In 2008, the Democrats are going to be competing for Senate seats in Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. The question is, can Democrats win in these states by using a new strategy? Did Jim Webb’s victory represent a fluke, or does it provide a template?
The simplistic understanding of the Allen-Webb contest is that Allen imploded after a series of increasingly bizarre revelations about his racial views, including nostalgia for Confederate memorabilia, an accusation that he stuffed a dead deer’s head into a black family’s mailbox, and the use of an obscure North African slur—macaca—to describe a Webb staffer of Indian descent. After some post-election-day recounting, Webb was declared the winner by 9,331 votes, the tightest margin of victory for any Senate race in the nation and the one that returned the Senate to the Democrats. “The conventional wisdom is that Allen lost because of macaca,” says Bob Kerrey. “But that was just the opening. Webb converted that opening.”
He did so by ignoring the advice of most national Democrats. Webb, whose own son, Jimmy, is a Marine deployed in Iraq, went out on the trail every day in conservative Virginia wearing Jimmy’s combat boots. He railed against the war from the first day of his campaign, back when Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Rahm Emanuel, the leaders of the effort to take back Congress, were warning candidates in red states to shy away from Iraq, believing it had cost Democrats two elections in a row. On the economy, Webb bucked the consensus view among Democrats since the Clinton era that they need to downplay class divisions and populist rhetoric and hew to Rubinomics and deficit reduction. In other words, he said things that Democrats actually believe—or used to believe—but during the Bush years have been too scared to say. His victory became a case study in how Democrats could be.
That’s certainly what Webb believes. He takes umbrage at the notion that his victory was a fluke, as is clear from his National Press Club speech. “A year ago today,” he said, “I had literally no money. I had no political base whatsoever in either party. My opponent had just received the highest number of votes in a presidential poll taken during the Conservative Political Action Conference here in D.C. I was thirty-three points behind in the polls.” Not only does he argue that it was his message that overcame these hurdles, but he also insists that his message should now “become the core message of a revitalized Democratic Party.”
It’s an excellent question. I’m not sure about the answer. I’m also not sure how the top of the Democratic ticket will affect the Senate races. What say you?
