Opinion: RAG Man tangles with the Scots-Irish

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At his always interesting RAGGED THOTS blog, Robert A. George takes in two views of James Webb, the newly elected Senator in Old Dominion: From the right, Andrew Ferguson calls Webb ‘the most deeply conservative national Democrat since Grover Cleveland,’ and from the left Joe Conason praises his newly relevant novel The Emperor’s General.

R.A.G. is right that a politician who can inspire such seemingly contradictory admirers will probably turn out to be the most interesting Senate freshman. That’s not because Webb pleases both the left and the right but because he’s a true maverick who can’t be tracked along any simple line. I like Webb because he’s a renaissance man, but if you’d shown me his recent Wall Street Journal OpEd on the class-based society without identifying the author, I’d have said ‘This person is off his or her rocker.’ (Not because I have any beef with class resentment—which is pretty much the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning—but just because it was a crazy article.) But it’s that element that makes Webb interesting, and worth watching as he shakes up assumptions about how good Republocrats are supposed to behave.