Webb’s recent announcement that he was taking the first official step toward a 2016 presidential bid nonetheless set off a round of commentary about the contrast between him and his former Senate colleague. On the FiveThirtyEight blog, Harry Enten concluded that Webb could be “the ideal Clinton challenger.” Al Hunt of Bloomberg News said Webb could be Clinton’s “worst nightmare,” while William Greider wrote in The Nation that Webb might become “a pivotal messenger” for the left.
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And despite what he may say about not comparing himself to Clinton, Webb has the beginnings of a two-pronged progressive critique. On economic policy, Webb will say the party — personified by the Clintons — has been too much in the grasp of big financial institutions and too little beholden to wage earners. He’s a little like Elizabeth Warren this way, only with more backwoods steel than Cambridge preachiness.
He’s also a sharp critic of the foreign policies pursued by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which he says have led us into wars — and kept us in them — without clear objectives or strategies. This puts him squarely at odds with Clinton, the former secretary of state, who was known to be one of the administration’s more ardent interventionists.
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All that will sound pretty enticing to liberals looking for some viable alternative, and it should. But then you come around to Webb’s long-held and thoughtful views on the party’s core theme of social justice. And here’s where that whole savior-of-the-left thing gets a little complicated.
Democrats, as you probably know, have been losing white voters, and especially white male voters, by pretty staggering margins in recent elections, particularly in rural parts of the country. According to exit polling, the party’s candidates won only 34 percent of white men last November; the 30-point spread between the two parties was the largest in 20 years.
Go to any activist meeting or liberal dinner party, and chances are you will hear a pretty consistent narrative to explain this trend. Basically, it goes like this: White men, and especially Southern white men, are just inherently racist and afraid of social change, and so they’re easily manipulated by Republicans and have turned their backs on Obama. But that’s really OK, because the demographics of the country are rapidly shifting, and very soon there will be enough black and Latino voters — not to mention women of all races — to tip the balance of any national election into the Democratic column.
Webb finds this theory downright offensive. In his view, Democrats have focused so much of their rhetoric and their programs on racial minorities that they’ve basically forgotten about all those white, working-class voters who face some of the same economic hardships but feel like all the focus is on the poor.
“I think this is where Democrats screw up, you know?” Webb told me. “I think that they have kind of unwittingly used this group, white working males, as a whipping post for a lot of their policies. And then when they react, they say they’re being racist.”
Back in 2010, under a Wall Street Journal headline that referred to the “myth of white privilege,” Webb called for an end to federal affirmative action programs, saying they no longer helped African-Americans and only served to embitter white voters. More recently, including in our conversation, he has obliquely assailed “interest groups” that divide the parties by race.
