Andrew Cain over at the Richmond Times-Dispatch offers more:
“I’ll be very frank here,” Webb said Thursday in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“It was rigged in terms of who was going to get the time on the floor by the way that Anderson Cooper was selecting people to supposedly respond to someone else. I even turned around to Bernie Sanders at one point and said, ‘Bernie, say my name, will you, say my name.’
“In that kind of environment it was either going to be Mr. Angry or be a potted plant. It’s very difficult to win a debate when you don’t have the opportunity to get to speak in the same amount of time on issues as the others get.”
Here’s the real question…
Webb could do one of two things. He could (a) run as an independent, just to do so, or he could — and I am throwing this out there — (b) run as a genuine 3rd party candidate.
Consider that there is an ocean of voters out there that are frankly sick and tired of both parties. The progressive left and the populist right are coming full circle in the likes of Sanders and Trump. One looks at both the Democratic and Republican fields and finds only two veterans — Webb and Gilmore.
Does Webb represent the honorable middle? One that appeals to the fire station, the labor union worker, the steel mills and textile factories, the farmer and the enlisted man? The hunter and the agrarian, the little old ladies in church who don’t recognize small town America anymore, the truckers and the old men huddled around coffee cups in restaurants dotting the American landscape? Those folks who know what it is to have dirt under ones fingernails and still consider their hands clean? Not a bad army of Americans, I’d say.
Even if you think that Webb’s tenure as a U.S. Senator was perhaps a bit more left-leaning than those familiar with his Lew Rockwell days are ready to admit, there’s a nerve that Jim Webb strikes among folks that is not easily plucked by any of the other candidates running.
It is intriguing.
Of course, most of this will fizzle out, I’m sure. Folks don’t believe anymore, and Webb might not be the best candidate to lead such a coalition. And yet… if Webb recognizes this, and if folks who have not sold out to the cults of personality huddling around the likes of Trump and Clinton?
Who knows?
