And comes out against Obama’s foreign policy recklessness:
“Our country has been adrift,” Webb said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington that rattled through a list of his disagreements with the Obama administration’s foreign policy. “We continue to be trapped in the never-ending, never-changing entanglements of the Middle East.”
Allahpundit doubts Webb poses a real threat to Clinton. And Doug Mataconis has a hard time imagining Webb on the campaign trail:
As Larry Sabato noted when Webb declined to run for re-election in 2012, while he may have been a good Senator, Webb isn’t a particularly good politician and he clearly doesn’t enjoy the kind of campaigning that someone running for President would need to do on a daily basis if their candidacy is going to go anywhere at all. This was something that was, quite honestly, evident even when Webb first ran for Senator in 2006, especially given the fact that it reportedly took a significant amount of cajoling from state and national leaders for him to agree to run in the first place. Many saw the fact that he didn’t run for re-election as a [reflection] of this disdain for the “meat and potatoes” of politics as well. If you’re going to run for President, you’d better like campaigning because that’s all you’re going to be doing for the better part of a year.
Aaron Blake throws another bucket of cold water:
He has negative charisma. The Fix believes that presidential races have a charisma threshold, by which we mean that candidates need to be at least somewhat compelling to a national audience to achieve viability. Tim Pawlenty (R), for instance, struggled with this. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) has a similar problem. Webb would probably make Pawlenty look like Herman Cain. He’s just very dour. We wonder who would get excited about him, in the absence of some galvanizing force that suddenly makes him the perfect candidate for that political moment in time.
Jonathan Bernstein enumerates the growing list of “anti-Clintons”:
Finally, a Democratic presidential field beyond Hillary Clinton may be emerging. Well, it’s a quasi-field, but it got one body larger today, with former Senator Jim Webb of Virginia talking about running on an anti-war platform. We now have five of these possible anti-Clintons: Webb, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Joe Biden. That’s a lot!
Well, sort of. O’Malley is the most active. He is hiring in Iowa and doing pretty much everything an obscure but viable candidate can do at this stage. Sanders, and now Webb, aren’t doing much beyond talking. Warren denies she is running even as she does candidate-like things, and is pointedly refusing to pledge that she won’t run. And Biden is in a holding pattern: He’s not organizing a real campaign, but has declared himself a potential candidate. We can’t know how many of these Democrats will actually be running in 2016, or even in spring 2015.
(Photo by Jamie Rose/Getty Images)
The Dish 