Virginia Senator James Webb: Washington's Most Unlikely Revolutionary

In Lebanon, Webb starts his speech perfunctorily, talking about bipartisanship and finding common ground on the war, but then he seems to hear himself going Beltway. His voice jumps up a note; in creeps scorn for his own compromises. "This isn't about bipartisanship," he says. "It's not about Iraq." He glares around the room. "It's about 9,000 votes in Virginia." Fuck, yes, nod the miners and their wives. It's about the people who put Webb over the top by less than one half of one percent.

Webb shouldn't have won -- he started with no money and no support, not even from the Democrats, who backed a telecommunications lobbyist named Harris Miller. He upset Miller in the primary only to face Republican Senator George Allen, then considered one of the front-runners for the 2008 presidential nomination. But he beat Allen, too, and the men and women in this room were the reason: Conventional wisdom held that Webb, as an anti-war Democrat, would take Northern Virginia and get slaughtered in the rest of the state. Webb did win the North, but he also won more of the Southern vote than anyone expected. They didn't elect Webb to compromise; they sent him to fight. Not for the Democratic Party, for them. Webb campaigned on two main themes, foreign policy and "economic fairness," a term he's still defining. To him it means an increased minimum wage, which the new Democratic Senate promptly passed; a commitment to health insurance for all, if not a plan to make it happen; the conviction that "free trade" is not "fair trade," even if he hasn't decided what constitutes the latter; and most of all, a simmering fury that CEOs make on average 400 times more than the typical worker.

"After 9/11," Webb tells the miners, "the old labels don't apply. The country is just a different place. And now we can remake the party system in these United States if we can get Reagan Democrats -- or whatever you want to call 'em -- if we can bring them back, we will remake politics. You don't measure the health of a society from the top down, but from the bottom up."

Before Born Fighting, Webb's books were animated by a critique of cultural snobbery, not capitalism. Then the war in Iraq revealed a new enemy to Webb: the system itself, the distortion of democracy that makes the poor fight wars from which only the wealthy benefit. "Class law," he calls it, is "a disguise that allowed certain privileges to flow to a few dominant groups at the expense of the many." The system, he concluded, needs to be turned upside down. "That's economic fairness," he tells the miners. "We have lost the formula. But this is the place, here in Virginia, this is the place where we are going to remake it."

It's time for questions. Several are about Iraq. One man has three sons in the Marines and worries about the health care they'll receive when -- not if, in his mind -- they are wounded. A mother with a son overseas wants to know if we're going to fight Iran. Another man's son's tour has been extended, which seems to him akin to the bullying the miners get from the coal companies.

"That's right," is the sum of Webb's answers. He wants more money for vets, and he's introduced a bill to stop Bush -- or Hillary -- from rushing into Iran without congressional approval, and he's fighting for a cap on deployments; beyond that, answers are lacking. Webb the novelist sees the problem: This story doesn't have a happy ending. But Webb the politician toes the Democratic line, declaring Iraq "solvable," as if it were a crossword, while Webb the warrior's plan for Iraq is diplomacy. He's been quietly meeting with Condoleezza Rice, he'll tell me later, urging talks with the Iranians. Meanwhile, the bodies are piling up, there and here: "We got people dying in the mines," says one woman. Dozens every year in preventable accidents and 1,500 every year of black lung, more than the annual U.S. death toll in Iraq. "That's right," says Webb again, and that seems to please the miners and their wives. They know they're right, but it's been a long time since a U.S. senator said so.

"We've got people in desperate need right here," announces one woman. "I'm talking about water." Towns like Lebanon used to get federal grants for basic services, but under Bush they're offered only loans. Their pipes are rusting, their kids are getting sick from dirty water. Another woman speaks up about oxygen concentrators, a crucial piece of medical equipment in coal country. The Bush administration slashed federal aid for the machines, says the woman, and people will die gasping for breath in their own beds. What will Webb do for them?

"I can look into that," he says, then checks himself. These are his people, and now "looking into that" will not be enough. This is the paradox Webb faces: He's been elected as an old-school populist in a two-party system that has little room for or interest in his crusade. And here are Webb's troops: Men in need of oxygen concentrators, women who can't pay their bills, miners in union-issue camouflage leaning hard on canes or on big, sturdy wives who pretend for their broken husbands' sakes that it's they who cling. The last big strike by the United Mine Workers is nearly two decades past, which was when they took up the faded fatigues that some of them are wearing tonight.

One of the strike's leaders is in the courtroom, a man named Jackie Stump. I ask if he thinks Webb will help the union push back against the bosses. He shrugs. He doesn't expect another big labor fight in his lifetime. The union won that strike -- preserving health benefits for disabled miners -- but lost the war, not on the picket line but in the courtrooms, where what Webb now calls "class law" crippled the union with fines in retribution for its revolt.

The mine into which Webb descended is one of the last three union coal operations in Virginia. The sons and daughters of Lebanon leave Russell County, some for Iraq, and at least one didn't come back: a former valedictorian and all-region defensive end from Lebanon High named Donald Ryan McGlothlin, who was killed November 16th, 2005, in Al-Anbar province. McGlothlin's father had already decided to support Webb's campaign when he learned that, like him, the candidate was wearing his son's combat boots in tribute. Ryan didn't believe in the war in Iraq, feeling the real war was to be fought in Afghanistan, but he felt a powerful duty to his mission.