No Webb For VP
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
While Webb had made his sentiments perfectly clear some time ago, he made his refusal to be a VP candidate official today. (Hat tip: Jim Antle) This is good news for Virginia and for the Senate Democrats, and it’s probably good for Obama for reasons I have stated before. This is also good news for the country, because Webb will be much more effective in advancing both foreign policy realist and economic populist causes in the Senate than he ever would have been able to do as Vice President.
On a Webb-related note, Sen. Webb has an article in the 6/30 issue of TAC on foreign policy in the Near East (sorry, not online). Here is an excerpt:
Journalism has its flaws, particularly when one comes to a situation with a preconceived political bias. But good journalism, coming from honest, perceptive journalists, has a far better track record with respect to the challenges of the Middle East than do the policies of our political leaders. Sometimes it is easier to comprehend harsh realities when one is able to observe them closely without direct involvement and without having to feel accountable for their end results. And sometimes politicians are so blinded by their policy positions and by the filtering process through whicfh they receive their information that they will never fully understand the realities of the problems they are trying to fix.
In any event, I came away from this experience [in Beirut] with a strong feeling that the United States should tread softly in the Middle East, that it should never give up its military or diplomatic maneueverability by occupying territory in a region so fraught with multilayered conflicts.
There is much more in the article in addition to this. I don’t know about anyone else, but I would much prefer to have an independent-minded Sen. Webb who can produce the insights in this article rather than see Jim Webb be obliged to defend the next dubious intervention in Sudan or God-knows-where as a member of the Obama administration.
Update: I should note that the article in the magazine is an excerpt from Webb’s new book, Time to Fight.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Jim Fallows put it best:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/belated_comment_on_jim_webb_as.php
“Jim Webb has arranged his life so as to maximize his intellectual and personal independence, and minimize the things he “has” to do and the bosses he must answer to. Novelist, essayist, journalist, movie-maker — through the two decades before his Senate race he’s been his own boss as much as possible, and has clearly relished saying exactly what he believes. The federal government office that most nicely matches his previous life is the one he now holds: as a U.S. Senator. Especially a Senator of the model Webb has described as his ideal: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There are still lots of things Webb “has” to do — fundraising, constituent service, party efforts — to maintain this role. But in the big scheme of things, not that many.
The federal government office that least matches Webb’s lifetime path is the vice presidency. Some wonderful people have held the job, plus some terrible ones. The ones who are happiest are those who can bide their time, bite their tongue, fly to foreign-dignitary funerals, and stick absolutely to the company line.”
Webb is one of the most thoughtful and decent national politicians we have. As a resident of the Old Dominion, I would be happy to leave him where he is for the next 50 years.
Well, he probably is better off in the Senate. I hope he manages to stay on the national stage.
God help us, now we’ll probaably end up with Slow Joe Biden.
[...] Barack Obama: Wrong on ethanol, wrong for America July 7, 2008, 9:48 pm Filed under: economics, energy, environment If you read just one thing from the latest issue of The American Conservative, skip my article and go for Jim Webb’s must-read book excerpt on our history of failed intervention in the Middle East (sadly not available online, though Larison quotes a bit of it here). Once you’re done with that, though, head straight for Tim Carney’s piece on the awfulness of corn ethanol. Here’s a quote to whet your appetite: The economics are simple: when corn is being used for fuel and farm fields are no longer producing food or feed, the price of food and feed goes up. The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service finds that farmers received $5.15 for a bushel of corn in May, up from an already high $3.49 a year ago. Corn futures, trading near $2.50 on the Chicago Board of Trade throughout 2006, climbed to almost $7 this past month. [...]