Let those other pundits and reporters obsess over the new Democratic leadership as it brings its own special brand of “progressive reform” to Capitol Hill. (An all-vegan menu in the cafeteria? Hookahs in the cloakroom? Mandatory Birkenstocks in place of wingtips?)

I will be directing my attention to the backbenches. I’ll be watching Jim Webb.

With his stunning upset of George Allen, the heavily favored Republican incumbent, the newly elected Democratic senator from Virginia arrives as the most exotic bird in the Washington aviary.

Unlike most modern politicians, Mr. Webb hasn’t spent his entire adult life running, or plotting to run, for political office. He is a man of unimpeachable physical courage and battlefield heroism, having been awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts for his service as a Marine in Vietnam.

As the author of six novels, most of them bestsellers and all of them bristling with interesting ideas, he enters the Senate with a record of creative and intellectual accomplishment not seen there since the death of Daniel Moynihan.

And best of all, his election last week makes him the most deeply conservative national Democrat since Grover Cleveland.

Mr. Webb, meet Ms. Pelosi.

Mr. Webb may be a novice politician but he’s also a natural. He was careful to keep his most conservative leanings well camouflaged during the campaign.

He is, for instance, an absolutist on Second Amendment rights — the right to keep and bear arms — but he made sure the subject seldom arose as he campaigned in the liberal suburbs of northern Virginia.

He has written extensively about affirmative action, calling it “a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand.” He has praised the Confederate battle flag and the sacrifice of the Confederate soldier with an eloquence that Jefferson Davis might envy.

Virginia Democrats pretended not to notice, and Mr. Webb was happy to let them.

His revulsion for Bill Clinton and his administration is deep, long-standing, and very public. “Every time I see him salute a Marine,” he once told an interviewer, “it infuriates me.”

When Mr. Clinton was condemned for his promiscuous use of pardons in January 2001, Mr. Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career.”

Yet five years later, when Mr. Clinton came to Virginia to raise money for the Webb campaign, Mr. Webb turned to the cameras and hugged him like a stuffed bear. He did the same with John Kerry, the former spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose hand, Mr. Webb once told Washingtonian magazine, he refused to shake for 20 years.

The man knows how to trim.

And the Allen campaign — foreshadowing a puzzlement that will be common among Republicans — didn’t know what to do about him.

One day, late in the campaign, I found myself in the slightly surreal position of being a conservative columnist listening to a conservative spokesman for the conservative incumbent Senator Allen explaining that their Democratic opponent deserved to lose because he was — too conservative.

“He’s got a real problem with women, especially in the military,” said the spokesman, who asked not to be identified. He complained about the vehemence of Mr. Webb’s opposition to affirmative action. He read me passages from a Webb encomium to the Confederacy.

“Maybe those views were acceptable in 1906,” he said, “but this is 2006.”

National Democrats may not know what to do with him either. Mr. Webb’s arrival in Washington is being hailed as part of a new wave of moderation and pragmatism sweeping the liberal party.

Yet Mr. Webb is neither a moderate nor a pragmatist: He’s a radical and a populist. His populism explains, among other things, his disdain for the Clintons. Both Bill and Hillary, he wrote in 2001, embody a “a pervasive elitism, from people who were taught when young that the laws that applied to their countrymen did not necessarily apply to them.”

The irony here should give Democrats pause. The last time they were supposedly swept with moderation, it was the Clintonian pragmatism of the 1990s: pro-free trade, fiscally restrained, pro-globalization, and accommodating of corporate America. Mr. Clinton himself once ruefully admitted that his administration’s cautious economic policies made him an “Eisenhower Republican.”

Mr. Webb is better described as a Buchanan Democrat — as in Pat Buchanan. Mr. Webb’s brand of populism is hostile to free trade, antagonistic to corporate America, suspicious of the market, and horrified by the effects of globalization, which has showered rewards on the elites while leaving behind the people who, as a populist, he means to represent.

How Mr. Webb fits into the byplay of Washington politicking and positioning is one of the most interesting questions to emerge from Election Day’s Democratic landslide. He won’t be able to trim for long.

So watch Mr. Webb. We will know soon enough whether this rare bird will be admired for his uncommon gifts and exotic plumage, or whether he will quickly go the way of the dodo.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.