Operation: Take Back Virginia
Page 3 of 4
|
|
In the cafeterias and meeting halls along the way signs declaring "Operation: Take Back Virginia" decorated the walls along with signs for Webb and Boucher. At Fort Chiswell a man from Wythe County told me he's been seeing signs for Webb on the front lawns of people who six years ago had signs for Allen. "Allen, he ain't been around here," the man said. "Republicans don't often come here. They don't come round to see the ones that's votin' for them." An area formerly heavy in agriculture, mainly beef cattle and dairy, Wythe County has been changing as first better-paid industry and now low-wage industry has come in. The day before, a Gatorade factory paying $6.50 an hour had opened with 290 workers. The man, who passed on giving his name, ran down a mental list of plants that had closed with Hayden Horney, the former clerk of the circuit court. The Volvo-Mac Truck plant is about the only union shop left, Horney said, and most of what remains pay less than $10. I asked the two of them what they thought were the main concerns of people in the area. "Driving 80 miles to work, the war in Iraq, losing jobs; they're pretty well fed up," the first man said.
Webb did this swing in a camouflage-colored and heavily chromed and decaled Jeep. He wore an Army-drab sweater, with trousers of a somewhat lighter hue and his son's desert combat boots. Jimmy Webb, 24, is a soldier in Iraq. If Jim Webb wins, he will be the only U.S. Senator with a child in the war. Webb doesn't milk this much, but his team did, with Governor Kaine saying this election was really less about Jim than Jimmy Webb, and all the thousands like him stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan or about to go. On Sunday in Big Stone Gap, Coal Country near the West Virginia border, Webb told a crowd that at a county fair this summer a fellow came up to him saying he had a plan to end the war: "Get all the sons and daughters of everyone in Congress and of everyone in the major media. Put them all in a training program and announce that in six months if the war isn't over these people are going to go fight it. The war will be over in six months."
Webb wants his audiences to know that he opposed the war before it began, but not to confuse him with any old antiwar sissy. At every meeting through the southwest he asked the veterans to stand, and in Big Stone Gap spoke of Bob Kerrey, former senator from Nebraska and admitted war criminal in the Vietnam War, as a "tremendous individual" and "someone I tremendously admire." Kerrey repaid the compliments before they were given by expressing his gratitude that the erstwhile Republican Webb had ventured to rescue the Democratic Party from the grip of "special interests" by running. Playing the man's man, Webb seemed to relish telling audiences that he got his first rifle at age 8, gave Jimmy his first rifle at eight, and has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. "I shoot a lot." He bristled that despite all that, the National Rifle Association endorsed Allen, and looked forward, with a curl in his voice, to giving them a call Wednesday morning. He described for The New Yorker the regimen of pain his father, also a career military man, put him through as a child to man him up. When he speaks of the war, the waste and horror of it are far removed; the reason to stop it is to better fight the Global War on Terror, whose premises he does not question, at least in public.
In some deeply personal way Webb's campaign to take back Virginia is also a quest to take back the Democratic Party, purge it of its supposed liberal weaknesses, all of them related to the 1960s and that era's original sin of mass opposition to the Vietnam War. Webb doesn't say any of this on the stump, where the message is conveyed by honoring war heroes past, now mostly Vietnam vets. At Fort Chiswell, a man came to shake Webb's hand, asking the candidate if he remembered an underground paper at Camp Lejeune during the Vietnam War period called Head On. Webb didn't and the man, Laird Baldwin, told him he'd worked on it before deserting after being denied conscientious objector status, then spending four years in Canada, finally returning and successfully suing the government, thereby earning himself an honorable discharge. "I'm going to support you," Baldwin said. "And I think I served my country too." Webb, a stiff campaigner anyway, stiffened visibly. Unaccustomed to political customs, he could neither smile nor thank Baldwin for his support. For a historian he appears closed to inconvenient history, and as a military officer unused to contradiction. As a coal miner would later say, commenting on the distance Webb seems programmed to put between himself and the voters, "He's used to telling, not asking."
After his encounter with Webb, Baldwin told me: "I had this epiphany [while in the Marines], probably on drugs, that after Hiroshima, after Nagasaki, that war is not an option. For Webb it still is, but at least he's the kind who believes in exhausting alternatives." Plus, his son's being there "will keep him honest, and he's honest anyway. I can't help wondering, though, what happens if his son says, 'I can't do this anymore.'" More generous than their candidate, Baldwin and his wife, Sylvia, left the rally with a yard sign for Webb.
