70s) radicals. I just hope he doesn't mind being tarred as a stabber of backs or a spitter on the troops by the modern-day equivalents of the old Jim Webb. It kind of goes with the territory.
If this is the new Democratic "conservatism" the Washington punditburo keeps bleating about, then all I can say is three cheers for conservatism. But Webb's op ed definitely left me with a profound case of political vertigo. My sense of direction (this way is left; that way is right) is getting pretty scrambled. Former Reagan cabinet officers now sound like Abby Hoffman. Connecticut Senators who started out trying to impeach Richard Nixon now sound like John Mitchell. Where's it going to end?
I don't know. But if Jim Webb and I are now on the roughly same side on the big issues of the day -- the war, globalization, corporate power, economic fairness, social justice -- it tells you something has fundamentally changed in American politics. It may not be a realignment (a political system this polluted and decrepit may not be capable of such a thing) but when Senators from Virginia start talking like Walter Reuther, it sure the hell isn't business as usual.
Update 11/29 10:30 AM: From The Hill (one of several competing congressional fishwrappers):
At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing. Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb."I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing," Bush retorted, according to the source.Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source . . .
Now I'm really starting to like this guy. It's just a shame that Shrub will get the Secret Service protection for life treatment after he leaves office, or I think Webb might eventually give in to temptation and take a swing at him. And if there is one person on this planet who deserves a couple of good ones to the jaw, it's the Dauphin.