THE HONORABLE, ENRAGED GENTLEMAN FROM VIRGINIA

His razor-thin victory in a swing state delivered the Senate to the Democrats. Since then, Senator Jim Webb has publicly refused to shake the hand of George W. Bush, delivered the most devastating State of the Union response in memory, and had to explain why an aide brought a loaded gun into the Capitol. It’s been a busy few months for the straightest talker in D.C.

Today is what’s known in the Senate as “vote-a-rama,” a daylong marathon of budget votes that requires members to be within a ten-minute walk of the Senate floor at all times. It’s not Jim Webb’s kind of day. He hates being chained to the floor schedule. “I’ve done all this stuff all over the world as a writer,” Webb told me. “Going places where nobody knows who you are, and nobody cares, and you can go into the back alleys, go into the bad areas, you know? Really see things. To me, government is a cage.” All this week, in an attempt to at least partially escape that cage, Webb has been spending his free time at his private writing office across the Potomac River in Arlington, working on a big speech about the future of the Democratic Party that he delivered yesterday at the National Press Club. Webb fancies himself an ideas guy—“If I had to pick a prototype for the Senate, it would probably be Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who came out of an intellectual career,” he said at the NPC—but there’s nothing high-minded about today. Today is about making sausage. Over the next seven hours, Webb will vote on dozens of arcane amendments to the main budget resolution, the blueprint for how the United States government will spend $3 trillion next year. There are reams of amendments to boost funding for every imaginable pet project—training physicians, combating meth, boosting nanotechnology. There are deviously worded land-mine amendments written with nothing other than future campaign commercials in mind, like the DeMint amendment “to prevent the adding of earmarks for spinach producers to an emergency war-supplemental-appropriations bill.” There are even votes on the technical aspects of this baffling process itself, like the Conrad amendment “to clarify the treatment of certain provisions in conference reports.”......LINK