Warner looks left, looks right, looks toward '08

Questions about candidacy
Balancing Warner’s advantages are unresolved questions:

• Is one term as governor too thin a resume for a war-time presidential candidate?
• How credible is Warner’s claim that he knows how to win in the South? After all, the northern Virginia counties of Arlington, Loudon and Fairfax, and the city of Alexandria, where Warner did so well in the 2001 election (far outperforming Al Gore’s showing in those same places in the 2000 election), are culturally indistinguishable from the suburbs of Chicago or Denver, partly because so many non-Virginians like Warner have moved there.
• Is Warner vulnerable to the charge that he is too calculating in becoming whatever voters want him to become?

Warner was born in Indiana, raised there and in Connecticut, and educated at George Washington University in Washington D.C., and at Harvard Law School.

He moved to Virginia in the 1980s and helped run Democrat Doug Wilder’s campaign for governor in 1989. Warner was elected governor in 2001 with 52 percent of the vote.

Virginian Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, Warner’s consultant in his gubernatorial campaign, explained his success with Virginia voters.

“We took a Connecticut Yankee named Mark Warner who had an appreciation for our culture, who said right off the bat, ‘I don’t know anything about NASCAR racing, I don’t know anything about bluegrass music, I don’t know anything about hunting and fishing, but you know what, it’s important to you, so it’s important to me.’”

Can Warner win in the South?
In order to win in the South, Saunders said, “That’s all you’ve got to do, get through the culture. And once you’re through that culture and you get to the true message of Jacksonian democracy, of social justice and economic fairness, then we kick ass in the South.”

If he is the Democratic nominee, Warner’s candidacy will be a test of Saunders’s theory.

It will be worth watching how Warner straddles the divides within his party.

Warming up the crowd at last Saturday’s Yearly Kos event was a New York comedian named Katie Halper, who went into a riff of anti-Bush sarcasm, calling the president “an animal-human hybrid.”

She then told a joke about Mary Cheney, who has written a book about being a lesbian as well Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter.

How, wondered Halper, could Mary be so good-looking and yet be Dick Cheney’s daughter, calling it a case of “gene switching, or as I like to call it, pulling a Lieberman” — a snide and crowd-pleasing reference to Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has earned the contempt of Daily Kos bloggers for backing the Iraq war, refusing to support a filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and other perceived offenses.

Throughout Halper’s performance, just a few steps off the platform, Warner watched and smiled genially. He shook Halper’s hand as she stepped off the platform.

Does Warner detest Bush enough?
But does Warner hate Bush and Lieberman enough (or at all?), does he sound outraged enough to satisfy the passionately anti-Bush, anti-Lieberman and anti-war contingent in his party?

After his speech to the Yearly Kos convention, one audience member confronted Warner and urged him to punish Bush and his aides.

Warner said, “Respectfully, where I’m going to put my efforts more is where we go going forward,” to which the disgruntled man replied, “One of the great ways to get our (international) reputation back is to put the bums in jail.”

It was striking that in his speech to the Yearly Kos convention, when Warner discussed Iraq, he did not use the line that he used the previous weekend at the Democratic state party convention in Manchester N.H.: “Going out (of Iraq) without a plan is just as bad as going in without a plan.”

A Warner aide said the line was omitted because the Las Vegas speech was edited for length.

Warner does say in his speeches that the United States should give the Iraqi government only “months, not years” to impose order on the country and implies a prompt withdrawal of U.S. forces if Iraqi leaders fail to do that.

The Kos crowd remained silent when Warner said “we are all glad” to have seen al Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed last week by a U.S. air strike.

The crowd also sat silently during the part of Warner’s speech in which he discussed the threat of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

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