The excitement among Democrats about James Webb, the Senator from Virginia, is understandable. Having a Vietnam-war-hero-turned- Reagan-administration-official-turned-Iraq-War foe on the ticket would lend Barack Obama a stiff dose of military experience, not to mention manly toughness.

But most speculation about Webb misses just how radical, risky and historic a choice Webb would be. He’s not some liberal Republican or moderate Democrat a few degrees to the right of the Democratic mainstream. He’s a Vietnam veteran whose driving passion for several decades was contempt for “the Left,” those draft-evading “elites” who came to run the modern Democratic Party.

Democrats have nominated southerners as part of their tickets nine times since 1976 (Carter, Bentsen, Clinton, Gore and Edwards) and military veterans eleven times (Carter, Mondale, Bentsen, Gore, Dukakis, and Kerry). They’ve convinced themselves therefore that they have reached out to the Reagan Democrats. But these veterans and southerners were all men who had been on the liberal side of the Vietnam-era culture wars. Not Jim Webb.

Choosing Webb would either violently re-open old wounds, or finally call home the Reagan Democrats.

Vietnam

To say Webb was a Vietnam veteran doesn’t begin to convey the full package. First, he wasn’t just there, he was a hero of the highest order – at one point having literally thrown his body in front of a grenade to protect another soldier. He persevered through unspeakable horrors, leading a platoon in which fifty-six men were killed or wounded, a typical moment being described in the book Nightingales Song when one of his squad leaders “hoisted a wounded Marine onto his narrow shoulders and was carrying him to safety when a burst of machine-gun fire tore his midsection apart, his lifeless body falling at Webb’s feet.”

More important, Webb developed a rage at those who opposed the war, especially those who avoided service. In his essays on Vietnam, he has blended, sometimes unfairly, all opponents of the war into one soldier-hating, elitist bloc who avoided service and then, to assuage their own guilt and prove their moral supremacy, villified the soldiers who did serve.

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, 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 Webb’s in the Senate) “typified the hopeless naivite 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.” Jimmy Carter, by providing amnesty to Vietnam draft evaders, had thereby elevated those who opposed the war to the “level of moral purist” while “insulting” those who had served.

And the Clintons? Well, after Bill Clinton left office amidst a scandal over his pardoning unscrupulous financiers, Webb wrote, “It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized is entire political career.” (Sort of makes one wonder how they might react to if Obama chose Webb instead of Hillary). Some of his animus toward the Clintons seems related to their involvement in the McGovern campaign and anti-war movements. Commenting on the 20th anniversary of Saigon, Webb was furious because war opponents, including the Clintons, were not apologizing. Sounding more like Rush Limbaugh than Barack Obama, Webb described anti-war protesters as too infatuated with the nobility of their efforts to recognize their own error:

“What would we make of the protest music that thrilled so many hearts, of the exhilarating antiwar rallies, of the love-soaked, dope-hazed evenings in places like Woodstock, if there finally was a conclusion that the young men who marched off to the jungles for years of unrelenting blood and terror had indeed done the right thing?”

Even his opposition to the Vietnam War Memorial (the black wall) arose from his belief that it mocked mock soldiers and would serve as “a wailing wall for future anti-draft and antinuclear demonstrators.”

Women
His views on women in the military flowed from a similar analysis that the cultural left de-valued and misunderstood military service. The class of congressman elected in 1974 – many of whom now chair the main committees of House and Senate – began a decade long attack on the military and soldiers, Webb believed. “All things military had become targets gleefully fired upon,” he wrote in the Weekly Standard.

Those who didn’t serve, Webb believed, benefited psychologically from ripping down the macho military. ”For many males who did not serve, particularly the high achievers who wished no blemish on their reputations, the ‘demasculaization’ of the military was a natural deterrent to any attack on their manhood as their youthful actions came to be viewed in retrospect.”

Webb’s controversial article, “Woman Can’t Fight” in Washingtonian in 1979 argued against having women in combat roles, and he previously had argued against admitting women to the Annapolis Naval Academy. “Men fight better,” Webb explains, because they are more naturally violent, cruel and aggressive. Again casting it as a dispute between real, everyday American and elites, he declared: “You might not pick this up in K Street law offices or in the halls of Congress, but once you enter the areas of this country where more typical Americans dwell, the areas that provide the men who make up our combat units, it becomes obvious. Inside the truck stops and in the honky-tonks, down on the street and in the coal towns, American men are tough and violent. When they are lured or drafted from their homes and put through the dehumanization of boot camp, then thrown into an operating combat unit, they don’t get any nicer, either.”

It is in that context, that 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.”

He links his opposition to women in combat, and at the naval academy, to his sense that that by “attempting to sexually sterilize the Naval Academy environment in the name of equality,” the training regimen – which requires a certain amount of brutality – has become too soft and ineffective. “Our military forces are doomed to suffer the consequences.”

Affirmative Action
Webb’s views on affirmative action may have been shaped during the years when he was a card-carrying member of the conservative team in the post-Vietnam culture war. Some of his writings on race drip with the same loathing of the left, and a sense that cultural “elites” running the nation had once again denigrated his people, in this case not soldiers but the white working class.

In a book review praising Ward Connerly, the conservative black who led the efforts to overturn affirmative action in California, Webb said “Connerly’s views on race relations are decades ahead of the Jacobins who have foisted the affirmative-action regime on this country….. Affirmative action, which originally sought to repair the state-induced damage to blacks from slavery and its aftermath, has within one generation brought about a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand.”

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

While never insulting African Americans themselves, Webb clearly identifies far more with the grievances of whites, now and the in the past. Speaking of the 1960s, he refers to the “the regrettable and well publicized turmoil of the Civil Rights years.” As for the Civil War, Webb noted compassionately that the Confederate soldiers had to return to a “devastated land and military occupation” and then “endure the bitter humiliation of reconstruction.” He showed no particular awareness that it was that military occupation that protected blacks from constant terrorism.

Nowadays, he defends affirmative action for blacks – whom he says have a legitimate historical claim – but criticizes its expansion to help other minority groups. “When this program expanded to the present day diversity programs, where essentially every ethnic group other than Caucasians are included, then that becomes state sponsored racism.”

He now emphasizes the positive, urging his fellow white Scots-Irish to join forces with African Americans “with whom our history in this country most closely intertwines.” Obama, he suggests, could unite blacks and whites like never before. “If this cultural group could get at the same table with black America, you could really change politics because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government.”

Therefore, he said during a debate during his campaign for Senate, “we should either move this program back to its original intent, which I support, or we should open up diversity programs to the point where poor white cultures have some opportunity.”

Opening Old Wounds or Healing Them?
Calling Webb a Reagan Democrat doesn’t fully capture just how much he was a part of the cultural right. He’s got far more Rush Limbaugh than Howard Dean in him. For a man skilled in novelistic nuance, he seems until recently to have held a cartoonish view of The Left as a hater of soldiers, lover of traitors and betrayer of whites.

Some may read this and feel that Webb therefore ought to be disqualified. I read them and think they probably make the case for Webb even stronger – if Obama fully appreciates the package he’s buying.

Yes, having someone who was Secretary of Navy under Ronald Reagan but opposed the Iraq war, gives Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war an incalculable sense of wisdom and toughness. But the power of a Webb nomination goes much further than that. Obama is being cast as an elitist, and there’s more than enough in his biography – bad bowling scores, Ivy League educations – to make that label stick. Webb, on the other hand, sounds almost evocative of George Wallace in his rage against left-wing “elites.” If a gun-toting guy like Webb can admire Obama’s commitment to The People then maybe voters would overlook how the Illinoisan holds a beer can.

As for Webb’s views on affirmative action, my first reaction was: while only Nixon could go to China and only Clinton could end welfare as we knew it, only Barack Obama could possibly consider someone who has called affirmative action “state sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws.” Imagine the message Obama could send about race if he chose Webb: Not only am I not some Jeremiah Wright-protégé, but I’ve chosen as my partner a man who feels that the main consequence of the last 20 years of racial policy is the disparagement of whites. When I say I want to unify the country, I mean it.

Make no mistake: almost any discussion of affirmative action is fraught for Obama. As a black man, it would be difficult for him to adopt Webb’s view that affirmative action should be limited only to African Americans, leaving out Hispanics and women, two groups he desperately needs. He could lean in the direction of Webb’s other approach, allowing for class elements to be considered in hiring and college admissions, an idea about which Obama has already expressed some sympathy.

Picking a running mate with controversial views on affirmative action will surely open up a can of worms, but it is a can that will be opened anyway. The issue hasn’t arisen directly so far in part because Hillary, agreeing with Obama’s views, didn’t challenge him. Democrats are kidding themselves if they think it won’t come up in the general election. And having Webb on the ticket would enable Obama to seem reasonable and deeply respectful of anti-affirmative action views.

Obama has been able to partly traverse the rifts within old New Deal coalition by emphasizing unifying issues like the Iraq war and the economy and through the neat trick of having been born in 1961, and therefore skipping the Vietnam-related culture wars. For younger voters, that’s sufficient. But for older voters, like the ones who voted against him in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, he has work to do.

Webb is not a safe pick. His views on women in the military could cost Obama among women voters -a potentially fatally flaw in the idea of choosing Webb–and some Hispanics might worry about his views on affirmative action. But an Obama-Webb ticket has the potential to bring home some of those who left the party for Ronald Reagan and George Wallace, bridging the gap between African Americans and working class whites.

Adapted from The Wall Street Journal Online