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Former Democratic senator Jim Webb announces run for president Former Democratic senator Jim Webb announces run for president
(about 2 hours later)
Former Virginia senator Jim Webb is running for president, joining a field of Democrats challenging Hillary Clinton for the nomination. “I understand the odds,” former Virginia senator Jim Webb told supporters as he announced that he would join the growing field of outside candidates challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Published online just hours before Washington emptied for the July 4 holiday weekend, the declaration appeared as quixotic as the resume of a tattooed former navy secretary for Ronald Reagan who has defended the Confederate flag and once lost a boxing match to Oliver North.
Related: Bernie Sanders sees poll surge after series of record-breaking appearancesRelated: Bernie Sanders sees poll surge after series of record-breaking appearances
Webb says in a message on his website that the US “needs a fresh approach to solving the problems that confront us”. But Webb, who first announced an exploratory presidential committee in November, joins the race at a time when Clinton’s once unassailable command of Democratic primary looks gradually more vulnerable.
Webb was the first Democrat to form an exploratory committee, announcing his interest in a presidential campaign last November. Like Bernie Sanders, who is chipping away at her lead from the left, and Donald Trump, who has captured a surprising following in the Republican primary, Webb can potentially appeal to Americans disenchanted with political insiders and the prospect of Clinton versus Bush election.
A Vietnam veteran and former navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan, Webb was elected to the Senate in 2006 and served one term. “Let’s clean out the manure-filled stables of a political system that has become characterized by greed,” he wrote in his online declaration. “We need to shake the hold of these shadow elites on our political process.”
Webb has made frequent trips to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. But he faces long odds in a field dominated by Clinton that also includes Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee. Described as a “warrior-intellectual” by the New York Review of Books, Webb is a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran who has also written 10 books, including a well-received history of the Scots-Irish in America called “Born Fighting” – a group he calls the great “arbiters of American politics”.
Once seen as a rising star among Democrats, Webb delivered the response to President Bush’s State of the Union address in 2007, and served on the foreign relations, armed services, veterans affairs, and the joint economic committees during his one term as senator.
Yet while making much of his military background and robust foreign policy experience, Webb also appears to be channeling some of the same fatigue with military adventurism that has propelled Rand Paul in the Republican primary.
“Let me assure you, as president I would not have urged an invasion of Iraq, nor as a senator would I have voted to authorize it,” he writes. “I would not have been the President who used military force in Libya during the Arab spring.”
He also lists economic fairness, criminal justice reform and infrastructure spending as among his priorities if elected.
But the former marine strikes a realistic tone about his chances of making it all the way to the White House “particularly in today’s political climate where fair debate is so often drowned out by huge sums of money”.
“I know that more than one candidate in this process intends to raise at least a billion dollars – some estimates run as high as two billion dollars – in direct and indirect financial support,” he adds.
“Highly paid political consultants are working to shape the ‘messaging’ of every major candidate.”
Except perhaps, with its broken web links and unusual timing, that of Jim Webb.