Speaking of veeps, Jim Webb is getting yet more attention. Timothy Noah, under the headline “Anyone but Webb” merely recounts everything we already know about Webb (much of it recommends him). Webb didn’t like women in the military, his aide tried to carry a loaded gun into Congress, and he “is a bit of a blowhard.” (Is he this much of a blowhard?)

Eve Fairbanks’ piece at The New Republic is the most insightful thing I’ve read on the Webb for Obama phenomena. She finds similarities between the two. The following strikes me as precisely true:

Webb is supposed to be Obama’s opposite: the angry white politician to Obama’s mild-mannered black one. But, oddly, Webb has something fundamental in common with Obama. Both men felt ill at ease at elite schools, leading them to embark on quests to rediscover their ethnic identities in their twenties. Both deepened these discoveries through writing. And both came to their identities as outsiders–as admiring anthropologists of the identity rather than people for whom the identity was organic from birth. This explains why Webb can celebrate anger without succumbing to it. It also helps explain his appeal to Democrats. Like Obama, he is not simply a member of a group historically important to the party; he is someone who embodies that group, someone who has turned that group’s narrative into his own. [snip]

Thanks to their analogous symbolic roles, Webb and Obama have one more politically important and bizarre similarity: They appeal to the same voters, wine-track Democrats who come out in unprecedented droves to vote for a black man or a hillbilly white because they want their party to be bigger than themselves.

I’d go further: It is precisely because Webb and Obama approach their identities in an almost anthropological way that they are acceptable to these wine-track voters. I think it would be much harder for these same voters to fall in love with a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, or a Robert Byrd. This may also explain why Webb and Obama were not initially embraced by the communities they claimed to represent. (Blacks gave Obama a chilly reception before warming to him. And Webb has not yet found a way to connect to Appalachian whites)