Jim Webb: Gentleman Enforcer for Barack Obama

As the drumbeat of support for the selection of Jim Webb as a running mate for Obama continues to grow, it is interesting and useful to examine the on-going story of Webb's GI Bill to understand what Webb would add to the ticket both as a candidate and later as a Vice President.

There is a remarkable piece about the current negotiations on the bill in Politico right now. What it amounts to is that John McCain has realized how well and truly screwed he is with his stance on this bill and he's begging Jim Webb to let him off the hook.

Webb introduced the bill simply for the sake of helping combat veterans and he went out of his way to avoid politicizing it for months. He was a few votes shy of cloture and fellow veteran John McCain was a natural ally to seek out for one of those votes. The only problem was that McCain was out on the campaign trail and hadn't had a chance to read the bill. Months went by, Webb's staff kept asking him to read the damned bill already and McCain didn't get around to it. Eventually, McCain's failure to support the bill became a political issue.

Even though he might very well be in favor of the bill if he would actually read it, McCain's staff eventually had to respond to the criticism by attacking the GI Bill, since it would look pretty bad to just admit that McCain hadn't been doing his job. And with that little flurry of criticism of the GI Bill, John McCain suddenly found himself backed into a corner.

Barack Obama started to attack McCain for refusing to support the bill. Could any line of attack be more perfect for the Democratic Presidential nominee against John McCain? McCain's strength is supposed to be his status as a veteran and defender of the military and it's people. Here McCain has accidentally created an ideal opportunity for Obama to disable his greatest strength. Obama has been using this and invoking Webb's name every time.

So long as McCain holds back his vote for the GI Bill, Obama can criticize his lack of support for the troops in a manner that is substantive and does not stoop to sleazy personal attacks. Imagine the effectiveness of having decorated veteran and former Navy Secretary Jim Webb himself on the ticket and whipping McCain for letting veterans down all the way through November. As a running mate, Jim Webb not only brings Appalacia into play but also enables the neutralization of McCain's former strong point on defense.

McCain needs a graceful way out. Some sort of highly visible change to the bill that he can say he insisted on so that he gets the thing out of the way for November without looking like he caved. That's what he is looking for now.

The really interesting thing about this piece in Politico is the fact that it is Jim Webb who is being lobbied by desperate Republicans, Jim Webb who the McCain camp is begging for mercy from and Jim Webb who holds all of the keys. Not Harry Reid, nor anyone else who is formally part of the Senate Democratic Party leadership. In his subtle, professional and gentlemanly way, Jim Webb has become a powerhouse of the Senate after only a year and a half into his freshman term. I can think of no other US Senator in the modern era who has risen to such a position of respect and influence in that body in such little time. He's done it without grandstanding or attacking. He's done it by being an unquestionably experienced hand on defense issues and by always placing emphasis on getting legislation done rather than scoring political points in the media.

The type of partnership that could emerge between Obama and Webb as President and Vice President would be a powerful one indeed. A new Obama administration is going to have an enormous challenge in terms of enforcing it's will on a military whose leadership was long since purged of heretics by the Bush administration. Many parts of Obama's legislative agenda will also be opposed by enough Senate Republicans to deny him the 60 votes necessary for cloture. Who better to patiently disarm this resistance than Jim Webb? There are tougher whips out there, but tough alone is not what this job calls for. The remarkable thing about Jim Webb is his ability to not only communicate by a glance the fact that he could break a man's neck with his bare hands but also his ability to patiently, firmly and politely get his fingers in the grease and work to establish a bi-partisan consensus. Webb's style meshes perfectly with Obama's ideals of 'a new kind of politics' that seeks consensus rather than division.

Jim Webb as a running mate would make the perfect weapon against John McCain for Barack Obama. And it is those same skills that have made him such a perfect weapon that would also enable him to serve as an extraordinarily capable Vice President, turning administration proposals into reality in both the military and the Senate. Hopefully, we'll get that new GI bill passed along the way.