"After Bush’s re-election, Democrats were consumed with self-loathing. They hated the Middle Americans who rejected them, but they also wanted those Middle Americans to love them... "

...Democrats concluded “their party must speak in language familiar to, among others, the disaffected hog farmers of Missouri,” the New Yorker reported in May 2006.

Then along came Jim Webb, and a crew called the "Redneck Caucus." Webb had served in Vietnam. He’d been a Republican. He'd opposed the Iraq War but in this super-cool, tough-guy way. He had a campaign aide named Mudcat. Webb had written a book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, about how his ancestors had stood up to tyrants of all sorts. GQ reported, “odd and romanticized as it sounds, Webb believes he came to Washington to represent the Scots-Irish, or at least their modern-day heirs.” The senator told Virginia voters he would “bring more people back into the Democratic Party. … People who will understand the basic message of what I call Jacksonian democracy, and that is that you measure the health of your society not at its apex but at its base."

That sounded nice enough, but it seems pretty clear Webb was only interested in one slice of that base. (The white slice.) As Anderson Cooper noted in the debate, Webb said in 2000 that affirmative action "has within one generation brought about a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand."... Asked about Black Lives Matter, Webb said “every life in this country matters.” (Though: “I have had a long history of working with the situation of African Americans.")...

And then, at the end, when asked which of his enemies he was most proud of, Webb said, “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to.” The line did not land well. Maybe because it was a decade too late.

...In Tuesday's debate, though, Hillary Clinton highlighted her proposals that would undo some of her husband's signature legislation, including his draconian 1994 crime bill. She talked about “reforming criminal justice,” saying “we need to tackle mass incarceration.”

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123120/jim-webb-ghost-democrats-past-especially-hillary-clintons

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Webb used strong words comparing the effects of Welfare on the black population to "state-sponsored racism," likening it to Jim Crow. He could be useful to Clinton as point man on the subject, allowing her to distance herself from the subject with regard to the white middle class. 

It would also be advantageous for her to attract the vote of the military, traditionally Republican, and also to allay any qualms that she resents men. I don't see a white/white ticket coming up, but I can see Webb as very helpful to her, with the possibility of  Secretary of Defense as his reward in the offing.