Confederate games
I thought about Jim Webb a week back, as Republican after Republican presidential candidate were forced to contend with the issue of the Confederate flag in the wake of the black church shooting…
… my sympathies to the candidates whose answer is “it won’t be an issue a president is grappling with”… even as at the strictest narrowest level the answer is… er… the state of South Carolina ought remove it as an official emblem hanging over the capitol…
In sum of his latest presidential hustlings from Reason magazine’s blog… that ends with the answer to the question…
Oh, he didn’t vanish entirely. Last month BuzzFeed spotted him at the annual Scottish Games in South Carolina, where he gave the haggis-and-kilt crowd what was “arguably the briefest stump speech in presidential history—a six-minute-and-five-seconds contemplation of the role of the Scotch-Irish in American history.” Last week he published a piece of fiction in Politico called “To Kill a Man,” which may be a first in presidential politics. And after the other Democratic candidates reacted to the Charleston church massacre with full-throated condemnations of the Confederate battle flag, Webb released a more subdued statement asking us to “remember that honorable Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War.”
He’s a few days from offering up a running or not.
And what’s interesting here is that Jim Webb, should he throw his hat in the ring (a ring that, quite bluntly, is going to end up going to Hillary Clinton with nary much problem) …
… would be the contradictory opinion to an iron-clad view against the Confederate flag. Whether this dissent from a Democratic candidate is anything any Republican candidate would want to proffer in their defense of an issue they’d just as soon have go away (and I suppose will more or less), well…