Virginia Senator James Webb: Washington's Most Unlikely Revolutionary

"I would never vote for George Bush," he told his father, "but I'd take a bullet for him." Bush recruited the fallen Marine's memory for a speech "to scotch up support for the war," his father says. The family gave Bush's speechwriters their consent. "The person was not who you owed your loyalty to," McGlothlin says, recounting his son's view. "It was the leader in the abstract."

There is the war over there, and a different kind of war over here. What will happen in coal country, Jackie Stump predicts, is that the union will get weaker and weaker until someday some kids who've never heard of organized labor will look around at their working conditions and say to each other, 'We'd better get together and do something about this.' And when they do, the bosses will try to knock them down. "If they're hungry enough," says Stump, "they'll hit back."

That's why he likes Webb, he says. Webb understands the fight must continue, even if you're not sure what you're fighting for.

Democracy in Iraq, or clean water in Virginia?

Old men in jungle fatigues, or young soldiers in desert camouflage?

Body armor? Or oxygen machines?

In February of 2006, Webb called the Democratic political strategist Dave Saunders, and together they plotted to end the career of Senator George Allen, a handsome dunce in the model of George W. who stood to be re-elected by thirty-three points. The Democrats planned to run Harris Miller, an anti-labor lobbyist dedicated to outsourcing IT jobs overseas. Saunders, his drawl as deep and wide as his connections in the tough little Dixie towns where most Democrats fear to tread, persuaded Webb that he was the man to take out first Miller -- who outspent Webb three to one -- then Allen. Saunders, known as "Mudcat" throughout the state, has for years been working on rebuilding Democratic strength in the South through an alliance of African-Americans and the Southern white men he calls "Bubbas." "We were in the same place in terms of 'How do you help people down here?' " says Webb. "How do you get the good out of this culture? At the end of this conversation, I said, 'I'll do this. Let's test the theory.' "

Webb is so white he wrote a book about it; Saunders quickly realized Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America could become the rare campaign book voters might actually read, one that doesn't pull punches. In its opening pages, Webb lists the slurs by which his people are known: "Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder." The Scots-Irish -- Protestant Scots who fought the British in Scotland, then in Ireland, then in America -- have indeed died disproportionately in America's wars. But the Bubbas, Webb argues, were and are not so much cannon fodder as a warrior caste. He considers poor white Southerners victims of the "monstrous mousetrap" they themselves built for African-Americans. "The Southern redneck" he writes, has become the "veritable poster child of liberal hatred and disgust . . . the emblem of everything that had kept the black man down. No matter that the country-club whites had always held the key to the Big House . . . at the expense of disadvantaged blacks and whites alike."

Why did liberals ignore class? In part because Bubbas so often played the role assigned to them, but also because the poor whites, "Jacksonian populists," as Webb likes to call them, "are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness."

It's not that Webb is racist, he'd just like to afford poor whites the status of victim too. In fact, he descends from a line of Southern whites at odds with the region's racist traditions, and he's especially proud of his fight in 1982 to get a representation of a black soldier added to the statue at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. "I put a black man on the Mall," he said in 1991, "and they" -- bigots and the art snobs who preferred Maya Lin's abstract wall -- "can kiss my ass."

Webb believes that a re-energized army of Bubbas will remake American politics, restoring gun lovers, hunters and NASCAR fans to the place they once held at the heart of American populism. "Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray," he titled one chapter in Born Fighting, describing a culture that at its best created country music and at its worst invented the lynch mob.

But Webb is as aware of the dangers of populism as he is of its potential. "On the one hand," he says, "populism created American politics. On the other it created a formula that's been continuously abused from that time forward. The notions that went into Jacksonian democracy are so commonly turned into rhetoric rather than substance. You know, the log cabin, 'We're for the little people.' " Webb rolls his eyes. "The emotional buttons."

When Webb decided to run, no one but Mudcat Saunders and his friend the writer Tom Wolfe (who insists Webb will be president one day) thought he could wage more than a symbolic fight. Sometimes it seemed he wouldn't even manage that. When Mudcat arranged for a band to play for the campaign, Webb overheard him telling the musicians to learn the Marine Corps hymn. "Jim never screamed at me," Mudcat remembers. "He just takes me outside and he stares at me and he says, 'One thing I want to make very clear to you. In no way, shape or form is the Marine Corps hymn to be used in my campaign. I will never use that song for political gain.' " Yessir, said Mudcat: "I thought, 'Well, fuck, we just gave up our own best ace card.' "

They didn't need it; George Allen charted his own demise. Re-election to the Senate seemed like such a sure thing that he began smirking during his speeches, as if aping Bush's worst qualities would make him the president's heir. He called an Indian-American Webb volunteer "macaca," and then he took offense at the news that his mother had been born Jewish, defiantly proclaiming his determination to eat a ham sandwich to prove his Christian bona fides.

Webb isn't a natural campaigner; he didn't have to be. When he defeated Allen in one of the slimmest, and certainly the most unexpected, Democratic victory of 2006, pundits didn't declare him a giant-killer. Instead, they ruled it victory by default -- curmudgeon beats boob.

A few weeks into his term, though, those same pundits were beginning to see in Webb what Mudcat and Wolfe recognize: the politician, yes, but also the soldier and the storyteller to whom voters thrill. In January, the Democratic Party tapped him to respond to Bush's State of the Union address. Halfway through his speech, he pulled out an old black-and-white photograph and held it before the camera as if politics were show-and-tell. "This is my father," he said, pointing at a barely discernible figure in the center, "when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from Germany as we waited for him back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used to take the picture to bed with me every night, because for more than three years my father was deployed, unable to live with us full-time, serving overseas or in bases where there was no family housing. I still keep it, to remind me of the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my father gladly served our country."

It was brilliant, and it had the added advantage of being true. "I was proud to follow in his footsteps," he continued, grabbing hold of every macho American man within earshot of a television, "serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a Marine helicopter pilot. My son has joined the tradition, now serving as an infantry Marine in Iraq." Webb's fighting family had trusted America's elected leaders, he said. "We owed them our loyalty," he said, "but they owed us sound judgment."

Webb was almost shaking with his sense of betrayal. Here was the synthesis of his three identities -- warrior, poet and politician -- bound up in one angry man voted up to the big house by Bubbas with guns, pissed off about losing their jobs to China and their children to Iraq. Lest the lesson be lost, he closed with a warning, recalling a time a hundred years ago when "the dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt." Once again, he seemed to be saying, such a time is at hand.

>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until June 15th.