Jim Webb launches 2016 exploratory committee
Source: Politico
Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb became the first well-known Democrat to launch an exploratory committee to run for president on Wednesday night, saying the nation is at a serious crossroads.
I have decided to launch an Exploratory Committee to examine whether I should run for President in 2016, Webb said in a four-page letter on his website, Webb2016.
I made this decision after reflecting on numerous political commentaries and listening to many knowledgeable people. I look forward to listening and talking with more people in the coming months as I decide whether or not to run.
The Vietnam veteran added, A strong majority of Americans agree that we are at a serious crossroads. In my view the solutions are not simply political, but those of leadership. I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/jim-webb-2016-committee-113055.html
jehop61
(1,735 posts)as someone who likes to "dabble" in things. Never sticking to anything for very long. A gadfly who has been both a Republican and a Democrat. Don't think his campaign will go very far.
Response to Adenoid_Hynkel (Original post)
BlueEye This message was self-deleted by its author.
7962
(11,841 posts)bigdarryl
(13,190 posts)RDANGELO
(3,433 posts)sorechasm
(631 posts)Didn't he call the VP position a complete waste of time? Plus many of his speeches against the corporate takeover of gov't are directed at the Clintons.
RDANGELO
(3,433 posts)This is going to be the big issue for us in 2016.
still_one
(92,187 posts)Robbins
(5,066 posts)to support.I am anyone but hillary for nomination.
It depends on the field.
We need someone credable on Income Inequality.That could be sleeper issue that could help dems.
mac56
(17,566 posts)BeyondGeography
(39,370 posts)Whoever attracts the "no more of the same ole, same ole," vote will get a good look.
Kilgore
(1,733 posts)BeyondGeography
(39,370 posts)He could be Warren with FP creds. If so, watch out.
still_one
(92,187 posts)speaks directly and doesn't seem to hedge when asked a question.
http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/james_webb.htm
NBachers
(17,108 posts)I supported him in his Senate campaign; I'll support his presidential campaign.
Faryn Balyncd
(5,125 posts)And here's what he told the WSJ in his op-ed 8 days after he defeated George Allen to take control of the Senate away from Cheney & the GOP in November, 2006:
Class Struggle
By Jim Webb
The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday 15 November 2006
The most important-and unfortunately the least debated-issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.
Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.
In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all......
http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/66991:jim-webb--class-struggle
He speaks truth, & he's not a corporate tool.
bigworld
(1,807 posts)djean111
(14,255 posts)Looking forward to hearing more from him.
TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)Odin2005
(53,521 posts)amandabeech
(9,893 posts)It would be refreshing to have a candidate who wasn't cozying up to Wall Street.
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)Next!
tabasco
(22,974 posts)I'm ready to stand with Webb and fight the scurrilous bastards!
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)This New Yorker article on Hillary, the inevitability trap, and other contenders is quite good. The whole thing is worth the read. I leave you with the section on Webb:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/inevitability-trap
Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who served one term, from 2007 to 2013, and then retired, has the potential to win the beer-track vote. In early October, I drove from Washington to a residential building that sits high on a hill in Arlington. On the eighth floor, in a condominium with a sweeping view of Washingtons monuments, Webb has been plotting his own path to defeating Clinton. I do believe that I have the leadership and the experience and the sense of history and the kinds of ideas where I could lead this country, he told me. Were just going to go out and put things on the table in the next four or five months and see if people support us. And if it looks viable, then well do it.
Webb is a moderate on foreign policy, but he is a Vietnam veteran from a long line of military men. His condo, which he uses as a study, is filled with antique weaponry and historical artifacts from his ancestors. He showed me a bookcase filled with collectibles. Ive been to a lot of battlefields, he said. He pointed to some sand from Iwo Jima; glass from Tinian, the island from which the Enola Gay was launched before it dropped an atomic bomb on Japan; and some shrapnel from Vietnam. I have that in my leg, he said.
After the war, Webb became a writer. His most famous book, Fields of Fire, published in 1978, is a novel based on his own experiences and has been credibly compared to Stephen Cranes The Red Badge of Courage for its realistic portrayal of war. Webb has always moved restlessly between the military and politics and the life of a writer. In the late seventies and early eighties, he worked as a counsel on the House Veterans Affairs Committee and later as Ronald Reagans Secretary of the Navy. He has also travelled around the world as a journalist for Parade. In 2007, I interviewed him in his Senate office weeks after he was sworn in. He noted that he was having a hard time adjusting to life as a senator and missed his writing life. Now, in Arlington, he talked about the unfinished business of his Senate career.
In his senatorial race, Webb did well not only in northern Virginia, which is filled with Washington commuters and college-educated liberals, but also with rural, working-class white voters in Appalachia. In 2008, those voters were generally more loyal to Clinton than to Obama, but Webb believes that he could attract a national coalition of both groups of voters in the Presidential primaries. He laid out a view of Wall Street that differs sharply from Clintons.
Because of the way that the financial sector dominates both parties, the distinctions that can be made on truly troubling issues are very minor, he said. He told a story of an effort he led in the Senate in 2010 to try to pass a windfall-profits tax that would have targeted executives at banks and firms which were rescued by the government after the 2008 financial crisis. He said that when he was debating whether to vote for the original bailout package, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, he relied on the advice of an analyst on Wall Street, who told him, No. 1, you have to do this, because otherwise the world economy will go into cataclysmic free fall. But, No. 2, you have to punish these guys. It is outrageous what they did.
After the rescue, when Webb pushed for what he saw as a reasonable punishment, his own party blocked the legislation. The Democrats wouldnt let me vote on it, he said. Because either way you voted on that, youre making somebody mad. And the financial sector was furious. He added that one Northeastern senatorWebb wouldnt say whowas literally screaming at me on the Senate floor.
When Clinton was a New York senator, from 2001 to 2009, she fiercely defended the financial industry, which was a crucial source of campaign contributions and of jobs in her state. If you dont have stock, and a lot of people in this country dont have stock, youre not doing very well, Webb said. Webb is a populist, but a cautious one, especially on taxes, the issue that seems to have backfired against OMalleys administration. As a senator, Webb frustrated some Democrats because he refused to raise individual income-tax rates. But as President, he says, he would be aggressive about taxing income from investments: Fairness says if youre a hedge-fund manager or making deals where youre making hundreds of millions of dollars and youre paying capital-gains tax on that, rather than ordinary income tax, somethings wrong, and people know somethings wrong.
The Clintons and Obama have championed policies that help the poor by strengthening the safety net, but they have shown relatively little interest in structural changes that would reverse runaway income inequality. There is a big tendency among a lot of Democratic leaders to feed some raw meat to the public on smaller issues that excite them, like the minimum wage, but dont really address the larger problem, Webb said. A lot of the Democratic leaders who dont want to scare away their financial supporters will say were going to raise the minimum wage, were going do these little things, when in reality we need to say were going to fundamentally change the tax code so that you will believe our system is fair.
Webb could challenge Clinton on other domestic issues as well. In 1984, he spent some time as a reporter studying the prison system in Japan, which has a relatively low recidivism rate. In the Senate, he pushed for creating a national commission that would study the American prison system, and he convened hearings on the economic consequences of mass incarceration. He says he even hired three staffers who had criminal records. If you have been in prison, God help you if you want to really rebuild your life, Webb told me. Weve got seven million people somehow involved in the system right now, and they need a structured way to reënter society and be productive again. He didnt mention it, but he is aware that the prison population in the U.S. exploded after the Clinton Administration signed tough new sentencing laws.
The issue that Webb cares about the most, and which could cause serious trouble for Hillary Clinton, is the one that Obama used to defeat her: Clintons record on war. In the Obama Administration, Clinton took the more hawkish position in three major debates that divided the Presidents national-security team. In 2009, she was an early advocate of the troop surge in Afghanistan. In 2011, along with Samantha Power, who was then a member of the White House National Security Council staff and is now the U.N. Ambassador, she pushed Obama to attack Libyan forces that were threatening the city of Benghazi. That year, Clinton also advocated arming Syrian rebels and intervening militarily in the Syrian civil war, a policy that Obama rejected. Now, as ISIS consolidates its control over parts of the Middle East and Irans influence grows, Clinton is still grappling with the consequences of her original vote for the war in Iraq.
Although Webb is by no means an isolationist, much of his appeal in his 2006 campaign was based on his unusual status as a veteran who opposed the Iraq war. Ive said for a very long time, since I was Secretary of the Navy, we do not belong as an occupying power in that part of the world, he told me. This incredible strategic blunder of invading caused the problems, because it allowed the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines at the same time that Iran was empowering itself in the region.
He thinks Obama, Clinton, and Power made things worse by intervening in Libya. Theres three factions, he said. The John McCains of the world, who want to intervene everywhere. Then the people who cooked up this doctrine of humanitarian intervention, including Samantha Power, who dont think they need to come to Congress if theres a problem that they define as a humanitarian intervention, which could be anything. That doctrine is so vague. Webb also disdains liberals who advocate military intervention without understanding the American military. Referring to Syria and Libya, Webb said, I was saying in hearings at the time, What is going to replace it? What is going to replace the Assad regime? These are tribal countries. Where are all these weapons systems that Qaddafi had? Probably in Syria. Can you get to the airport at Tripoli today? Probably not. It was an enormous destabilizing impact with the Arab Spring.
Faryn Balyncd
(5,125 posts)RedstDem
(1,239 posts)want hill er ee........
semanticwikiian
(69 posts)became a democrat about the same time that E Warren did.
has the same issues priorities & world view as E Warren & Bernie
this guy may be the Obama of 2016.
would like to know who's funded him to-date
and what his prescriptions are for climate change
.... been vague about that
.... I mean, Norfolk is starting to drown !!!!!
reACTIONary
(5,770 posts)...stepping forward. I'm looking forward to others, and most definitely HRC, making the move!
HR_Pufnstuf
(837 posts)kick