If you'd told me twenty years ago that John Kerry would eventually run for president, I would have expected Webb to be in there Swiftboating with the best of them. Originally a conservative Democrat in the mold of his first political patron, long-time Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, made his bones with the conservative movement by crossing party lines to support Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election -- supposedly because of his rage over Jimmy Carter's amnesty for Vietnam era draft evaders.

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But instead, nearly two decades later, Webb's now the newly elected Senator from my native state (a stronghold of the Confederacy and the national "right-to-work" movement) who's lined up shoulder to shoulder with Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and is writing op eds for the Wall Street Journal explicitly calling for what the Republican chattering classes sneeringly condemn as "class warfare"

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If this is the new Democratic "conservatism" the Washington punditburo keeps bleating about, then all I can say is three cheers for conservatism. But Webb's op ed definitely left me with a profound case of political vertigo. My sense of direction (this way is left; that way is right) is getting pretty scrambled. Former Reagan cabinet officers now sound like Abby Hoffman. Connecticut Senators who started out trying to impeach Richard Nixon now sound like John Mitchell. Where's it going to end?

I don't know. But if Jim Webb and I are now on the roughly same side on the big issues of the day -- the war, globalization, corporate power, economic fairness, social justice -- it tells you something has fundamentally changed in American politics. It may not be a realignment (a political system this polluted and decrepit may not be capable of such a thing) but when Senators from Virginia start talking like Walter Reuther, it sure the hell isn't business as usual.