Is This Candidate About to Re-Enter the Presidential Race?

When former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) dropped out of the Democrat presidential race, he left open the possibility of launching an independent run. Over the Christmas weekend, he made it sound as though that was much closer to happening.

Saturday morning, he took to Twitter and Facebook to launch his most pointed attacks on Hillary Clinton since his campaign began. His statement on Facebook read:

Our next commander in chief must define a strategic vision for the country and accept accountability for past actions. Hillary Clinton should be called to account for her inept leadership that brought about the chaos in Libya, and the power vacuums that resulted in the rest of the region. She’ll need better answers than the recent nonsensical comment that she advocated taking out Muammar Qadaffi in Libya in order to avert a situation like Syria. The predictable chaos in Libya was bad enough, but it also helped bring about the disaster in Syria. Who is taking her to task for this? http://read.bi/1SbMG7h

She said, “If we had not joined with our European partners and our Arab partners to assist the people in Libya, you would be looking at Syria.” In reality that is what we are looking at. As the Harvard (Kennedy School) Lessons from Libya study of 2013 found, “The biggest misconception about NATO’s intervention is that it saved lives and benefited Libya and its neighbors.” Radical Islamist groups, suppressed under Qaddafi, emerged as the fiercest rebels during the war, highlighted by the September 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues.

Clinton talked at this last DNC debate about her failure as Secretary of State as if she was successful. While she held that office, the U.S. spent about $2 billion backing the Libyan uprising against Qadaffi. The uprising, which was part of the Arab Spring, led directly to Qaddafi being removed from power and killed by rebel forces in 2011. Now some 2,000 ISIS terrorists have established a foothold in Libya. Sophisticated weapons from Qaddafi’s arsenal—including up to 15,000 man-portable, surface-to-air missiles have apparently fallen into the hands of radical Islamists throughout the region. For a Secretary of State (and a Presidential administration) this is foreign policy leadership at its worst.

The first rule of wing-walking (and regime change) is never let go of what you have until you have a firm grasp on where you are going.

Clinton isn’t the only target for Webb’s ire. On Christmas Eve, he launched into a critique of President Obama, and establishment Democrats in general. He said the president’s comments on NPR earlier in the week were “degrading” to working-class Americans:

Obama’s comments in Monday’s NPR interview show how out of touch this administration and the Democratic Party have become with working men and women. His comments degrading the working class by asserting that they cannot adjust to change, and calling factory work a “bargain”, are examples of the left’s doing all it can to isolate that demographic group as idiosyncratic. They are publicly humiliating respected ways of life in order to avoid accountability for not having protected this vital component of America’s future growth. Is this the bargain Obama speaks of: http://wapo.st/1SbQbL3?

Obama told NPR, “…wages and incomes have been flat-lining for some time, and that particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck…”

Webb has not officially laid down the ground work for an independent run, and the logistics behind such a campaign are very difficult. But at the very least, he’s established he won’t be a Democrat cheerleader in 2016.