If Only George Allen's Mom Were Black

You know that Allen wishes she were. We wouldn't be talking about the m-word anymore and that would totally take care of the n-word problem -- black people are allowed to say it, as in "Wassup, my N-wordz!" But, unfortunately, she was just Jewish. So, instead of strategizing for the Allen-Obama presidential contest of 2008 -- finally a black man in the White House! -- the Allen campaign has been reduced to attacking an opponent it had previously been committed to ignoring.

Fortunately Republican feminists have come up with some good ammunition. About the same time George Allen was deciding where to hang the Stars and Bars in his new office, Jim Webb was writing in the Washingtonian, hopefully describing the Naval Academy as "a horny woman's dream" and making the outrageous and insultingly misogynistic claim that men are "naturally more violent" than women. Unlike Allen, Webb can't deny what he said (like an idiot, he wrote it down), so he's been reduced to apologizing for it, and his supporters in the liberal media have resorted to trying to place his offensive remarks in context. After all, as the Washington Post points out, in the same article, Webb also said: "I believe most of what has happened over the past decade in the name of sexual equality has been good. It is good to see women doctors and lawyers and executives. I can visualize a woman President. If I were British, I would have supported Margaret Thatcher" (italics mine).

So, if you're a liberal, the good news is that Jim Webb was always something of a feminist. But the bad news is that he wanted to vote for Margaret Thatcher. Which makes the relevant point. There's nothing intrinsically liberal about feminism - how is it supposed to count as a victory for the left when right-wing women get elected instead of left-wing men? Or when women as well as men can go to fight a catastrophically foolish war in Iraq? And there's not even anything intrinsically liberal about anti-racism - George Allen isn't defending his racist remarks (which is what a serious racist would do), he's denying them.

I haven't seen Jim Webb's apology for his desire to vote for Thatcher but I'm willing to believe he regrets it and that's the regret that matters. The reason to vote for him, in other words, has nothing to do with feminism and nothing to do with racism. The best reason to vote Webb is tucked into his website after a long bit about Iraq and labeled Economic and Social Fairness:

"This country is splitting into three pieces. As a result of the internationalization of the economy, the people at the top have never had it so good. The middle class is continuing to get squeezed by stagnant wages and rising cost of living. And we are in danger of creating a permanent underclass. We must reexamine our tax and trade policies and reinstitute notions of fairness, and also enforce our existing trade laws so that free trade becomes fair trade."

No doubt this doesn't go anywhere near far enough but at least, unlike the debate over who's the racist and who's the misogynist (or, for that matter, the debate over Iraq - would poor people be richer if we weren't in Iraq?), it's a meaningfully liberal position.