MARINE DROPS OUT OF RACE, WON’T SEEK PAJAMA BOY PARTY’S NOMINATION: Investor’s Business Daily notes that “Jim Webb dropped out of his party’s primary race, leaving a field of candidates so extreme that none could have won the Democratic nomination as recently as 2000*. The party has lurched left, hard:”
Conceding that his “views on many issues are not compatible with the power structure and base of the Democratic Party,” Webb, a U.S. senator from 2007 to 2013, left the race Tuesday.
Webb’s differences with the party are not entirely about policy issues.
He’s just too much of a traditional man to suit the tastes of today’s Democrats.
To illustrate that point, IBD created this jarring visual comparison:
Nobody loves a good juxtaposition than me, and the side-by-side images that IBD mashed together are damning. But Webb and Footie Obamacare Pajamas Boy are more related than they first seem. Webb opportunistically changed parties in 2006 to run against then-Sen. George Allen of Virginia. Webb’s victory was assured when in service to Webb’s campaign, the Washington Post ran an estimated 100 articles beginning in mid-August of 2006 until the end of the election in November casting a harsh Klieg light upon Allen’s “macaca” quip when pointing out his omnipresent Mohawk-wearing video tracker from the rival Webb campaign.
But while Webb has had a vastly different career arc from Vietnam War Marine to Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan to Democrat senator and quixotic presidential candidate than young Ethan Krupp, the self-described “liberal fuck” who posed for the now infamous Footie Pajamas Boy photo, Webb is directly responsible for that image in one real sense. Webb voted for Obamacare, and upon retiring in 2012 after his single term as senator told fellow Democrat Chuck Todd of MSNBC that he had no regrets voting for the now-disastrous bill.
As Phil Kerpen of AmericanCommitment.org tweeted when Webb quit the presidential race, “Contrast Webb’s sad bolting today with the coulda been drama of him voting no on Obamacare and walking across the aisle, Christmas Eve 2009.”
IBD’s requiem for Webb’s presidential bid concludes, “Webb’s departure shows, and polls confirm, the extremists in 2015 are the Democrats, not the Republicans. This is exactly why a socialist can generate such heavy support in the party. The roots have been severed.” And Webb himself played no small role in their destruction.
* Wait, how much further to the left could the Democrats have moved since Al Gore, master of the “digital brownshirts” and purveyor the “Ecological Kristallnacht,” won the nomination in 2000?