Webb's Famed Anger Is His Strength

James Webb's legendary temper spurs worry that saps energy from the argument for a Barack Obama-Webb ticket. But it's exactly that quality that makes him an attractive possibility, Eve Fairbanks writes in the New Republic. It’s not just his “capacity to hormonally invigorate a party sick of its effete, wine-sipping image.”

If only more blue-collar whites would “stop being mad at conservatives for frowning at their guns and start being mad at conservative for raping their pocketbooks,” Fairbanks says. Webb’s not really pissed off, but instead is energized, and has an anthropologist’s acute sense of what makes regular people angry—and how to convert it to left-leaning victory. (More James Webb stories.)