Confession time: I was one of the approximately one percent of Democrats who wanted (President) Jim Webb to become our next Commander in Chief. Admittedly, we disagree on many things. Climate change tops the list. But, he brought realism to a field sorely lacking it.
Webb’s platform centered around pragmatic liberalism and leadership. He stressed rebuilding the infrastructure and reforming the criminal justice system, albeit not for the usual reasons that liberals do. While he talked like a progressive on the need to rebalance the income distribution, he wanted to do so in a way that had a prayer of appealing to enough moderate Republicans to become law.
That gets to the core of why I liked Webb the best. I admire some Republicans — John Kasich and Rand Paul chief among them — but I am nervous about who they would appoint to the Supreme Court, and what they wouldn’t veto if Republicans held the Senate. On the left, Martin O’Malley made Baltimore what it is today, and Lincoln Chafee left office with an approval rating less than 30 percent, meaning that neither is qualified to be president.
I don’t like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton because there are many issues that simply need to be addressed soon in America, such as the debt, climate change, immigration policy and entitlement reform. Those issues will require bipartisan consensus to pass, so long as the House is gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, and as the Democrats are unlikely to slip beneath the filibuster threshold in the Senate. This means that a Democratic president couldn’t afford to view Congressional Republicans as a proud enemy, as Clinton does, or as a force best dealt with by voting them out of office as Sanders suggested during the debate.
Simply put, we need a president willing to reach across the aisle. Jim Webb was the sole Democratic candidate willing to do that who was qualified to head the executive branch.