In March, Jim Webb, George ‘Macaca’ Allen’s opponent in the Virginia Senate race, went on the Colbert Report for a round of interview gotcha. (Watch Colbert calling Allen ‘dumb as a post.’) This clip is before Macacagate hit, before Webb loosened up and got more practice politicking. Webb comes across like a sergeant, not a face: skilled at leading a team of wonks and executors but missing the polish of a public speaker.

Webb has led an interesting life. He’s even written a Samuel L. Jackson movie: Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones played soldiers in Rules of Engagement, based on Webb’s novel about the moral ambiguity of war. Ben Kingsley played an ambassador:

An attorney defends an officer on trial for ordering his troops to fire on civilians after they stormed a U.S. embassy in a third world country. [Link]

Webb also has a new anti-Iraq war novel in development as a Rob Reiner movie called Whiskey River:

An American solider injured in Iraq is called back into action before he’s fully recovered, prompting his father to kidnap his son in order to save his life. [Link]

Webb hails from a rural white community in Virginia of Scotch-Irish descent and hates the term ‘redneck.’ He’s a self-made millionaire from his military fiction and screenwriting careers. After his stint in Vietnam he became fluent in Vietnamese, and when he remarried, his third wife Hong Le was a Vietnamese-American refugee turned securities lawyer.

Vietnam made Webb a Republican, Iraq made him a Democrat again. Back in the ’70s, Webb disliked John Kerry’s testimony about Vietnam War atrocities, and the Republicans of the time were the pro-military party. Reagan appointed Webb secretary of the Navy. In fact, Bush père appointed his ex-wife to a veterans commission. Webb is now running as a Democrat for the same reason why almost every Iraq war vet candidate is running as a Democrat: the blunder in Baghdad.

Even after Allen’s atrocious autumn, with stories out daily about his regular use of racist slurs, he still holds a slim lead in red state Virginia. Allen managed to stanch the bleeding with two Hail Mary primetime ads featuring his wife and Virginia’s popular senior senator John Warner.

The Virginia Senate race calls the whole ideal of the citizen-politician in question. It’s a microcosm of the tension between professional politicians and democracy. If the race goes Allen’s way, it won’t be because his genial Reagan impression plays well against Webb’s metal-chewing soldier. It’ll be because Webb has a plan B. Webb is merely fighting for policy, Allen for career survival. Allen simply has more to lose. When politicians went full-time, they could more easily be bought and sold. Those with no fallback are more venal and more pliant.

… it seemed to me that we’d begun reversing the order of things–that through more and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the government was taking more of our money, more of our options, and more of our freedom. I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, “Stop.” I was a citizen politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do. [Ronald Reagan, who may have started as a citizen-politician but ended up far from one]

Webb is the quintessential pissed off citizen-politician, motivated by a war spinning out of control to put his career on hold and fix the problem. But it is precisely because Allen is a full-time politician that he’s more incented to win. Webb has refused to exploit Allen’s foot-in-mouth disease, and Democratic activists have privately questioned Webb’s killer instinct. In interviews, he’s taken the high road and focused on policy, while Allen has been happy to attack him on character. Webb may never have the chance to fix politics because he’s been insufficiently willing to play them.

Throughout this curious drama, which unfolded in the crucial final weeks of the campaign, Jim Webb might as well have been on vacation. “We’d be just as happy to see it all go away… We’re looking forward to beating Allen on the issues, and his lack of leadership…” [Webb] had come into the race as a Democratic iconoclast, hoping to advance the debate on Iraq while broadening the Party, but he had found himself taken captive by George Allen’s controversies. He’d shown no taste for this sort of political knife fight, and one sensed that if this first campaign also proved to be his last he would survive the disappointment. [New Yorker]

The Virginia Senate race may end up disproving the viability of the citizen-politician. It’s a noble model dating to the founding of America: the non-career politician with specialized skills who earns a healthy income independent of lobbyists, goes into government to fix specific problems and leaves when the mission is done. The beauty of the citizen-politician is that his/her incentives are aligned with those of citizens, exactly why the Greeks used citizen-soldiers:

The Athenians who confronted the Persians were not trained soldiers. Rather, they were what the Greeks called hoplites: citizen soldiers who carried their own armor and weapons… in ancient Greece, war knew no age. Athenian hoplites were as young as 18, as old as 60, the old men (like Socrates) tempering the inexperience of young men. The poor usually fight our wars; in ancient Greece, war knew no class. Great merchants fought alongside modest landholders, artists next to artisans… Hence the great morale of the citizen soldiers of Athens: not only was their democracy direct and participatory, so too was their view of war and death.

Citizens could not fight long battles: farms and vineyards would not wait. Thus the genius of Greek battle: it was nasty, brutish and short. A good thing too: once the battle was decided, the hoplites returned home, picking up again the private lives they had left behind. [Link]

It’s the opposite of the career politician, an unskilled generalist who enters the profession specifically to grow rich on the teats of pork and kickbacks. There is something deeply wrong with our political structure when it resembles a high school popularity contest. Allen may win because he smiles when he slurs. And that would be a sad day for representative democracy.

Most Americans pay so little attention to politics that modern campaigns run aground on the shoals of name recognition, screen tests and smileyness. That’s why so many cling to the delusion that the narcoleptic Reagan was a competent president, why Democratic rock stars like John Edwards and Barack Obama get a free pass on substance by flashing their pearly whites.

Non-presidential elections are like anything where an individual doesn’t perceive money or health to be at stake. They’re a classic low-information, layman’s market where people make decisions based on snap judgments on character and proxies like party affiliation.

It is precisely because Allen is a full-time politician and Webb is not, that we have a racist sitting senator and may re-elect him anyway.