Warner looks left, looks right, looks toward '08

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - In the battle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, no one is running harder than Mark Warner.

The former Virginia governor has a lot going for him: he is tireless and engaging; he talks about policy and international affairs with verve and a grasp of detail.

In a 30-minute interview, he comes across as an affable all-American guy who made a fortune in the cell phone business and happens to have an insatiable interest in politics.

At the end of his four years as governor, Governing magazine gave his administration an A- grade for its management of money and personnel. Only one other state, Utah, won as high a rating.

As chairman of the National Governors Association, he came up with a Medicaid proposal that would have slowed the growth of that $200 billion-a-year program.

Comptroller General David Walker and other non-partisan analysts warn that reform of Medicaid and other entitlements must be the highest priority for the next president — otherwise entitlements will eat up the entire budget. Warner's on top of this.

Attempt at Medicaid reform
Signaling his exasperation with partisan stubbornness in Washington, Warner said that when he briefed a congressional committee about the plan, “It almost cured me of any national political ambitions… The Republicans just (said), ‘I don’t care about the people, give me the number. The Democrats, on the other hand, were like, ‘Medicaid was brought down by Moses on tablets and you can’t change any of it.”

A Republican critic, Virginia House of Delegates Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith, said of Warner’s term as governor, “His biggest failure — which he may view as his biggest success — was the enactment of the largest tax increase in Virginia history, breaking his campaign promise.”

But Warner replied, “The overwhelming majority of Virginians think it was the right thing to do to help fix our finances…. Since we had a two-to-one Republican legislature, it only got through because there was broad-based Republican support.”

Warner seems to be trying to run as a non-ideological candidate, someone who can transcend left-right divides.

“The issues facing our country no longer so much divide on left versus right, liberal versus conservative, but much more about the future versus the past,” he says in his speeches.

But the recent battles in Congress over the estate tax and the capital gains and dividend taxes prove that there are real and substantial liberal versus conservative clashes: one side, (Warner's party mostly), argues for more government redistribution of wealth; the other (mostly Republicans), calls for less redistribution of wealth.

Warner knows this, but seems to be thinking in terms of a “shared sacrifice” agenda that would win bipartisan support for tax increases and restraining the growth in entitlement spending.

Cultivating the bloggers
As he prepared a formal launch of a campaign that’s already well under way, Warner has astutely cultivated the most creative people in the Democratic blogosphere.

He was the first presidential hopeful to accept an invitation to speak at the Yearly Kos convention, last weekend’s gathering of 900 activists in Las Vegas sponsored by the Daily Kos web site. Warner was given the prime speaking spot on the schedule.

“He’s not the favorite (of the bloggers). But I think he’s getting a good hearing, and I think it’s the fact that he was the first candidate to commit to a conference that nobody was taking seriously,” said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of Daily Kos web site.

Warner realized that the left-leaning bloggers wanted respect and he was willing to go to Yearly Kos to show, as Moulitsas said, that “maybe we weren’t the far-left extremist wackos that everybody else seems to think we are.”

Warner seems as comfortable with traditional John F. Kennedy Democrats in New Hampshire as with the Kos bloggers.

Interactive Analyzing the 2008 presidential field

“I’d been hearing about him from friends in Virginia and they’ve been telling me he’s been extraordinarily effective,” said Democrat Jim Heffernan of Hanover, N.H after hearing Warner speak at the state party convention two weekends ago. “I can see exactly what they’ve been talking about: he’s articulate, he’s impassioned.”

Heffernan called him “a technocrat, an entrepreneur, a man who understands the tools of technology and can use them for the common good.”

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