Virginia Senator James Webb: Washington's Most Unlikely Revolutionary

[babylonsister]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14980312/virginia_senator_james_webb_washingtons_most_unlikely_revolutionary

Virginia Senator James Webb: Washington's Most Unlikely Revolutionary

JEFF SHARLET
Posted Jun 08, 2007 2:19 PM

>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until June 15th.

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."

more...

[Boo Boo]

1. "The Democrats planned to run Harris Miller, an anti-labor lobbyist dedicated

to outsourcing IT jobs overseas."

Some plan.

[athebea]

2. I like this guy...

... and I know in my gut that he's going to be president someday.

[Hand]

3. Hmm... Obama/Webb?

Wow! :wow: I like it. :applause:

[qdemn7]

4. WOW!!!

I love this:

"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."

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.

Out-FUCKING-standing!!! Webb for President!!! :bounce: :applause: :yourock: