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...know what you're thinking: Klein is going to speculate about, or endorse, the increasingly popular idea that Virginia Senator Jim Webb should be Barack Obama's running mate. Sorry, but no. That sort of speculation is usually a waste of time. It is what political reporters do instead of reporting during the dead weeks after the primaries. Anyway, there is more important Webb-related business to be transacted now. He has written a book, A Time to Fight, that may be the best evocation of the 21st century Democratic Party's emerging style and philosophy. In the process...
...Webb is a natural-born provocateur and a human harbinger. His political journey predicted the switch of working-class white people to the Republicans 30 years ago, and in 2006 he became the first prominent Republican - he served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan - to switch to the Democrats and run for high office, and win. He is also a terrific writer, of both fiction and fact. His preceding nonfiction book, about his Scots-Irish ancestors, was called Born Fighting, and I imagine if there's a sequel to A Time to Fight, it will be called...
...Webb takes some politically risky turns in A Time to Fight, especially his chapter on the foolishness of mandatory drug-sentencing laws. He also takes a well-calibrated, if expected, 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. But he is best on matters of immediate concern to his personal tribes, the military and the Scots-Irish working class. "The ultimate question," Webb writes about Democrats and the military, "is this: When you look at a veteran, what...
...Although the military still doesn't trust Democrats, the careless and incompetent use of the troops in Iraq by the Bush Administration has caused a pervasive sense of disgust in the ranks, which may be why, Webb writes, a majority of the veterans running for Congress in 2006 did so as Democrats. In 2008 there are real opportunities for Democrats to gain the trust and support of military families, but only if they make a more sophisticated effort to celebrate the service the troops perform. Webb has led them along that path by proposing a GI bill that some Republicans...
...visiting Iraq. When Patrick Murphy, who served with the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad, returned to the country as a Congressman in 2007, he said he found the trip "somewhat scripted" and insisted on breaking off and seeing his former comrades so they "would give the straight story." Senator Jim Webb, a former Marine and Secretary of the Navy, called congressional Iraq visits a "dog and pony" show...