Can the Democrats Handle a Heretic?

By Joe Klein

Jim Webb is standing at parade rest, feet apart at shoulder width, chin out, quiet blue eyes scanning his target of opportunity--the assembled Democrats of Montgomery County, Virginia--and waiting for local party chieftain Steve Cochran to ask him something. "Well, looking through this," Cochran says, riffling through a series of questions written on three-by-five cards, "there's one dominant theme. People want to know why you became a Democrat after all those years as a Republican, and why you endorsed George Allen for the U.S. Senate over Chuck Robb in 2000, and why you want to run against Allen now."

Webb is a much decorated Vietnam War hero, successful novelist and former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration. He is running in the Virginia Democratic Senate primary against Harris Miller, a longtime party activist and telecommunications-industry lobbyist. And it's strange: Webb's Democratic bona fides are the big question in the June 13 election, but he refuses to offer a pat answer. He wanders through his response, talking as a writer thinks, trying one pathway, then another--and it requires some patience from the audience, which is used to hearing politicians give smooth, market-tested replies to the tough questions. But the patience is rewarded. Webb has taken a spiritual journey over the past decade, launched by the research he did for Born Fighting, his nonfiction paean to his all-American ethnic group, the Scots Irish. "When I started studying Andrew Jackson, I realized that I was really a Jacksonian populist Democrat," Webb tells the crowd. "Jackson believed that you don't measure the health of a society at the apex but at the base. I believe that too, and that's why I'm a Democrat." There are other reasons. Webb opposed the war in Iraq, and he was increasingly uncomfortable with Republican extremism on social and economic issues. "I'm not sure that Democrats are much better," he told me earlier, as we toured southwestern Virginia in his camouflage-painted campaign jeep. "But their historic through-line is better."

Webb may turn out to be a crucial figure in the recent history of the Democratic Party. For the past 25 years, the tide of political conversions has been running in the opposite direction, from Democrat to Republican, and most of the converts were people like Webb: white, Southern, middle class or poorer, patriotic and, often, with a strong family tradition of military service--in fact, Webb's son Jim Jr. is a Marine lance corporal headed to Ramadi. Webb's conversion may be a sign that those sorts of people may now be willing to give the Democrats a second look. A standard-issue Democrat like Miller would probably be cannon fodder for a Republican incumbent like Allen, a party star and probable presidential candidate. It wouldn't be an easy race for Webb either, but his candidacy might begin to redden the Democrats' necks in the South. And with his pugilistic history--he fought a famous bout against Oliver North at Annapolis--Webb would surely give Allen a tussle.

But it isn't easy running as a Democrat. There are litmus-test land mines in every audience. At the Montgomery County meeting, a local surgeon named William Epstein showed me his list: drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, abortion, gay marriage. "I'm afraid he's a mini-Republican," Epstein said at first. But later, after asking the candidate directly, he amended his judgment: "He answered me straight and passed every one of my tests." Webb is an outdoorsy hunting-and-fishing environmentalist. He is pro-choice, pro-gay rights. He has expressed nuanced reservations about affirmative action and women in combat in the past and takes careful time to explain his positions now. "If he told a lie, his tongue would fall out," says his strategist, Dave (Mudcat) Saunders, who won't take any money from him. "His sense of honor is a frightening thing."

Webb is a political amateur, and party pros consider him "undisciplined." That means he hates fund raising and isn't very comfortable with the backroom coddling of special interests that is a dismally essential part of the job. He entered the race late and precipitately. His answers are sketchy on some domestic-policy issues; Miller has a Washington insider's grasp of issues like education and tax policy, as the Washington Post pointed out in an endorsement editorial last week. Indeed, Webb may be in serious trouble in the primary. A minuscule turnout is expected, less than 5% of the electorate, and Miller has been working his way through the traditional Democratic constituencies--abortion-rights activists, teachers' unions and minorities--like a threshing machine. "We have one candidate who is appealing and undisciplined and another who is disciplined and unappealing," a prominent Democrat told me. "It's a real problem." It is more than that: a campaign that will help determine whether Democrats have the expansive soul to become a majority party once more. Liberals hunt down heretics, Michael Kinsley once wrote, while conservatives happily chase converts. Webb is a convert in a party that mistrusts converts. His candidacy is a litmus test for a party that loves litmus tests.