Over the last couple of days,
there have been very stong rumors that Democratic party insiders have begun to coalesce around Northern Virginia lobbyist
Harris N. Miller as their preferred candidate to run against George Allen for his Virginia senate seat in 2006. The two main individuals who have indicated publicly that they are seriously considering running are Miller and former Reagan administration Secretary of the Navy
James Webb, who has switched parties due to his differences with the Bush administration. I had posted a profile of his
views on foreign and defense policy on Sunday evening of last week, and had argued that he would be a good source of 'new thinking' in the Democratic party on these issues.
But James Webb also is the kind of candidate who scares the hell out of certain Beltway Insider [tm] types -- because he's a maverick who isn't afraid to speak his mind.
He was one of only a handful of former Republican senior officials who didn't let his (then) affiliation with the Republican party stop him from
calling bull---t on President Bush's Iraq misadventure, in a very loud and public way. And he certainly doesn't pull his punches, as you can see from this passage from his (mostly positive)
review of Andrew Bacevich's book, "The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War."
Running through these pages is the first overt articulation of a confrontation that has slowly been gathering steam for more than ten years. This confrontation goes to the core of the American experience. One side is represented heavily by those with a classical training in America's past wars (and frequently with experience in having fought them), who would send American forces into harm's way only if the nation is directly threatened. The other side is dominated by a group of theorists, most of whom have never seen the inside of a military uniform, who adhere to an essentially Trotskyite notion that America should be exporting its ideology around the world at the point of a gun.
Clearly, this is a guy who calls it like he sees it, and has an independent streak a mile wide.
And my guess is, when insiders at the DSCC, etc, read his writings, they probably thought he might be a controversial candidate -- a bit of a maverick, and someone who isn't going to be amenable to taking orders from the party leadership. ("Psst, Jim, maybe you oughtta lay off taking about all that Iraq stuff -- stick to the talking points we gave you.")
Given that these insiders don't think the Virginia race is winnable, they've taken a page out of the old playbook -- run a 'safe' candidate. Political parties usually don't leave a major race like a Senate seat uncontested, the way they sometimes do for House seats, but they often give the nomination to a party fundraiser in that state more or less as an honorific, without any expectation that they'll win.
I don't know what's inside their heads, obviously, but that strikes me as the likely reason for the apparent turn toward Harris Miller -- they don't expect to win, and he's a safe candidate who will stick to the script and not make any waves. I think they're wrong, however. I don't have anything against Miller personally, but in just a half-hour of 'oppo research' on the web, I was able to home in on an issue that may have been overlooked -- as a lobbyist for the high-tech industry, he's been representing the interests of the bosses, not the workers, in some very important ways which have weakened high tech workers' salaries and bargaining power.
As head of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), Harris has lobbied relentlessly since the 1990s for expansion of the H1-B visa program, which is very controversial among tech-sector workers since, by introducing a supply of much cheaper labor into the U.S. labor market, it tends to weaken American programmers' and engineers' bargaining power via-a-vis their employers. Needless to say, that would likely give Miller a head start on fundraising among those who inhabit the top-floor offices along the Dulles Toll Road, but it very well might not endear him to the many tens of thousands of tech workers (and Northern Virginia voters) who inhabit the cubicles below.
Miller also has been a strong proponent of outsourcing many more Federal Government jobs, a position that, needless to say, wouldn't exactly endear him to another huge very-Democratic-leaning constituency in Northern Virginia.
Of course, George Allen would support the ITAA on these issues as well, but these issues are going to get a lot of airplay, and they're not going to help Miller achieve the sort of turnout in Northern Virignia which he would need to beat Allen. Anyway, my point in all this is to underline the fact that Harris Miller isn't a 'safe' candidate. He will make some waves as well...
If we want to have any chance of beating George Allen, we need someone who will make some noise, and even if James Webb didn't win, his pull-no-punches style would leave Allen bruised enough to be less of a contender in 2008, which is in itself an important goal -- and a 'safe' placeholder candidate wouldn't do that.
Neither Miller nor Webb has made anything official yet, nor has the DSCC. This is all in the realm of 'well-sourced rumor' for now. So we still have time to act.
Some friends of mine have set up a web-based petition, where we are collecting the names of people who would like to encourage James Webb to run. If you'd like to add your name, click here. Even if you're not in Virginia, sign up -- we want to show that we can tap the blogosphere for financial support, the same way it happened for Paul Hackett.
And if I still haven't convinced you, read my post from last week. Wouldn't you like to have this guy out on the hustings, taking on George Allen in a pull-no-punches fashion, and trying to get the U.S. on the path back to a saner foreign policy? (That's why he's no longer a Republican, after all.) If I have convinced you, click here to email this post to a friend or two, or you could email it to yourself and forward it more widely...
I don't generally ask for "recommends" when I post here at DailyKos, but I'm going to make an exception here, because I think this may be an instance where the netroots has an opportunity to help reverse a decision by the Beltway Insiders [tm] before it's announced publicly.