Webb 2016?

We seem to be seeing the start of it, clearly with President Obama's blessing. Well, he's not Hillary Clinton.

But more than that, he is Reagan's old Navy Secretary turned the Democratic opponent of the Iraq War whose election in the purplest of Southern border states clinched the Senate for the party of his - and of so many other despairing Nixon and Reagan supporters' - birth. Like most conservative Democrats, he declared for Obama immediately or as soon as John Edwards was out, in Webb's case immediately.

Had he been the running mate, then there would have been a landslide, sending the full Democrats for Life ticket to the House, the Ron Paul activist and traditional Catholic Bob Conley to the Senate from South Carolina, and so on. The paleocons probably tipped it for Webb in Virginia, and could easily have done so nationwide. He embodies his Scots-Irish Southern heritage as it is now, and mercifully not as it was in his boyhood. Why, he even has an Asian wife.

Cast iron foreign policy realist though he is, Webb is neither as economically populist, nor as conservative morally and socially, as all that. He has a fiscally "conservative" streak, though not too much of one. And he is more of a cultural conservative; but then, an awful lot of people are.

There may yet emerge a candidate who is all three of a better economic populist, a better moral and social conservative, and at least as good a foreign policy realist. That candidate may even be the senior Senator for a key swing seat, with a history of endorsement by The American Conservative. But until such time as that candidate emerges (it could, of course, be Webb himself by then), then it is perfectly clear who is the man to watch.