Virginia Senate contender Jim Webb enlisted the political muscle of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, part of an increasingly concerted push to unseat Virginia’s Republican junior senator and loosen the GOP control of Congress.
Outside of La Bergerie in Alexandria, Webb stood beside one of the nation’s most visible Democrats and a front-runner for the 2008 presidential nomination, who argued that “power has taken over and consumed” the Republican majority.
“We need a change of direction; we need to elect Democrats,” Clinton told reporters. “We’re never going to have the right kind of debate about what can be done in Iraq or Afghanistan until we’ve got some leverage in the Congress.”
Webb is running a tight race with Sen. George Allen, buoyed by remarks his opponent that have bogged down the Allen campaign. During a speech in rural Virginia, Allen famously called an Indian-American Webb volunteer “macaca,” and recently was charged with using the “n-word” in his youth.
The partnership of Webb and one of the most polarizing Democratic figures in American politics is an apparent departure from his earlier attempt to garner support through his ties with the Reagan administration. Nancy Reagan recently asked Webb to pull a television ad featuring her late husband.
Allen campaign manager Dick Wadhams blasted Webb’s association with Democratic senators and “that very liberal crowd.”
“He fashioned himself a Reagan Democrat when he got into the race, but it is becoming very apparent that was as much as a facade as just about everything in his candidacy has been,” Wadhams said Tuesday.
