> Senator Webb has the views of many people from my hometown (and, in fact,
> Webb's first wife
> was from my hometown) in Western PA. People who have been left behind as
> industries fled the
> Northern rust belt. They combine a kind of economic populism (resentment
> that they have
> playted by the rules but have been tossed aside like the trash, combined
> with a mixture
> of hatred and envy of the rich) with a dislike for those who game the
> system for money without
> working. For too many of them, this latter group is equated with blacks
> and other minorities.
> They say, hey we are hurtiing too but who cares about us. The minorities
> get all the attention.
> Like my mom, they buy into the jingoistic populism of a Lou Dobbs.
>
> If Webb were contemplating a true movement of poor people and an alliance
> of white, black, and brown,
> he would be admirable. But he is not and will not. I think that for
> Obama to take him as a VP would
> signal something very cynical about Obama.
=============================================
I'm now inclined to think that too much of Webb's old baggage has been
circulating recently - particularly about his hawkishness as Reagan's Navy
Secretary and his attitude to the women's movement (the latter, for which he
subsequently apologized) - that he's not likely to be on the ticket.
But he does openly talk of black-white unity which, without his saying it, an Obama-Webb ticket would be seen to represent.
In an MSNBC "Morning Joe" interview posted on LBO by Julio Huato last month, Webb described the relations between poor whites and poor blacks as those between "tortured siblings" and offered that if his "cultural group" of Appalachian Scots-Irish "could get at the same table with black America you could rechange populist American politics because they have so much in common in what they need out of government." He stated he was "never against affirmative action for blacks, only it's extension to every other cultural group except poor whites."
See:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24692961#24758234
IMO, he's got more of a feel for class politics in America than any other mainstream American politician, but populism has been an historically vague and contradictory political sentiment in which left-wing and right-wing beliefs can coexist quite easily, and Webb seems consistent in this respect.