Terry Samuel's been paying close attention to Jim Webb's early months in the Senate, and Webb's surprisingly confident and effective performance have Terry wondering whether "this ex-Republican red state senator might serve as an exemplar for Democrats, as they head into 2008 trying to wrest the White House from the GOP while defining themselves as more than just the anti-Bush, anti-war party?"
Webb hasn't just been harshly critical of the war, he's been lamenting the incarceration rates of black men and bragging about walking picket lines, spouting inequality statistics and inveighing against CEO pay. All this is, if nothing else, charting a new path for red state senators, who can see in Webb's aggressive populism an alternative to the traditional coping mechanisms of tentative centrism. Webb is proving that there's no fundamental incompatibility between hard-edged progressivism and a state like Virginia. His cultural signifiers are so defiantly, aggressively "red," that his liberalism comes off as an altogether different beast as that of a Boxer or a Kennedy. One more suited to his electorate, but no less ferociously concerned with class inequality and sane foreign policy, and possibly more effective for the superficial contradictions.
As for Terry's primary question, I see no one capable of bringing Webb's unique bundle of cultural attitudes and progressive opinions into the 2008 race, and those elements of Webb's comportment are inseparable from his appeal. Stylistically, Edwards, Obama, and Clinton are worlds away from Webb, which is fine. Sometimes it's okay for a promising politician not to run, or be absorbed, into the presidential race.
Update: And this is the sort of thing that probably gains you votes in VA:
An aide to Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) was charged this morning with trying to carry a loaded pistol into the Russell Senate Office building," reports the Washington Post.
"The gun was discovered as the staffer passed through an x-ray machine at the C Street entrance at about 10:30 a.m... He also had with him two fully loaded magazines."
Early word is it was Webb's gun, with the Senator had handed the aide at the airport.
