Will Jim Webb embark on a serious Independent run at the Presidency?

(CNN)Jim Webb and his close advisers have started to look closely at ballot access dates for the former Virginia senator's possible independent presidential run, according to aides and advisers, and feels "confident" that if he were to run, he would be successful.

Webb dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination last month, announcing to a room full of journalists that he would be exploring an independent bid.

Like he did during his run for the Democratic nomination, the former Virginia senator is keeping a close circle of advisers that includes his wife, Hong Le Webb.

"He has tasked us to do a feasibility study on how to get on enough state ballots for a mathematical chance at 270 electoral votes," spokesman Craig Crawford told CNN on Thursday. "That's in progress."

http://linkis.com/com/o8gO5

This is the guy we need, not only because he is the best but also to show that people actually care about the country.

Besides graduating from Annapolis at the top of his class, being first in his class of 243 lieutenants at the Basic School, being a platoon and company commander and winning a Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts in Viet Nam, he was a committee general counsel, congressional staffer, official in the Defense Department, SecNav and senator, he is a NY Times best selling author, has the screenwriting credit for "Rules of Engagement" and he even has a bleeping EMMY.

But the thing that is so awesome is that he resigned as SeNav in protest of what the SecDef asked him to do. It blew me away at the time. Who does that? The story is that the SecDef Carlucci asked him to misrepresent facts to the Congress. He laid it on Carlucci at the time. Awesome. Specifically he was asked to misrepresent the usefulness of a new class of Navy warships.

Senator Webb is exactly what we need.

From 2008 but resonating now:

"A wall in Jim Webb’s Washington office is filled with a collection of archival photographs, the centerpiece of which is a striking black-and-white portrait captioned “Appalachian Man.” The photograph’s anonymous subject is a workingman who could be forty or sixty. His weathered face, vaguely handsome beneath a thick felt hat, is fixed in a glare suggesting skepticism, even disdain. Whoever Appalachian Man was, his image has found the perfect setting.

Webb has been thinking and writing about such people for forty years. When he turned to writing after serving as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam, he became obsessed with the American cultural divide, and the fact that his people, the Scots-Irish, stood so firmly on one side. The descendants of the Ulster warrior clans that settled the Appalachian frontier were a proud, ornery lot, deeply patriotic and always ready for a fight. They invented country music, fostered the form of democracy named for their kinsman Andrew Jackson, and supplied generals on both sides of the Civil War. In “Born Fighting,” his 2004 book about the Scots-Irish influence in American life, Webb summarized the culture’s core ethos: Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray.

Webb has cast himself on both sides of the cultural divide. After Vietnam, he began identifying himself as a Republican, and eventually became Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary. “There were a lot of people, like myself, who got really disillusioned by the Democratic Party getting away from its message of taking care of working people, and becoming the anti-military party rather than the antiwar party,” he told me recently. “There was this huge group, this bellwether group that was sitting there. And after the Democratic Party started obscuring its message they look up and say, At the top, there’s no real difference between the parties, no real difference except at least these people”—the Republicans—“are gonna protect God and guns. And they do values-vote.”
Webb eventually became disgusted by the Republicans’ manipulation of those values voters, through what he calls “Karl Rove tactics.”

“The Karl Rove approach is very simple,” he says now. “It’s just three things: He’s not like you, he doesn’t understand you, you can’t trust him. Our guy is like you, our guy understands you, you can trust him. That’s the whole formula.” Webb became a Democrat and ran for office, motivated partly by the challenge of attracting disenchanted former Democrats back into the Party, and of moving the Party back toward them.

An Obama-Webb ticket would certainly have helped Obama with some of the constituencies most wary of him, but when Webb was asked to undergo vetting for consideration as Obama’s running mate he declined. “I know what it’s like to be in an Administration,” he told me. “You owe the people at the top your absolute loyalty. I did it for four years.” Webb might well have chafed in an Obama Administration. He was for offshore drilling—or, at least, he favored allowing Virginia to decide whether its coasts should be explored—when Obama and most of the Party still opposed it. Webb advocates the exploitation of America’s vast coal fields, saying, “We’re sitting on the Saudi Arabia of coal.” Obama used that same term when he spoke in Lebanon, emphasizing the need to develop clean coal technology. But earlier this year he referred to coal as “dirty energy,” and his running mate, Joe Biden, said recently in Ohio, “No coal plants here in America. Build ’em, if they’re going to build ’em, over there”—in China.

Webb is freer to fashion his own political identity from his position in the Senate. “My prototype really is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was able to combine an academic, intellectual career and a government career, really put new ideas out there, and think. I think I’ve been able to do that. And I don’t want to stop doing that. I’ve got a lot of ideas that don’t fit into either party, really.”
Recalling Mudcat Saunders’s advice for Obama, I asked Webb whether Obama had sought his counsel about breaking down cultural barriers in rural America. “I’ve done it a few times with him,” Webb says. “He’s been pretty busy over the last eighteen months, but a good time is when we’ve had stack votes on the Senate floor and we sit there for an hour, hour and a half, and just sit down and talk about different things.” Webb said he urged Obama to read an opinion article Webb wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2004, in which he argued that “the greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African-Americans to the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries.”

“We had some good talks about this,” Webb told me. “And I think he really gets it. I think it’s one of the reasons he has pushed where he has been pushing.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/06/the-appalachian-problem

Walt

Great credentials but where does he stand on the big issues? Pro 2nd amendment or not? Pro border control or not? Pro constitution or not? Anyone have a summation of his stance on the important issues? Is he conservative independent or liberal independent? For big government or for less government...I haven't even started reviewing republican candidates yet but I still don't think an Independent can win and I still fear a strong Independent running would only help the democrats and hurt the republicans...by taking votes from the lesser of the two substantiated evils.

nope ... Hillary's machine will destroy him!

Who is he and what does he stand for?