The James Webb Free-fall?

James Webb may have really stepped in it this time. After the concern over whether he filed his FEC report on time (which is being disputed after the anthrax scare), now Webb has to be worried about being labeled as anti-Semitic, and with less than a week left before the primary, leaving him little time to respond. Most harmful to James Webb, this is getting MSM attention. This has greatly frustrated Virginia Centrist, who believes that the Miller campaign is taking advantage of this development:

I will actively work AGAINST Harris Miller if he wins the primary. I will trash him at every juncture, and do EVERYTHING I CAN to ensure that he receives less than 35% of the vote (it won't be hard). Not only that - I will single-mindedly hound him with this blog for the rest of his political career, and I will encourage others to do so.

Funny, I remember VC saying something about political blogs holding no sway.

Lowell is trying to stop the bleeding by stating with conviction that James Webb is not anti-Semitic. And I suspect he is right. But Lowell forgets that, in the election, it does not matter right now whether he is or is not. What matters is how people perceive James Webb, and right now, it seems likely that they may perceive Webb as a racist.

Right now, it would be in James Webb's best interest to organize a public event, and fast. Get the media out, and apologize for the cartoon. Tell people that its release was a lapse in judgment and that he holds no ill will towards Jews. It might not recover all the votes he may lose from this event, but there just might be enough time for Webb to get back into contention. With the Jerry Kilgore death penalty ad that violated Godwin's Law (which, by the way, is nothing more than an escape from an argument which should be easy enough to win if what they say is true) still fairly recent, it is obvious that people in the Commonwealth are fairly sensitive to inappropriate comparisons. The faster he fixes this, the better his chances of winning the primary on Tuesday are.

Meanwhile, George Allen's campaign chugs along with a purely positive ad. If Senator Allen continues using mostly positive advertising, he should have an easy path to re-election.

Still, I cannot help when laugh when I remember how many times Lowell stated that James Webb was George Allen's "worst nightmare". Seems to me that the only man that James Webb is a nightmare to is James Webb.