No wonder Senator James Webb was insulted by The Dubster's arrogance in asking about Webb's "boy," serving in Iraq at the time. The Dubster is not fit to kiss Senator Webb's shoes (or the younger Webb's combat boots). Senator Webb's boxing record at the Naval Academy was besmirched by a loss to the likes of Oliver North (Webb's despised classmate), but Webb redeemed himself by working for the reelection of Senator Charles Robb to deny Oliver North a U.S. Senate seat. Then, Webb achieved an upset of another Dubster-wannabe when he defeated George Allen, Jr. for the U.S. Senate in 2006. Put The Dubster, Ollie, and Allen, Jr. in a bag and shake it. Reach in and pull out any of the three and you'd have a handful of loser. James Webb will very likely not be The Hopester's running mate. Webb is a man of principle and a man of strong beliefs. Webb does not turn with the prevailing wind. Also note that Webb, a warrior, urged diplomacy (without conditions) as a first response to Iran. James Webb was a real hero in Vietnam. The Geezer was shot down and captured in North Viet Nam because The Geezer disobeyed orders and flew at a lower altitude and was shot down by enemy missiles. Even worse, The Geezer's arrogance resulted in the death of The Geezer's wingman on that ill-fated mission. Give me James Webb over 10,000 Geezers. if this is (fair & balanced) appreciation of genuine heroism, so be it.
[x Rolling Stone]
Virginia Senator James Webb: Washington's Most Unlikely Revolutionary
By Jeff Sharlet
As night settles between the mountain ridges that rise on either side of Lebanon, Virginia, a rough little strip of a town in the state's southwestern corner, Sen. James Webb's people assemble in the Russell County Courthouse. They're coal miners and miners' wives, a third of them in the camouflage strike gear of the United Mine Workers, many of them wearing ball caps declaring them veterans of Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. A leather-skinned veteran named Eldridge tells me in a raspy whisper that he voted for Webb because Webb, a novelist and historian, had gotten these people, mountain people, right in his most recent book, a best-selling history of the Scots-Irish in America called Born Fighting. "We've got our own ghosts and goblins," Eldridge says, and he thinks Webb sees them. "He has the Second Sight."
Eldridge is the third person this evening to cite the supernatural — a kind of cultural memory, maybe — as a reason for supporting Webb, a fact that doesn't surprise Virginia's new Democratic senator. "My grandmother taught me my ghosts," he tells me, his voice a low, considered rumble.
The miners file into the courtroom, and Webb takes his place at the front, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His natural expression is one of restrained anger, his ruddy face tucked into a bull neck as if to emphasize the glower of his foggy blue eyes. He's handsome like Jimmy Cagney, but with a jaw that would dent an anvil. For years he kept a punching bag close to his desk, and at sixty-one he still looks like he could, and gladly would, hold his own in a bar brawl. Earlier that day, he'd donned a headlamp for a quarter-mile descent into Laurel Mountain Deep Mine, and at the courthouse his neck is still gray with coal dust from his trip underground.
A local politico, ballooning out of a Kelly green blazer, asks the Russell County Democratic Committee to stand. Up rise the miners in their labor fatigues. "We're all claiming cousins with you now," says green blazer, and Webb blushes and smiles; three of his actual cousins, including a small-town big named Jimmy Webb, are in the crowd.
Webb's family — his "blood," he says — has lived in the hollows of Big Moccasin Gap, as the area is called, for more than 200 years, but Webb grew up on military bases all over the country. When he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1964, he listed thirty-three home addresses on his application. His father was an Air Force officer and a veteran of World War II; Webb was a Marine officer in Vietnam; and his son, Jimmy, is a Marine just returned from Iraq, where he fought in Ramadi. Last year Webb campaigned wearing a pair of Jimmy's combat boots to remind himself why he was running: to end the war. He refuses to talk to the public about his son. When asked about the boots, he'd say that was the wrong question: "It's not why I'm wearing the boots, it's why I'm wearing the necktie."
When he ran for public office, Webb didn't campaign on his military record, he simply offered himself as a fighter. In Fields of Fire, Webb's first novel and one of the best depictions of combat in Vietnam, the protagonist, Lt. Robert E. Lee Hodges, sums up his approach to confrontation: "I fight," the character declares, "because we have always fought. It doesn't matter who." In Vietnam, Webb became the most highly decorated Marine from his Naval Academy class: two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, the Silver Star and the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. He's enamored of what he calls the "warrior aristocracy" tradition of the Scots-Irish, and he made captain at age twenty-three, though he thinks of himself as an enlisted man — one soldier among many.
Webb loves war. He's been studying military history as long as he can read. He loves war so much he can't stand to see one bungled as badly as Bush has the one in Iraq. In place of a plan, Bush offers a posture; where there should have been a strategy, there was only ideology. That's what makes Webb so angry about Iraq. It's not a fight, it's a cause, either a wonk's dream or an oilman's conspiracy, depending on how worked up Webb is when you ask him. There's only the cause driving this stupidity into the sand, not the needs of a nation. It's the work of the elites Webb has always hated. "America's top tier . . . are literally living in a different country," Webb charges. "Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to war."
Just a few years ago, Webb described America's elites in terms that might be familiar to the fans of Fox News. Liberals were "cultural Marxists," and "the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood" were a fifth column waging war on American traditions. But Iraq has refocused his views. Now when he speaks of the elites he more often means "the military-industrial complex," and "the Cheney factor," the corporate chieftains he describes as the new robber barons. The war and the crimes of class -- sending Americans to Iraq and their jobs to China -- are becoming interwoven in his mind. Iraq has aligned his angers.
For years Webb worked for Republicans, a career that culminated in a stint as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. But when his old nemesis Oliver North, a Naval Academy classmate whom he has despised for decades, ran for Senate in 1994, Webb campaigned for Democrat Chuck Robb just to stop him, and he started identifying himself as an independent. For his own campaign in 2006, he billed himself as a Reagan Democrat. Barely a year later, he's a "Jacksonian Democrat," after Andrew Jackson — another man of war who went to Washington at the head of a populist crusade. His authorial "James" shortened now to a folksy "Jim," Captain Webb is marching leftward, and he's taking many of his old views with him: his dedication to military power, the chip he carries on his shoulder on behalf of the Southern white man he believes is the "whipping boy" for American racism, and most of all, the populism that hates both the Democratic and Republican upper classes.
In Lebanon, Webb starts his speech perfunctorily, talking about bipartisanship and finding common ground on the war, but then he seems to hear himself going Beltway. His voice jumps up a note; in creeps scorn for his own compromises. "This isn't about bipartisanship," he says. "It's not about Iraq." He glares around the room. "It's about 9,000 votes in Virginia." Fuck, yes, nod the miners and their wives. It's about the people who put Webb over the top by less than one half of one percent.
Webb shouldn't have won — he started with no money and no support, not even from the Democrats, who backed a telecommunications lobbyist named Harris Miller. He upset Miller in the primary only to face Republican Senator George Allen, then considered one of the front-runners for the 2008 presidential nomination. But he beat Allen, too, and the men and women in this room were the reason: Conventional wisdom held that Webb, as an anti-war Democrat, would take Northern Virginia and get slaughtered in the rest of the state. Webb did win the North, but he also won more of the Southern vote than anyone expected. They didn't elect Webb to compromise; they sent him to fight. Not for the Democratic Party, for them. Webb campaigned on two main themes, foreign policy and "economic fairness," a term he's still defining. To him it means an increased minimum wage, which the new Democratic Senate promptly passed; a commitment to health insurance for all, if not a plan to make it happen; the conviction that "free trade" is not "fair trade," even if he hasn't decided what constitutes the latter; and most of all, a simmering fury that CEOs make on average 400 times more than the typical worker.
"After 9/11," Webb tells the miners, "the old labels don't apply. The country is just a different place. And now we can remake the party system in these United States if we can get Reagan Democrats — or whatever you want to call 'em — if we can bring them back, we will remake politics. You don't measure the health of a society from the top down, but from the bottom up."
Before Born Fighting, Webb's books were animated by a critique of cultural snobbery, not capitalism. Then the war in Iraq revealed a new enemy to Webb: the system itself, the distortion of democracy that makes the poor fight wars from which only the wealthy benefit. "Class law," he calls it, is "a disguise that allowed certain privileges to flow to a few dominant groups at the expense of the many." The system, he concluded, needs to be turned upside down. "That's economic fairness," he tells the miners. "We have lost the formula. But this is the place, here in Virginia, this is the place where we are going to remake it."
It's time for questions. Several are about Iraq. One man has three sons in the Marines and worries about the health care they'll receive when — not if, in his mind — they are wounded. A mother with a son overseas wants to know if we're going to fight Iran. Another man's son's tour has been extended, which seems to him akin to the bullying the miners get from the coal companies.
"That's right," is the sum of Webb's answers. He wants more money for vets, and he's introduced a bill to stop Bush — or Hillary — from rushing into Iran without congressional approval, and he's fighting for a cap on deployments; beyond that, answers are lacking. Webb the novelist sees the problem: This story doesn't have a happy ending. But Webb the politician toes the Democratic line, declaring Iraq "solvable," as if it were a crossword, while Webb the warrior's plan for Iraq is diplomacy. He's been quietly meeting with Condoleezza Rice, he'll tell me later, urging talks with the Iranians. Meanwhile, the bodies are piling up, there and here: "We got people dying in the mines," says one woman. Dozens every year in preventable accidents and 1,500 every year of black lung, more than the annual U.S. death toll in Iraq. "That's right," says Webb again, and that seems to please the miners and their wives. They know they're right, but it's been a long time since a U.S. senator said so.
"We've got people in desperate need right here," announces one woman. "I'm talking about water." Towns like Lebanon used to get federal grants for basic services, but under Bush they're offered only loans. Their pipes are rusting, their kids are getting sick from dirty water. Another woman speaks up about oxygen concentrators, a crucial piece of medical equipment in coal country. The Bush administration slashed federal aid for the machines, says the woman, and people will die gasping for breath in their own beds. What will Webb do for them?
"I can look into that," he says, then checks himself. These are his people, and now "looking into that" will not be enough. This is the paradox Webb faces: He's been elected as an old-school populist in a two-party system that has little room for or interest in his crusade. And here are Webb's troops: Men in need of oxygen concentrators, women who can't pay their bills, miners in union-issue camouflage leaning hard on canes or on big, sturdy wives who pretend for their broken husbands' sakes that it's they who cling. The last big strike by the United Mine Workers is nearly two decades past, which was when they took up the faded fatigues that some of them are wearing tonight.
One of the strike's leaders is in the courtroom, a man named Jackie Stump. I ask if he thinks Webb will help the union push back against the bosses. He shrugs. He doesn't expect another big labor fight in his lifetime. The union won that strike — preserving health benefits for disabled miners — but lost the war, not on the picket line but in the courtrooms, where what Webb now calls "class law" crippled the union with fines in retribution for its revolt.
The mine into which Webb descended is one of the last three union coal operations in Virginia. The sons and daughters of Lebanon leave Russell County, some for Iraq, and at least one didn't come back: a former valedictorian and all-region defensive end from Lebanon High named Donald Ryan McGlothlin, who was killed November 16th, 2005, in Al-Anbar province. McGlothlin's father had already decided to support Webb's campaign when he learned that, like him, the candidate was wearing his son's combat boots in tribute. Ryan didn't believe in the war in Iraq, feeling the real war was to be fought in Afghanistan, but he felt a powerful duty to his mission.
"I would never vote for George Bush," he told his father, "but I'd take a bullet for him." Bush recruited the fallen Marine's memory for a speech "to scotch up support for the war," his father says. The family gave Bush's speechwriters their consent. "The person was not who you owed your loyalty to," McGlothlin says, recounting his son's view. "It was the leader in the abstract."
There is the war over there, and a different kind of war over here. What will happen in coal country, Jackie Stump predicts, is that the union will get weaker and weaker until someday some kids who've never heard of organized labor will look around at their working conditions and say to each other, 'We'd better get together and do something about this.' And when they do, the bosses will try to knock them down. "If they're hungry enough," says Stump, "they'll hit back."
That's why he likes Webb, he says. Webb understands the fight must continue, even if you're not sure what you're fighting for.
Democracy in Iraq, or clean water in Virginia?
Old men in jungle fatigues, or young soldiers in desert camouflage?
Body armor? Or oxygen machines?
In February of 2006, Webb called the Democratic political strategist Dave Saunders, and together they plotted to end the career of Senator George Allen, a handsome dunce in the model of George W. who stood to be re-elected by thirty-three points. The Democrats planned to run Harris Miller, an anti-labor lobbyist dedicated to outsourcing IT jobs overseas. Saunders, his drawl as deep and wide as his connections in the tough little Dixie towns where most Democrats fear to tread, persuaded Webb that he was the man to take out first Miller -- who outspent Webb three to one -- then Allen. Saunders, known as "Mudcat" throughout the state, has for years been working on rebuilding Democratic strength in the South through an alliance of African-Americans and the Southern white men he calls "Bubbas." "We were in the same place in terms of 'How do you help people down here?' " says Webb. "How do you get the good out of this culture? At the end of this conversation, I said, 'I'll do this. Let's test the theory.' "
Webb is so white he wrote a book about it; Saunders quickly realized Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America could become the rare campaign book voters might actually read, one that doesn't pull punches. In its opening pages, Webb lists the slurs by which his people are known: "Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder." The Scots-Irish — Protestant Scots who fought the British in Scotland, then in Ireland, then in America — have indeed died disproportionately in America's wars. But the Bubbas, Webb argues, were and are not so much cannon fodder as a warrior caste. He considers poor white Southerners victims of the "monstrous mousetrap" they themselves built for African-Americans. "The Southern redneck" he writes, has become the "veritable poster child of liberal hatred and disgust . . . the emblem of everything that had kept the black man down. No matter that the country-club whites had always held the key to the Big House . . . at the expense of disadvantaged blacks and whites alike."
Why did liberals ignore class? In part because Bubbas so often played the role assigned to them, but also because the poor whites, "Jacksonian populists," as Webb likes to call them, "are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness."
It's not that Webb is racist, he'd just like to afford poor whites the status of victim too. In fact, he descends from a line of Southern whites at odds with the region's racist traditions, and he's especially proud of his fight in 1982 to get a representation of a black soldier added to the statue at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. "I put a black man on the Mall," he said in 1991, "and they" — bigots and the art snobs who preferred Maya Lin's abstract wall — "can kiss my ass."
Webb believes that a re-energized army of Bubbas will remake American politics, restoring gun lovers, hunters and NASCAR fans to the place they once held at the heart of American populism. "Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray," he titled one chapter in Born Fighting, describing a culture that at its best created country music and at its worst invented the lynch mob.
But Webb is as aware of the dangers of populism as he is of its potential. "On the one hand," he says, "populism created American politics. On the other it created a formula that's been continuously abused from that time forward. The notions that went into Jacksonian democracy are so commonly turned into rhetoric rather than substance. You know, the log cabin, 'We're for the little people.' " Webb rolls his eyes. "The emotional buttons."
When Webb decided to run, no one but Mudcat Saunders and his friend the writer Tom Wolfe (who insists Webb will be president one day) thought he could wage more than a symbolic fight. Sometimes it seemed he wouldn't even manage that. When Mudcat arranged for a band to play for the campaign, Webb overheard him telling the musicians to learn the Marine Corps hymn. "Jim never screamed at me," Mudcat remembers. "He just takes me outside and he stares at me and he says, 'One thing I want to make very clear to you. In no way, shape or form is the Marine Corps hymn to be used in my campaign. I will never use that song for political gain.' " Yessir, said Mudcat: "I thought, 'Well, fuck, we just gave up our own best ace card.' "
They didn't need it; George Allen charted his own demise. Re-election to the Senate seemed like such a sure thing that he began smirking during his speeches, as if aping Bush's worst qualities would make him the president's heir. He called an Indian-American Webb volunteer "macaca," and then he took offense at the news that his mother had been born Jewish, defiantly proclaiming his determination to eat a ham sandwich to prove his Christian bona fides.
Webb isn't a natural campaigner; he didn't have to be. When he defeated Allen in one of the slimmest, and certainly the most unexpected, Democratic victory of 2006, pundits didn't declare him a giant-killer. Instead, they ruled it victory by default — curmudgeon beats boob.
A few weeks into his term, though, those same pundits were beginning to see in Webb what Mudcat and Wolfe recognize: the politician, yes, but also the soldier and the storyteller to whom voters thrill. In January, the Democratic Party tapped him to respond to Bush's State of the Union address. Halfway through his speech, he pulled out an old black-and-white photograph and held it before the camera as if politics were show-and-tell. "This is my father," he said, pointing at a barely discernible figure in the center, "when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from Germany as we waited for him back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used to take the picture to bed with me every night, because for more than three years my father was deployed, unable to live with us full-time, serving overseas or in bases where there was no family housing. I still keep it, to remind me of the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my father gladly served our country."
It was brilliant, and it had the added advantage of being true. "I was proud to follow in his footsteps," he continued, grabbing hold of every macho American man within earshot of a television, "serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a Marine helicopter pilot. My son has joined the tradition, now serving as an infantry Marine in Iraq." Webb's fighting family had trusted America's elected leaders, he said. "We owed them our loyalty," he said, "but they owed us sound judgment."
Webb was almost shaking with his sense of betrayal. Here was the synthesis of his three identities -- warrior, poet and politician -- bound up in one angry man voted up to the big house by Bubbas with guns, pissed off about losing their jobs to China and their children to Iraq. Lest the lesson be lost, he closed with a warning, recalling a time a hundred years ago when "the dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt." Once again, he seemed to be saying, such a time is at hand.
[Jeff Sharlet is a journalist and author best known for writing about religious subcultures in the United States. He is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Mother Jones, New York, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Oxford American, New Statesman, Forward, Nerve, and The Baffler.]
Copyright © 2007 Rolling Stone
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