from The Nation:
Jim Webb's Time to Fightposted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 05/19/2008 @ 11:55pm
Jim Webb can make the Four Seasons seem like a diner in Owensboro, Kentucky. It's that kind of blue-collar street cred that may be just what it takes to propel the first term Senator from Virginia onto the Democratic ticket as Vice-President.
On Monday night, at a party for his latest book, " A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America," the first term Senator from Virginia filled the dining citadel of elitism with a spirited mix of active duty and retired Marines and New York's media glitterati. After he said a few words, Webb remained at the made-for-the occasion podium--as if he were campaigning--and took questions.
Ronald Reagan's former Secretary of the Navy has refocused the warrior ambition that made him the most highly decorated Vietnam -era Marine from his Naval Academy into a passionate, progressive and patriotic populism. When asked tonight, by the New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg, what he thought of those who opposed the Vietnam war, Webb said "I never had a problem with those who properly opposed the war. I had a problem with the way vets were treated when they got home." He explained that as the young vet and author of "Fields of Fire," the classic novel of the Vietnam War, "I inherited the obligation to articulate the conclusions of those who served." And in that, he suggested, lay the seeds of anger and bitterness toward opponents of a war he had served in...passions which have ebbed and subdued as he has witnessed the disaster of Iraq.
Monday night, as other nights, most notably the January night in 2007 when Webb delivered the most devastating Democratic State of the Union reply in modern memory, the Senator used his bully pulpit to rip into a Republican Administration that has shafted the men and women it sent into an unecessary war by denying them the benefits they deserve and for allowing this country, as he told me, to "calcify along class lines." When I asked what he would do to make the people who lived up and down the street we were on, Park Avenue, contribute to reclaiming a fair and just America, Webb spoke forcefully of ending a system "in which the average corporate CEO now makes nearly 400 times more than what an average worker does. " When "I graduated from college," he told me, "the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker did." As Webb fielded questions, with his young Vietnamese wife close by,--he even repeated questions when they weren't clear ("a technique of military instruction," he joked)-- he denounced the inequities of system which takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/322265
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
