Webb Skepticism

Alex Massie makes the case for Webb as VP, and it’s one that’s been made many times before and remains quite convincing. Webb, after all, is the white working class incarnate. He’s a former Republican, he has credibility on the war that matches or surpasses McCain, his proposed veteran legislation would funnel a lot of money to those areas where Obama is doing poorly, he can’t be portrayed as weak, etc etc etc. But his tremendous upside also entails some downside: nominating Webb could easily be viewed as a slap in the face to female and minority voters.

Real quick: Webb has a ton of sympathy for the Confederacy. Sure, he doesn’t support slaveholding and isn’t a modern-day segregationist like Trent Lott, but one aspect of his academic/cultural project of defending the legacy and history of the Scotch-Irish (or, in American, rednecks and white trash) is coming to grips with the fact that these people made up the bulk of the Confederate military. Here’s what Webb said at an address at the Confederate Memorial:

I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery. In 1860 fewer than five percent of the people in the South owned slaves, and fewer than twenty percent were involved with slavery in any capacity. Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution, and that it had never been surrendered. Nor had Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in Kentucky and Missouri when those border states did not secede. Perhaps all of us might reread the writings of Alexander Stephens, a brilliant attorney who opposed secession but then became Vice President of the Confederacy, making a convincing legal argument that the constitutional compact was terminable. And who wryly commented at the outset of the war that “the North today presents the spectacle of a free people having gone to war to make freemen of slaves, while all they have as yet attained is to make slaves of themselves.”

Make of that what you will, but considering that leading lights in the liberal blogsophere delight in going after those that who celebrate “Treason in Defense of Slavery Month Heritage Month,” it’s unclear how Webb’s sympathy for the Confederate cause, or at least those who fought for it, would go over with black voters. But that isn’t all that big a worry considering that Barack Obama is at the top of the ticket. A bigger concern is how female voters and activists would respond to a Webb nomination. Webb, in 1979, published an article entitled “Women Can’t Fight” in defense of his position that women should not be allowed in combat positions in the Navy. If activists like Emily’s List’s Ellen Malcom are still smarting over an Obama victory, then putting Webb on the ticket could be seen as throwing women under the bus. For them, the Party would have gone from being very close to nominating the first female presidential candidate, to having a gender reactionary nominated as Vice President.

Another argument against Webb is that instead of acting as “insurance” that Obama would be able to compete for working class white votes and not have McCain get away with questioning his patriotism,
he would instead accentuate that Obama is perceived to be everything that Webb is not. If the purpose of putting Webb on the ticket is, as Massie and others say, to project strength on foreign policy, military issues, patriotism, being a badass, getting white working class support, then that very action implies that Obama is weak on all those fronts. And when a candidate essentailly cops to weakness in certain areas, the media and the other party will just eat it up. Neil Sinhababu made this point very well a few months ago:

when a presidential candidate chooses a VP to cover a weakness, it’s considered an acknowledgement by the campaign that their presidential candidate has a weakness. Thereafter, the media is officially licensed to harp on that weakness.  So now you reinforce the storyline: “Ordinary white folks don’t and shouldn’t like Obama!” or “John Kerry is a New England aristocrat with no ties to the common man!”  Given the fact that the presidential candidate is more significant, a balancing strategy might actually end up moving perceptions of the ticket in the opposite direction.

I’m not saying that Webb would be a bad choice - I think ultimately that the veepstakes doesn’t really matter that much - it’s just that he isn’t necessarily the best choice.