Webb: I Wasn’t Interested in Veep From Day One

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who took himself out of consideration to become Barack Obama’s running mate, said he was never very interested in being vice president.

“Well, I was saying from day one that I really wasn’t interested,” Webb said in an interview with Charlie Rose. “This is not the same thing as Barack Obama and [Sen.] Hillary [Rodham Clinton] (D-N.Y.) and other people saying they wanted to be president. People would ask me about this and I would say I’ve been in elective office for two years. I’ve got a great staff around me. We’re focusing on issues that I can talk about openly, that would be very difficult to do if I were, in fact, a part of an administration. And there was so much speculation after my book was published and the GI Bill passed, I just decided to clear the air and to basically start focusing on things we’re working on.”

Webb, the Secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, also talked about returning to the Democratic Party. He said though he was proud to serve under Reagan, a Republican, he decided that when he ran for Senate that it was time to “come home.”

Webb said that Democrats need to return to the populist principles they followed under President Andrew Jackson, who, like Webb, came from a Scots-Irish background and was a military leader before becoming an elected official.

“The number one function of the Democratic party from Andrew Jackson forward was you take care of the working people in the country and you have a strong and properly focused national defense,” he said. “That lasted all the way into the ’70s. And I think that’s where the Democratic party needs to be.”

Webb continued: “He spoke for the notion that you measure the health of a society not at the apex but at the base. And you measure the value of a human being not by what their worth is but who they are as a person. That’s very much out of Jacksonian democracy.”