The former Virginia senator wanted to be president. He just didn’t want to work for it.

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Running for president is hard, grueling work that almost always ends in failure. To succeed, or even come close to success, you have to commit 100 percent. You have to campaign and cajole and speak and charm and hope that voters come to your tent, and stay for the show. And even then, even if you’re good, it’s a crapshoot.

Three months ago, in August, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said he wanted to be president. The United States, he said, needed “proven, experienced leadership that can be trusted to move us forward from a new president’s first days in office.” Webb was far from favored to win, but he was a compelling candidate, a throwback to an older, less diverse Democratic Party that represented the bulk of America’s white working-class, with a smattering of votes from black Americans and other groups.

As an idiosyncratic Democrat—opposed to “identity politics,” skeptical of gun control, and for the Keystone pipeline, but pro-union, pro-choice, and pro–same-sex marriage—Webb could have been an unusual force in the Democratic primary, moderating candidates on some issues but pushing them to the left on others, like foreign policy, national security, and criminal justice reform.

Webb wanted to lead the
United States, but he
didn’t want to do the
work to get to voters.

Instead, Webb didn’t do anything. He was hardly on the trail in Iowa, and only made one stop in New Hampshire. “The crickets here in New Hampshire are louder than the Webb campaign,” said the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party to Mother Jones. His press team was silent, and he hardly raised any money—just under $700,000 in the third quarter. If not for Lincoln Chafee, former governor of Rhode Island, Webb would have been at the bottom of the fundraising ladder.