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"FacebookPinterest\n\nToday is what&amp;#39;s known in the Senate as &amp;quot;vote-a-rama,&amp;quot; a daylong marathon of budget votes that requires members to be within a ten-minute walk of the Senate floor at all times. It&amp;#39;s not Jim Webb&amp;#39;s kind of day. He hates being chained to the floor schedule. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve done all this stuff all over the world as a writer,&amp;quot; Webb told me. &amp;quot;Going places where nobody knows who you are, and nobody cares, and you can go into the back alleys, go into the bad areas, you know Really see things. To me, government is a cage.&amp;quot; All this week, in an attempt to at least partially escape that cage, Webb has been spending his free time at his private writing office across the Potomac River in Arlington, working on a big speech about the future of the Democratic Party that he delivered yesterday at the National Press Club. Webb fancies himself an ideas guy\u2014&amp;quot;If I had to pick a prototype for the Senate, it would probably be Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who came out of an intellectual career,&amp;quot; he said at the NPC\u2014but there&amp;#39;s nothing high-minded about today. Today is about making sausage. Over the next seven hours, Webb will vote on dozens of arcane amendments to the main budget resolution, the blueprint for how the United States government will spend $3 trillion next year. There are reams of amendments to boost funding for every imaginable pet project\u2014training physicians, combating meth, boosting nanotechnology. There are deviously worded land-mine amendments written with nothing other than future campaign commercials in mind, like the DeMint amendment &amp;quot;to prevent the adding of earmarks for spinach producers to an emergency war-supplemental-appropriations bill.&amp;quot; There are even votes on the technical aspects of this baffling process itself, like the Conrad amendment &amp;quot;to clarify the treatment of certain provisions in conference reports.&amp;quot;\n\nIt&amp;#39;s puzzling even to the lifers; for a first-term senator having his virgin vote-a-rama experience, it&amp;#39;s mind-boggling. So Webb and his staff have jury-rigged a system to help the senator figure out what the hell he&amp;#39;s actually voting on as each amendment pops up. Since cell phones and PDAs are banned from the Senate floor, his team is camped out at a conference table in the adjacent Reception Room, with its frescoed ceilings and gold-coffered dome and imposing portraits of legendary senators. The man running the show here is Michael Sozan, Webb&amp;#39;s legislative director, an intense goateed 38-year-old who sits at the table furiously punching keys on his BlackBerry.\n\nSozan is communicating with two aides in Webb&amp;#39;s office across the street. &amp;quot;They&amp;#39;re feeding me information about what&amp;#39;s going on on the floor,&amp;quot; Sozan says without looking up. &amp;quot;Right now the senators are in a series of high-profile votes on the estate tax. Webb literally has a couple of minutes to figure out each vote, and so the staff back in the office is typing up a summary by watching TV.&amp;quot; Helping Sozan is Phillip Thompson, Webb&amp;#39;s ecutive assistant, a somewhat absentminded former Marine who will become briefly famous, or infamous, three days from now, when he&amp;#39;s arrested for walking into a Senate office building with a loaded pistol and two clips of ammunition in his briefcase. (Thompson told the police that the weapon belonged to Webb, but the following day Webb denied he had given it to Thompson and explained, a little mysteriously, &amp;quot;I believe that it&amp;#39;s important for me, personally, and for a lot of people in the situation that I&amp;#39;m in, to be able to defend myself and my family.&amp;quot; He also defended Virginia&amp;#39;s permissive gun laws: &amp;quot;I believe that wherever you see laws that allow people to carry, generally the violence goes down.&amp;quot;)\n\nVictories and defeats come swiftly this morning. Senator Ben Nelson, a conservative Democrat from Nebraska, has just tried to put together a compromise amendment on the estate tax, one that might be a little more palatable to his constituents than the version offered by the Democratic leadership. It fails, 25 to 74. Nelson walks off the floor, slumps into a chair, and lets out a sigh. Webb voted against the Nelson amendment, but at the moment he has a more pressing concern. It has suddenly occurred to Webb that today&amp;#39;s schedule is so punishing there&amp;#39;s no time for lunch, and he walks off the floor and into the Reception Room looking slightly desperate. &amp;quot;How do I eat&amp;quot; he says.\n\nToday is also Webb&amp;#39;s first real chance to practice the grubby art of bringing bacon home to his Virginia constituents. Tucked into the giant budget package is language to restore $163 million in funding that Bush tried to cut from a NASA research center in Hampton, Virginia. Webb&amp;#39;s office will celebrate this victory with a press release later in the day, though he doesn&amp;#39;t seem to take much pleasure in it himself.\n\nAs the day goes on, the amendments come so fast there&amp;#39;s no time for Webb&amp;#39;s aides to brief him on what&amp;#39;s in the language. That&amp;#39;s why legislation by Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon is especially treacherous. &amp;quot;Uh-oh,&amp;quot; Sozan says, as the time to vote approaches. &amp;quot;This is the big one of the day.&amp;quot; The amendment would raise tobacco tas to pay for health care. Webb talks frequently about the need to expand health-insurance coverage, and Smith&amp;#39;s amendment is a creative if imperfect way to do that in a tight budget environment. But Virginia is a tobacco-growing state, and even worse, Webb&amp;#39;s staff doesn&amp;#39;t even know what&amp;#39;s in the amendment. &amp;quot;This is one of those times,&amp;quot; says Sozan, &amp;quot;where a senator has to figure things out for himself by talking with colleagues, because the language has been modified on the floor.&amp;quot; After the vote, Webb comes back to the conference table in the Reception Room.\n\n&amp;quot;You voted no on that, right&amp;quot; Sozan asks.\n\n&amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Webb replies.\n\n&amp;quot;Good.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Maybe,&amp;quot; Webb says. He breathes in, scrunches his face, and shifts his weight back on his heels. &amp;quot;They all sound good,&amp;quot; he says.\n\nBetween votes, Webb sits at the conference table and tells me why he ran for the Senate. It was not to debate points of order and celebrate pork. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve always cared a lot about government, but I never wanted to be an elected member. I loved the freedom of being a writer,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I would think about running and I would say, &amp;#39;This is what I&amp;#39;m giving up.&amp;#39; So three or four times, I thought about it. And then, right before Katrina, I was over in Vietnam, then in Thailand. And you get far enough away from all this&amp;quot;\u2014and by &amp;quot;this&amp;quot; Webb means the general catastrophe of the Bush era but especially the war in Iraq\u2014&amp;quot;and sometimes you can see it more clearly. I was reading about it, getting online and reading about it, and honestly, just feeling so bad for this country.&amp;quot; He pauses. &amp;quot;My country.&amp;quot;\n\nThen Katrina hit, and his mind was made up. &amp;quot;Watching the stuff that came out of Katrina,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;the unfair condemnation of people who had no power, that was it for me.&amp;quot; Webb e-mailed his old friend Bob Kerrey, the Vietnam veteran and former senator who, Webb says, had once tried to recruit him for a Senate run. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m finally frustrated enough that I think I&amp;#39;m gonna run,&amp;quot; Webb wrote, and Kerrey told him to come see him immediately in New York. &amp;quot;Kerrey said, &amp;#39;You and Barack Obama are the only two people I&amp;#39;ve talked to about running for the Senate who started with a set of principles and theories and values and then moved on to why you want to run,&amp;#39; &amp;quot; Webb told me, &amp;quot; &amp;#39;rather than wanting to run and then looking for issues.&amp;#39; &amp;quot; So Webb went to Steve Jarding, the top Democratic consultant in Virginia, and asked what the chances would be against George Allen, a popular, well-financed incumbent Republican. &amp;quot;About 15 percent,&amp;quot; Jarding said. Webb liked his odds.\n\nThe simplistic understanding of the Allen-Webb contest is that Allen imploded after a series of increasingly bizarre revelations about his racial views, including nostalgia for Confederate memorabilia, an accusation that he stuffed a dead deer&amp;#39;s head into a black family&amp;#39;s mailbox, and the use of an obscure North African slur\u2014macaca\u2014to describe a Webb staffer of Indian descent. After some post-election-day recounting, Webb was declared the winner by 9,331 votes, the tightest margin of victory for any Senate race in the nation and the one that returned the Senate to the Democrats. &amp;quot;The conventional wisdom is that Allen lost because of macaca,&amp;quot; says Bob Kerrey. &amp;quot;But that was just the opening. Webb converted that opening.&amp;quot;\n\nHe did so by ignoring the advice of most national Democrats. Webb, whose own son, Jimmy, is a Marine deployed in Iraq, went out on the trail every day in conservative Virginia wearing Jimmy&amp;#39;s combat boots. He railed against the war from the first day of his campaign, back when Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Rahm Emanuel, the leaders of the effort to take back Congress, were warning candidates in red states to shy away from Iraq, believing it had cost Democrats two elections in a row. On the economy, Webb bucked the consensus view among Democrats since the Clinton era that they need to downplay class divisions and populist rhetoric and hew to Rubinomics and deficit reduction. In other words, he said things that Democrats actually believe\u2014or used to believe\u2014but during the Bush years have been too scared to say. His victory became a case study in how Democrats could be.\n\nThat&amp;#39;s certainly what Webb believes. He takes umbrage at the notion that his victory was a fluke, as is clear from his National Press Club speech. &amp;quot;A year ago today,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;I had literally no money. I had no political base whatsoever in either party. My opponent had just received the highest number of votes in a presidential poll taken during the Conservative Political Action Conference here in D.C. I was thirty-three points behind in the polls.&amp;quot; Not only does he argue that it was his message that overcame these hurdles, but he also insists that his message should now &amp;quot;become the core message of a revitalized Democratic Party.&amp;quot;\n\nIt&amp;#39;s a pretty tall order for a freshman Democrat\u2014stopping the war, ending economic inequality, and redefining what it means to be a Democrat\u2014and after his victory, the strategy inside the Webb camp was to downplay Webb&amp;#39;s reputation as a pugnacious fighter and take pains to show how the ex-bor and Vietnam vet who resigned from the Reagan administration in a huff could be a get-along kind of guy. That plan went up in smoke almost immediately. At a White House reception in November to welcome the incoming members of Congress, Webb skipped the receiving line to avoid shaking the president&amp;#39;s hand. But Bush approached Webb and asked him about his son. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,&amp;quot; Webb responded. Bush returned fire: &amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s not what I asked you. How&amp;#39;s your boy&amp;quot; His back now up, Webb ended the conversation. &amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s between me and my boy, Mr. President.&amp;quot; The conspiracy theory in the Webb camp is that the White House, fearing Webb&amp;#39;s moral authority on the Iraq issue, circulated the anecdote to make him look a hothead who was too emotionally invested in Iraq to make rational decisions about it. &amp;quot;They used that to try to knock him down,&amp;quot; a senior aide to the senator told me, &amp;quot;and to set expectations for Webb as a bit of a nut.&amp;quot;\n\nWhatever the case, Webb got his revenge two months later. His view on Iraq had become the consensus within his party, and he had become the chief Democratic spokesman on the war. He was tapped to give the response to Bush&amp;#39;s January 23 State of the Union address, making the freshman senator the face of the new Democratic Congress to millions of Americans. On the day of the speech, Democratic leaders scheduled Webb on a dizzying round of media interviews. During a briefing in the Senate for some three dozen reporters, Webb sat uncomfortably between Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, who were beaming like a pair of eager marketing reps launching an important new brand. &amp;quot;He represents to me what the new America is all about,&amp;quot; Reid said. Later, when Webb arrived at a hearing of the Armed Services Committee, he achieved the impossible: More reporters and photographers were there to watch him than they were for Hillary Clinton, the committee&amp;#39;s reigning celebrity. Reid and Pelosi even showed o\u00AC their new spokesman at a private meeting with the big three network anchors.\n\nNot that Webb listened to Reid or Pelosi about what to say in the speech. The leadership, working with a pair of outside political consultants, sent Webb the outline of a speech that included all the usual pabulum that Democrats typically say in their forgettable addresses. Webb was told to talk about bipartisanship, Iraq, and energy policy, while wedging in the usual litany of Democratic social-program sound bites. Webb&amp;#39;s instructions were to be conciliatory, even give Bush some credit for admitting that he&amp;#39;d made mistakes in Iraq. Then the leadership wanted a respectful rebuttal of the Bush agenda. &amp;quot;The idea was to go at Bush point by point,&amp;quot; a Webb aide told me. &amp;quot;They said we need to explain why Democrats are better on these issues. Jim said, &amp;#39;We can&amp;#39;t let him control the debate.&amp;#39; He actually dismissed Bush&amp;#39;s speech in one sentence.&amp;quot;\n\nThe consultants insisted that Webb start with Iraq, reasoning that viewers tune out after the first few minutes. Webb insisted that the first half of the speech be about economic inequality. When the speechwriting gremlins tried to insert language about real-life examples of economic hardship, like a single mother struggling to get by, Webb ignored it, instead using language similar to that in his own stump speeches and his recent book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. &amp;quot;He was adamant that the economic stuff stay at the top, and he wanted the language done the way he had it,&amp;quot; a frustrated adviser to Harry Reid told me. &amp;quot;He&amp;#39;s got no time for consultants, and he&amp;#39;s got an enormous ego.&amp;quot;\n\nWebb talked about the chasm between CEO salaries and the average worker&amp;#39;s pay. He gave a short history lesson on his political hero, Andrew Jackson. And he baldly stated that America was &amp;quot;drifting apart along class lines&amp;quot; and resembled the era when the country was divided between &amp;quot;robber barons&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;dispossessed workers&amp;quot; who were &amp;quot;threatening revolt.&amp;quot; Instead of conciliation, he ended the speech with a stark warning to Bush: Praising Republican presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Webb called on Bush to act like them. &amp;quot;If he does, we will join him,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;If he does not, we will be showing him the way.&amp;quot;\n\nWebb laid out in stark terms the &amp;quot;two areas where our respective parties have largely stood in contradiction.&amp;quot; Rather than delivering a laundry list of proposals, as Democratic leaders had urged, he explained the war and the economy in broad philosophical terms, and in so doing solidified his position as the party&amp;#39;s new spokesman on the war. &amp;quot;We expected him to be the third rail of the caucus,&amp;quot; says the adviser to Reid. &amp;quot;But now he&amp;#39;s always consulted on all Iraq issues.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd so, like that, a white, southern, gun-toting, decorated Marine, a man who for thirty years had mostly contempt for liberal America, became one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party and the ideal running mate for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The political logic is convincing. During the Clinton years, Democrats traded away downscale, culturally conservative whites in the South and Midwest in return for rich, culturally liberal suburbanites on the coasts. Whereas in 1992, Clinton won four southern states, in 2000, Al Gore was completely shut out of the region, including his home state of Tennessee, but won most of the richest counties in America. The party has been trying to win back these voters ever since. And on top of access to these votes, Webb would help Clinton or Obama compensate for their lack of national-security credentials. Webb&amp;#39;s team is already subtly positioning him for the role. &amp;quot;He&amp;#39;s proven to be an amazing spokesperson for the Democratic Party on national security,&amp;quot; says Paul Reagan, Webb&amp;#39;s chief of staff. &amp;quot;Polling still shows Democrats have weakness on national security, and Jim Webb can change that.&amp;quot;\n\nThe roots of Webb&amp;#39;s opposition to the war in Iraq, his kinship with Reagan Democrats, and his overall pugnaciousness go back a long way. He had a chip on his shoulder long before he encountered George W. Bush at the White House. Webb grew up an itinerant military brat, the son of a stern air-force dad, and had thirty-three addresses before college.\n\nHis father, who &amp;quot;did not spare the lash,&amp;quot; as Webb writes in Born Fighting, raised his son with the values of his own rough youth. Webb got his first pair of boxing gloves when he was 6 and his first rifle when he was 8. His dad taught him a golden rule of street fighting: &amp;quot;Always mark them, so that the next day they have to face the world with a black eye or a cut lip or a bruised cheek and remember where they got it.&amp;quot; Webb&amp;#39;s father would taunt him, holding out his fist and demanding that Jim punch it until he admitted he wasn&amp;#39;t tough. (&amp;quot;My small fist would crumple against his, and I would be unable to stop my tears, but I would never admit I wasn&amp;#39;t tough,&amp;quot; Webb wrote of his father&amp;#39;s challenges.) He would inspect his son&amp;#39;s room, military-style, while the younger Webb was forced to stand crisply at attention. Webb grew up in awe of a &amp;quot;tribal circle&amp;quot; around his father, including his dad&amp;#39;s best friend, Bud, who would regale Jim with tales that Webb says shaped him, like the time Bud hit a man &amp;quot;so hard in the forehead that when [he] woke up and blew his nose his eyeball popped out.&amp;quot;\n\nWebb spent a year outside the world of the military as a freshman on an ROTC scholarship at USC, but the following year, 1964, he entered the Naval Academy. His dad&amp;#39;s lessons paid off. During one hazing session, recounted in Robert Timberg&amp;#39;s The Nightingale&amp;#39;s Song, upperclassmen repeatedly thwacked Webb with a cricket bat across his ass, promising to relent only if Webb told them it hurt. The blows kept coming until the bat broke in half, and then Webb&amp;#39;s tormenters gave up.\n\nHe arrived in Vietnam in 1969, the second-worst year for U.S. casualties. He commanded 170 men in a rifle company known as Dying Delta for its merciless casualty rate. As far as Webb was concerned, he was at the beginning of a lifelong career in the Marines. There was no backup plan. And then, one day, shrapnel from two Vietcong grenades tore through his body as he was clearing bunkers in a nasty combat zone called the Arizona Valley. &amp;quot;I had seen dead Marines, multiple-limb amputees, high-arm amputees, severed spinal cords, bladders ripped open by shrapnel, sucking chest wounds, even one Marine who had been shot between the eyes and out the jaw only to come back to our company after three months in a Japanese hospital,&amp;quot; he later wrote. He, too, returned to his unit in no time, ignoring an infection in his left knee and somehow unmindful that a piece of shrapnel there was gradually destroying the cartilage in the joint. He finished his tour, becoming the most decorated Marine in his Naval Academy class (two Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, the Navy Cross). It was only when he returned home that he learned, after multiple surgeries, that the knee injury was so severe he would have to retire from the military.\n\nSo like a lot of young people who don&amp;#39;t know what to do with their lives, Webb went to law school. When he arrived at Georgetown University in 1972, he was totally unprepared for the environment that greeted him. Whereas he found that leading troops in Vietnam was eerily natural from his first day there, he felt like an alien on the Georgetown campus. He became disgusted that almost none of his classmates were combat veterans. He recoiled at the antiwar sentiment that dominated the classrooms and the contempt that faculty and students expressed for Vietnam vets. A breaking point came one day when Webb&amp;#39;s final exam for a criminal-law class included a question about the Fourth Amendment that cited the made-up case of a &amp;quot;Sergeant Webb&amp;quot; who smuggled jade into the United States by hiding it in the bodies of his buddies who were killed in Vietnam. According to Timberg, Webb spent the evening in tears as he tried to study for other exams.\n\nThere was something else that deeply frustrated Webb during his time at Georgetown. In addition to dealing with those opposed to the war, he encountered colleagues who saw America as an imperium run by an authoritarian and racist WASP elite. And because he was not one of them, Webb was lumped in with the WASPs by his classmates. &amp;quot;When I got to Georgetown Law, people told me I was a WASP,&amp;quot; Webb explained to me one morning in his Arlington writing office. &amp;quot;And I couldn&amp;#39;t figure out what they were talking about.&amp;quot; He became obsessed with understanding his own Scots-Irish ancestry and how it differed from that of the WASP elites whom his classmates railed against. &amp;quot;The Library of Congress was a few blocks away, and so I started studying ethnic migrations in my spare time. At one point, I read six books in five days about ethnic migrations while I was taking fifteen hours at Georgetown.&amp;quot;\n\nWhat he learned was that his Scots-Irish ancestors were a stubborn, bellicose people who had brutally resisted every attempt to rule them. According to Webb&amp;#39;s romantic telling of their history in Born Fighting, the Scots-Irish stood up to Rome, King Edward I, and the Irish and the French before setting sail for the New World, where they contributed the toughest troops in the Revolutionary War and later fought nobly in the Civil War, mostly for the Confederacy. Webb became fascinated with the populist president Andrew Jackson, a Scots-Irishman himself, who stood up to the bankers and aristocracy of his day. Looking around at his Georgetown colleagues, Webb decided that the Democratic Party of his Scots-Irish Jacksonian ancestors had been taken over by the radicals of the 1960s New Left. So he became a Republican.\n\nHis connection to his Scots-Irish history still drives his politics. Last year Webb was advertised as the senator who came to Washington to stop the war in Iraq, which is partly true. But odd and romanticized as it sounds, Webb believes he came to Washington to represent the Scots-Irish, or at least their modern-day heirs. One of his first trips as senator was to southwest Virginia, where many in the Webb clan still live. And while Webb seemed tentative during vote-a-rama, he was completely at home on the morning I accompanied him to a studio where, on live interactive TV, he read a section of Born Fighting to students from Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Here Webb sat at a table proudly reading a section celebrating the &amp;quot;un-reconstructed redneck.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He refers to himself as a redneck,&amp;quot; his press secretary, Jessica Smith, said as we peered at Webb through the studio window. &amp;quot;He gets all excited when he talks about this. Look, he&amp;#39;s all smiley. Though, he probably has the best shoe collection of any redneck.&amp;quot; Webb talks about the Scots-Irish at every gathering he attends. His goal is to remake his party into the defender of their interests. &amp;quot;We&amp;#39;re going to work hard to bring more people back into the Democratic Party,&amp;quot; he said recently to a gathering of Virginia activists. &amp;quot;People who will understand the basic message of what I call Jacksonian democracy, and that is that you measure the health of your society not at its apex but at its base.&amp;quot;\n\nBut it took thirty years after his searing Georgetown experience for Webb to become a Democrat again. On the morning of September 11, Webb was having breakfast at the Pentagon with the commandant of the Marine Corps when he learned that the World Trade Center had been attacked. As he drove back to his Arlington apartment, the Pentagon was hit. He watched it burn from the balcony of his high-rise.\n\nAs was the case with many people, Bush&amp;#39;s response to September 11 caused Webb to rethink his political allegiances\u2014but while much of the country was rallying behind the president, Webb was forsaking him. He had opposed the first Gulf War, in 1991, arguing that a large American footprint in the heart of the Middle East would inflame the Muslim world. He was also bothered by the fact that none of Bush&amp;#39;s kids had served in Vietnam. But neither Poppy&amp;#39;s Gulf War nor W.&amp;#39;s dodgy National Guard service prevented him from voting for the father in 1992 or the son in 2000. The war in Iraq changed everything, though. Webb&amp;#39;s view of military service is that there is a sacred trust between soldiers and the civilian leaders who send them into battle. To Webb, Bush had committed the worst possible offense for a president: He had broken that trust. Webb made the point bluntly in his State of the Union response: &amp;quot;We owed [our leaders] our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us\u2026sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it. The president took us into this war recklessly.&amp;quot;\n\nWatching the debacle in Iraq, the bitterness Webb harbored toward many Democrats of the Vietnam generation melted away. &amp;quot;After 9/11, I just said, &amp;#39;History can figure that stuff out,&amp;#39; &amp;quot; he said last year. &amp;quot;I just lost my anger about it.&amp;quot; For decades, Webb would not show John Kerry the respect of a simple handshake because he so disagreed with Kerry&amp;#39;s protests toward the end of the Vietnam War. In 2004, he voted for Kerry for president. Two years later, he was the leading spokesman for getting out of Iraq and, to many Democrats, the future of their party.\n\nBut leaders don&amp;#39;t always get to pick the national dramas in which they star. Jim Webb awoke on April 16 expecting another day of combat with Republicans. The Senate and the House had recently passed separate legislation requiring deadlines to get troops out of Iraq, and Harry Reid had even threatened to stop funding for the war. Webb was being more than a good soldier in this debate. He&amp;#39;s not a fan of either deadlines for withdrawal or cutting off money for the troops. His own Iraq legislation, meticulously crafted with Senator Chuck Hagel, calls for a diplomatic offensive and a requirement that troops deployed to Iraq be fully mission capable, an effort to slow Bush&amp;#39;s surge. But deadlines and threats to withhold funds now dominated the debate, so Webb stepped up his role as his party&amp;#39;s Iraq spokesman, batting back GOP taunts that Democrats were abandoning the military. On April 13, he blasted John McCain for &amp;quot;impugning people&amp;#39;s patriotism&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hiding behind the troops.&amp;quot; Two days later, when Dick Cheney snarled that Democrats were returning to their 1970s McGovernite roots, Webb popped up on CNN to smack him down. He may not have been winning legislatively, but at least he was at the center of the issue that brought him to Washington.\n\nAnd then, the next morning, Cho Seung-Hui killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech University. Webb was taking a break between meetings with prospective judges when he was told that one or perhaps two students had been killed. He continued the interviews. Later, on his way to the Senate, he learned the death toll had climbed. &amp;quot;It was at 20, and then I had to go preside over the Senate,&amp;quot; Webb told me in the first interview he&amp;#39;s given about the massacre. &amp;quot;And so I was totally out of the information loop for more than an hour. When you&amp;#39;re up there, you hear nothing. I was in a total news blackout.&amp;quot;\n\nA staffer eventually sent a note explaining that Virginia&amp;#39;s senior senator, John Warner, wanted Webb to accompany him on the floor, where they both made statements about the killings. Later, after the death toll rose to thirty-two, Webb and Warner decided to introduce a formal resolution expressing their deep regret about the incident, and Webb then spoke again. Webb doesn&amp;#39;t do emotion. As a candidate, he was notoriously shy, worrying that he was invading the space of prospective voters when he was out shaking hands. On the Senate floor, he made brief remarks, his hands clasped tightly in front of him. He looked stiff, and his speech was halting. &amp;quot;Both of those statements were kind of done cold turkey,&amp;quot; he told me. &amp;quot;Both of them were just spoken.&amp;quot;\n\nI tried to get Webb to open up and explain what it was like to be thrust into a leadership role during a national tragedy, which is when it dawned on me that Jim Webb is more suited for the Senate than anyone realizes. I had him wrong, he said; he was well prepared to deal with something like this. &amp;quot;These are issues of governance,&amp;quot; he said, a little bloodlessly. &amp;quot;People keep asking me, &amp;#39;Is the Senate what you thought it would be&amp;#39; I basically say, &amp;#39;Pretty much.&amp;#39; But these sorts of things, they are leadership questions. They are the kinds of things I did in the Marine Corps, the kinds of things I did when I was congressional-committee counsel, and when I was in the Pentagon. They&amp;#39;re just judgment calls on how to govern.&amp;quot;\n\nHis first reaction was to stay away from Blacksburg and out of the spotlight. &amp;quot;I personally don&amp;#39;t like politicians who jump on bandwagons,&amp;quot; he told me. But after some thought, he joined the president and most of Virginia&amp;#39;s congressional delegation at the memorial service on the Virginia Tech campus: &amp;quot;It turned out to be a good leadership gesture,&amp;quot; he said, though he still refused all media requests for a week.\n\nWebb&amp;#39;s way of dealing with the crisis was to eschew sentiment; when I asked him how he deals with death, he said, &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s a process. It goes from disbelief into grieving, and for some people into anger.&amp;quot; As we talked, he kept coming back to his preference for process over emotion. What are the lessons we should take away from the massacre &amp;quot;I think Governor Kaine did a very good thing by setting up this panel to look at the incident. That is a good way to channel a lot of the emotions constructively.&amp;quot; Do gun laws need to be changed &amp;quot;I know people&amp;#39;s emotions are really high right now, but let&amp;#39;s just let this analysis play out a little bit.&amp;quot; Are you getting lots of angry constituent mail for your position on guns &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t track my mail every day, you know We get hundreds of letters and e-mails and whatever. There&amp;#39;s going to be very strong feelings on both sides.&amp;quot;\n\nBut there was one point at which even Jim Webb gave in to some strong feelings. In Blacksburg, he met a student who had been a high school classmate of his son, who is still serving in Iraq. &amp;quot;She came up and we talked for a while and said a pretty emotional hello,&amp;quot; Webb said. She asked about Jimmy and gave the senator a hug. &amp;quot;We just shared the emotion of that moment.&amp;quot;\n\nRyan Lizza is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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