Has Joe just really not been paying attention?
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Senate candidate Jim Webb's campaign will help determine whether Democrats can become a majority party once more.....
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.
Ok, some populism going on. I like that. Anti-Iraq war, check. Anti-social and economic extremism, check, check. -RSBut 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.
Ooooo, scary. This high bar will surely do him in! What rational person could pass THAT kind of test?! -RS "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."
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,1200712,00.html?promoid=rss_kleinKlein provides a quote from *one* nervous "prominent Democrat". Might that be a consultant/pundit type dem?
What else does he think people are looking for? Hasn't he been paying attention at all?