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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWebb is a decorated Vietnam war hero and a former Secretary of the Navy.\n\nDo you think it's going to be close this fall?\n\n It really will. It'll depend on whether we're going to make Sarah Palin go out and do the things everybody else had to do\u2014unfettered interviews and those sorts of things. You know, the two words that came to my mind when I saw her speech were Spiro Agnew. Agnew was a governor who did not have national credentials but was loquacious and combative, and that was his whole function as vice president, to make the kind of speeches that Sarah Palin is making.\n\nThey let Palin right out of the gate with character assaults, saying that Obama considers the presidency \"a journey of personal discovery.\"\n\n Well, the Karl Rove technique is brutally simple and simply brutal. What they do is they go after three basic points: He's not like you, he doesn't understand you, and you can't trust him. It's very simple. And then everything goes into those three precepts. So they're doing everything they can to say, \"Barack Obama is\"\u2014to use a Spiro Agnew term\u2014\"an effete liberal snob. He's disconnected. He can't truly understand the average working person. You can't trust him, because you don't know really what he's going to do.\" But you can take those same three precepts and apply them all to John McCain: He's not like you, because of where his head is right now; his foreign-policy views are a 1950s construct. He doesn't understand where most Americans are, in terms of what's happened economically. And as a result, John McCain is not the person you want to trust with your country.\n\nBut if you apply them that way, it doesn't have the visceral impact.\n\n It can. One area where the Democrats are very weak and the Republicans are very strong is in symbolic language and messaging. I spent four years in the Reagan administration. Reagan was terrific. He understood that leadership is symbolic. I'll give you a small example. When I graduated from the Naval Academy, there was a tradition that only the top 10 percent actually got their diplomas handed to them. Everybody else got a big box. That continued all the way until Ronald Reagan. Reagan went to the Air Force Academy graduation, and they told him, \"Okay, you're going to give diplomas to the top 10 percent.\" He said, \"Wait a minute. I may have to order one of these people to their deaths. The least I can do is give them their diploma and shake their hand.\" And he stood up there, and he shook every graduate's hand. Let me tell you, that went through the United States military like lightning: This is a guy who understands you, who respects you. That's symbolic leadership.\n\nDo you consider yourself a former, or reformed, Republican? \n\n I would view my history of service more like Daniel Patrick Moynihan's. I was never active in the Republican Party in terms of elective politics or organized politics. I'm very proud that I served in the Reagan administration, just like Moynihan served in the Nixon administration. But when he ran, he ran as a Democrat. Basically, I have looked for opportunities to serve my country. So I don't look at myself as a former Republican. I look at myself as someone who was very proud to have been part of the Reagan administration, and I don't think the last eight years is respectful to what President Reagan was trying to do. This has gotten so vitriolic. The Internet is a part of it; the Karl Rove approach is a part of it.\n\nWhat is it about the Democrats that makes it hard for them to find symbols and messaging?\n\n I don't know. Democrats got way off message at the end of the Vietnam War. They went from being the antiwar party to being perceived as the antimilitary party, which is a different thing. And they went from a party whose number one concern was working people, all the way from Andrew Jackson, to where working people were one constituency among many. And they kind of lost their message. And if you look at where the country needs to go in terms of economic fairness, smart sensible foreign policy, etc., I think the answers are here. It's just a question of clarifying it inside the party, among the leaders.\n\nWhy do you think McCain didn't vote for the GI bill that you wrote? Was that just politics?\n\n I talked to him three times about it. And each time he said, \"Yeah, I've really got to look at that,\" because he was out campaigning or whatever. And I said, \"John, Uncle Sam paid for your education. He paid for my education. You look at the benefit that this could bring.\" And he'd go, \"I'm gonna look at this.\" But I don't think he got a good look at it before 30,000 veterans let him know, and then he got his back up. I think he was worried about being perceived as caving in if he had joined us at that point. In politics, once you go on record, it's very difficult to turn yourself around. Honestly, that's how we ended up in Iraq. I'll tell you a little story. I wrote a piece in The Washington Post six months before the invasion, saying, \"Don't do it. Do you really want to be in this place for the next fifty years?\" And a mutual friend of me and George W. Bush, someone very close to the president, called me, and he goes, \"There's nothing you said that I don't agree with, but what would you do if you were the president? You've got all these troops mobilized; they're on the border areas. What can he do?\" And I told him, \"Declare victory.\" But it's very difficult for a political leader who's out there to get back. And that's what happened with John McCain on the GI bill. He got some bad advice, and how do you find your way back?\n\nHow do the Democrats win back Virginia?\n\n With the right approach. Virginia is a microcosm of the country. Northern Virginia is very cosmopolitan, high-tech, immigrant. Norfolk, Hampton Roads, they're a combination of African-American and military. Southside Virginia, you've got a manufacturing base that has really been hit hard by all this outsourcing. And southwest Virginia is as red as any red state. If I had to pick a spot where I think the decisive votes are going to come, it would be Southside. That's the people who've lost all these jobs.\n\nObama's still a tough sell there.\n\n But if those people really think hard about what John McCain's economic message is, we've got a shot.\n\nClick here to read more provocative, revealing interviews with the men and women behind the most epic presidential race of our lifetime."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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