Virginia Senator Jim Webb, the Democrat who beat George Allen four years ago following the “macaca” incident, has announced that he will not seek re-election.

Webb, like pretty much every “moderate” Democrat campaigned in the center and then became a pawn of Barack Obama and his chamber’s leadership.

It must have become clear to him that his support of all-things-Obama would make a successful re-election campaign extremely difficult especially, as Phil Klein points out, with Virginia being the “epicenter for opposition to ObamaCare, having been the first state to pass a Health Care Freedom Act, and then launch one of the suits challenging the law’s constitutionality.”

Although Webb’s race would indeed have been difficult, it wouldn’t have been impossible.  It will be even more difficult for any other Democrat to win that seat against the popular Allen who announced two weeks ago that he will again seek that seat.

Phil Klein suggests that current Chairman of the Democratic Party and former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine would be the Dems’ leading candidate although Kaine has already said that he would not seek the seat even if Webb retired.  I expect Kaine to maintain that position, in part because he really does seem to like his current job and in part because despite the results of the left-leaning PPP’s early poll, Kaine has to believe that if the political winds are blowing anything like their current speed and direction, he’d be an underdog to Allen.  After all, every ad will be rightfully tying Kaine to Obama.  In addition to noting that PPP uses a registered voter model, or something very close to it, rather than a likely voter model, their results are likely to overstate a Democrat’s chances.

It’s looking every more likely that we will once again be saying “Senator George Allen", though if there’s anything Allen himself has shown us it’s that a front-runner can find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.