Going after Webb

When the Wall Street Journal shines a light on you, you’re in the running for Vice President. Now, will the national Democrats rally around someone who isn’t a sniveling anti-military wuss? Despite nominating 9 southerners and 11 veterans since 1976, they “were all men who had been on the liberal side of the Vietnam-era culture wars. Not Jim Webb.”

The WSJ asks if national Dems will rally around Webb in three areas (Vietnam, Women, and Affirmative Action) or will it start a fight with itself.

He shows no mercy to those who seemed overly friendly to North Vietnam. Asked at one point if he might want to meet Jane Fonda, Sen. Webb said, “I wouldn’t go across the street to watch her slit her wrist.” His contempt was not reserved for Hollywood radicals. Then-Congressman Christopher Dodd (now a senior Democratic colleague of Sen. Webb’s in the Senate) “typified the hopeless naiveté of his peers” who assailed the South Vietnamese government and idealized the North. John Kerry, he wrote, “deserves condemnation” for leading Vietnam Veterans Against the War because he “portrayed their fellow veterans as unwilling soldiers, morally debased and haunted by their service.’’

Not exactly the way to win states like oh, say, Pennsylvania.

It is in that context that Sen. Webb then wrote the words that have gotten him trouble most: “And I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen I encountered during my recent semester as a professor at the Naval Academy, whom I would trust to provide those men with combat leadership.”

Not exactly the way to win Hillary supporters.

Now, thanks to affirmative action in college admissions and hiring, “the less successful white cultures have fallen further behind as a veneer of minorities have joined the elites.” Notably, during the primaries, the Virginia senator ascribed Sen. Obama’s weak performance in the Appalachian region not as the result of racism but as whites’ justifiable disgust over the excesses of affirmative action.

How can the left elevate Webb while criticizing Geraldine Ferraro?

Will the Democrats allow Webb to join the national ticket and risk “re-opening old wounds” for a shot at the White House?

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About the author

Brian Kirwin

The right wants to jeer him. The left wants to censor him. Moderates usually want both. Brian Kirwin is a political consultant and public relations strategist in Virginia Beach with a lightning-rod flair. Brian also serves on the VB Arts & Humanities Commission and frequently appears on Hampton Roads theatrical stages, if only to prove that all actors aren’t liberals. Kirwin’s columns stir up debate and hit the political scene with no punches pulled.