Jim Webb and the Democrats’ white-man problem

“I think this is where Democrats screw up, you know?” Webb said. “I think that they have kind of unwittingly used this group, white working males, as a whipping post for a lot of their policies. And then when they react, they say they’re being racist.”

Rather than run as a liberal (which he is not, in a whole host of ways), Webb could run as a kind of anti-Hillary. He would be an explicit counter to the sort of progressive, feminist narrative that would inherently undergird a Clinton run. He would also be the anti-Obama, a break from the sort of identity politics around race, gender and ethnicity that have, in Webb’s telling, excluded working-class white men.

(A white woman running for president after the nation’s first black president could certainly underscore the “what about us” feeling among this demographic.)