Jim Webb: ‘People are looking for leadership they can trust’

Former Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia said Wednesday that “people are looking for leadership they can trust” and that he thinks a lot of people want to go back to the party of former Presidents Harry Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“Think about Harry Truman, what he would be saying to someone who told him he needed a consultant to show him how to dress or a lifestyle consultant [tell] him that he needed to go to Wal-Mart?” Mr. Webb said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” “You know, we need people who will, in politics, lead the same way that they live.”

Mr. Webb is weighing a presidential bid on the Democratic side. Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for the party’s 2016 nomination, is in the early presidential state of Iowa this week for small events with potential voters.

She also made an impromptu stop at a Chipotle restaurant in Ohio Monday as she drove from New York to Iowa in a so-called “Scooby” van.

Mr. Webb said comments Mrs. Clinton made Tuesday lamenting executive compensation and tax rates for hedge fund managers sounded familiar.

“I started talking about that nine years ago on the campaign trail. I mentioned it in my State of the Union response to George W. Bush in ’07,” he said.

“And what particularly struck me was she was talking — I listened on the radio on this — about hedge fund managers making millions and millions of dollars and actually paying a lower tax rate than nurses and truck drivers,” Mr. Webb said. “And I had to have a chuckle there, because I’ve used that example three different times on the Senate floor and I used it because one of my daughters happens to be a nurse and my son-in-law drives a truck.”  

“So I would say I’m glad she’s over on this side of the issue now,” Mr. Webb said. “American workers are needing this kind of voice and they want it from people who really mean it.”

Mr. Webb said he felt good about his own recent trip to the early presidential state, saying a message everyone seems to respond to is that “there is too much money polluting the political process” — an issue Mrs. Clinton talked about Tuesday as well.

“We have to find a way to have the people power overcome the money power. That’s really the best solution. We did it when I ran for the Senate,” Mr. Webb said.  

“We had 14,000 volunteers in Virginia when I ran for the Senate,” he continued. “We have to stop ourselves from believing that you need to have a money primary before you have a political primary. So we’re getting out, talking to people. And we’ll just see how it goes.”