When former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., announced he was dropping out of the Democratic presidential race, possibly to run as an independent, the media were eager to hint that his candidacy had been a sham.
“How often were you out campaigning, meeting with voters?” asked Buzzfeed’s Olivia Nuzzi, a former Democratic campaign volunteer. “Where were you campaigning?” She also asked how many people he had on staff. The line of questioning implied the possibility that Webb had been running a Potemkin campaign as a Democrat, designed chiefly to generate attention for a pre-planned independent candidacy.
One can only guess whether this was so. But there are many Democrats who, like Webb, have seen the party slide left in the Obama era, leaving them stranded as though by a receding tide. Perhaps the Republican Party has become more conservative, but its shift right has been matched by the Democratic Party lurch in the opposite direction.
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Webb is someone who fit fairly comfortably into the liberal Democratic mainstream in the pre-Obama era. Unlike his former Senate colleague Hillary Clinton, he opposed the Iraq War before it happened (and also the Gulf War). As a senator, he opposed policies that blocked homosexuals from serving in the military. He supported legalized abortion. He voted for Obamacare, supported expanding Medicare, and opposed anything resembling privatization of Social Security.
But in the era of Obama, with the Left having taken the reins, Webb’s poistions just aren’t good enough. The mostly white and wealthy urban gentry that drives the Democratic Party’s agenda today enjoys the benefits of market capitalism but nevertheless loves to hear professions of faith in socialist ideology in its new millennial forms.
Where Democrats once bristled at being accused of pining for the politics of Western Europe, they now proudly hold up Denmark as the standard to which America should aspire. They have qualms about candidates who refuse publicly to promote mass gun confiscation; indeed, in a Democratic primary, the gun rights issue hurts not only Webb but also socialist Bernie Sanders.
In the context of a Democratic primary, even Webb’s valiant, highly decorated service in Vietnam, where he was sent by a Democratic president and Congress, was used against him. He was met with sneers when he answered a debate question about each candidate’s “enemies” by pointing out that he had faced real enemies who were trying to kill him, not just political opponents. The fact that Hillary Clinton received such a cheer when she panderingly suggested Republicans were enemies says a lot about the ideological intolerance of the modern Democratic party, although it should be acknowledged that there is a mirror image of that intolerance in some quarters of the Republican right.
Cast your mind back no further than 2006, and recall that Democrats took control of Congress by recruiting moderate candidates. Look back a little further, and the left-wing candidate in the 2004 Democratic field, Howard Dean, was discussing the need to attract support from gun owners with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. A few years before that, a Democratic president signed welfare reform and ushered in a stock market boom by signing a large capital gains tax cut.
The Democratic Party of that era has been forgotten in the age of Obama. And all the Jim Webbs who have not yet left it must be wondering why.
