The Honorable, Enraged Gentleman from Virginia

That is the title of GQ’s excellent profile of Jim Webb (hat tip to DailyKos). Here is an excerpt:

Then Katrina hit, and his mind was made up. “Watching the stuff that came out of Katrina,” he says, “the unfair condemnation of people who had no power, that was it for me.” Webb e-mailed his old friend Bob Kerrey, the Vietnam veteran and former senator who, Webb says, had once tried to recruit him for a Senate run. “I’m finally frustrated enough that I think I’m gonna run,” Webb wrote, and Kerrey told him to come see him immediately in New York. “Kerrey said, ‘You and Barack Obama are the only two people I’ve talked to about running for the Senate who started with a set of principles and theories and values and then moved on to why you want to run,’ ” Webb told me, “ ‘rather than wanting to run and then looking for issues.’ ” So Webb went to Steve Jarding, the top Democratic consultant in Virginia, and asked what the chances would be against George Allen, a popular, well-financed incumbent Republican. “About 15 percent,” Jarding said. Webb liked his odds.

Tough, no-nonsense, principled, and completely unafraid of an uphill battle; you gotta love this guy. From a political perspective, Webb’s potential is limited only by his temper, which by most accounts is quick and hot, and whether he can tolerate to bullshit, go-along-to-get-along aspect of “making sausage”. That notwithstanding, I think he could be legend, one of those rare politicians, like Kennedy or Reagan, that transforms their Party and its politics for a generation.