Jim Webb for Veep!

Check out Joe Klein's latest column for TIME, "Getting to Know Jim Webb." Though he won't say so right out loud, Klein thinks Webb, the recently elected senator from Virginia and a Democrat, is the clear top choice as Barack Obama's running mate in the November presidential election.



oldstyleliberal agrees. Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, as a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service." Klein says Webb, in his recent book A Time to Fight, "takes a well-calibrated ... swing at the Bush Administration's naive neoconservative foreign policy — after all, Webb opposed going to war in Iraq in a 2002 Washington Post Op-Ed piece."

I like the fact that Webb could not be more sympathetic to and supportive of those who serve in uniform, those who have so served in the past, their families, and their general culture ... which ties in closely with Scots-Irish working class from which Webb himself proudly hails. My own family's roots are likewise to be found in this slice of the American soil.

I also like something else Klein quotes from Webb's book:

"The ultimate question," Webb writes about Democrats and the military, "is this: When you look at a veteran, what do you see? Do you see a strong individual who overcame the most difficult challenges most human beings can face ... or do you see a victim?" But if some Democrats tend to pity members of the armed forces, the Republican Party "continually seeks to politicize military service for its own ends even as it uses their sacrifices as a political shield against criticism for its failed policies. And in that sense, it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As some of my recent posts have indicated, on Memorial Day Weekend of 2008 I "saw the light," becoming, in my heart, a pacifist. I now oppose the Iraq War, and all wars from this point forward, as being insane. This does not mean, however, that I despise — or pity — the military. Jim Webb may or may not agree with me that we should never fight another war unless we're attacked. But I agree with him that the values of duty, honor, and personal sacrifice which the military stands for are the best things about America and should be revered by its political class, not exploited for the civilian leaders' own twisted ideological purposes.

So I think Barack Obama will have to look long and hard before he'll be able to find a better running mate than Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia.