Jim Webb finally emerged from his fortressed Twitter campaign and promptly stepped on a controversial land mine:
I think they could do better with white, working people and I think this last election showed that. The Democratic Party could do very well to return to its Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Andrew Jackson roots where the focus of the party was making sure that all people who lack a voice in the corridors of power could have one through the elected represented…. We need to get back to the principles of the Democratic Party that we are going to give everyone who needs access to the corridors of power that access regardless of any of your antecedents.
In general, the mistake here was one of excessive historical inclusiveness: that is, Webb's assertion that the Democratic Party of Jackson, FDR and Truman embraced "all people" and gave "everyone" who needed it access to the corridors of power. "All" and "everyone" are, to understate the matter, problematic. It's true that Jackson championed (or, rather, exploited) poor-white-male suffrage expansion, that Roosevelt opened wide the door of federal employment of blacks, and that HST battled the Dixiecrats and integrated the armed forces. But in this cultural-studies age of "presentism" — the intellectual crime of imposing modern ethical standards on historical figures — whatever good was done then isn't good enough now, thus this political trio's perceived shortcomings are subject to condemnation. Take it away, Charles Pierce:
Let us stipulate for a moment that Andrew Jackson also was a slaveholder and a genocidal madman, no matter how much the buckskin-shirt crowd loved him. Let us not return to his principles, thank you. And while FDR and Truman were fine presidents, who did some of all that they could have done, they still presided over a Democratic party that was the political and constitutional bulwark of the Jim Crow South. Neither one of them could break that dark alliance until the Civil Rights Movement shook the political order to the point where Lyndon Johnson could blow up the alliance entirely.
Pierce is on much firmer historical ground with Roosevelt and Truman, in that he acknowledges that both men's higher ideals were inescapably subverted by the Southern "Democracy." (Jackson dwelled in a racial world so far removed from our own, present ideals just don't apply.) To write that the 32nd and 33rd presidents "could have done" more than they did, however — after acknowledging that they were boxed in — is a contradictory, but popular, fiction.
It is, then, this fiction that reigns throughout much of the multiculturally sensitive center-left; therefore Webb's too-broad inclusiveness, while well-intentioned, could haunt him to doom. Critics will parse them and condemn them as politically insensitive and historically uninformed, even though "all" and "everyone," as Webb knows, meant something much different to the Jacksonian and New Deal eras.
Yet Webb is striving for the White House, not for tenure as an "anti-presentist" history professor (an increasingly rare breed, at any rate). Thus it would be to his advantage to avoid the historical trap he set for himself and simply emphasize that his championing of "everyone" today means just that: everyone. He'll want to put aside references to Jackson's concept of egalitarianism and FDR's political realities and instead approach the problem of poor and poorer whites as a class problem. And here, Charles Pierce nails it: "If he runs for president as a 'Reagan Democrat,' he won't be worth listening to. If he runs as a guy who can convince poor and middle-class voters of all races that they share a common adversary, then Jim Webb could make this a very interesting campaign."