Jim Webb: Here Comes Trouble

Could that be Jim Webb? Across the parking lot of the Eden Center, a Vietnamese-American strip mall in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, I've spotted a smallish figure in a tan ball cap, jeans, and boots, huddled against the bitter cold of an early February afternoon and peering around.

Webb's communications director, Craig Crawford, had told me to meet the one-term Virginia senator under the Vietnamese flag—the old South Vietnamese flag, actually, the bright yellow one with the red stripes. That's where this fellow is standing. Even as I draw closer, and he waves tentatively, he looks less like a man who might be running for president than an early retiree running errands.

But it's Jim Webb, all right. If there were any doubt, it's gone once he gets on the phone with Crawford, who has gotten lost on the spidery highways of Northern Virginia. "Where are you?" Webb barks into his phone. "Do you see the Vietnamese flag? What? What are we doing? We're out here freezing our asses off!"

He shoots me a conspiratorial grin, as if to reassure me that he's only mock-angry—not flashing the temper that folks in Washington are forever tut-tutting about—then says, "Come on." He leads the way toward his favorite "hole-in-the-wall" restaurant, the Banh Cuon Saigon.

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