NYT profile of Mark Warner.
In today’s New York Times, contributor Matt Bai has a lengthy (over 8,500 words), insightful profile of former Virginia governor Mark Warner and the position that he’s found himself in as he seeks the Democratic nomination for the 2008 presidential elections.
Entitled “The Fallback,” Bai’s thesis is that Warner is positioned to be the second choice for the presidency, immediately behind Senator Hillary Clinton. Sen. Clinton has all the benefits of being an incumbent vice president. Rain makers and the biggest donors are largely unwilling to support anybody else, in part because they fear being locked out of the race if she gets the nomination, as they assume she will. As a wildly popular southern governor, Warner has become everybody’s second choice, which is a fine position to be in. But it’s a particularly good one for him, because, unlike the other candidates, Warner is sitting on $200M in personal wealth. He can ignore the big donors and pay his own way. If Hillary blinks, he’ll be there as the #1 guy. However, Warner’s not ready. He remains unpolished, and his views are not those of Democratic elites. But the race is a long way off, and he’s got time to clean things up and to convince the decision-makers to come around.
Or so that’s Bai’s view of things. There’s not much that I’d disagree with there, though it’s worth adding that Warner has come an extremely long way just in the past couple of years.
One bit of the article had me silently cheering:
Warner may have glimpsed a piece of his future when he attended a dinner of wealthy Democrats last summer at the Bay Area home of Mark Buell and his wife, Susie Tompkins Buell, well-connected contributors and close friends of the Clintons. Warner made some introductory comments about “the Virginia story,” but the first several questions were not about taxes or schools or health care, but about gay marriage (which he’s against), the death penalty (which he’s for) and abortion (he’s in favor of parental notification but vetoed a bill banning all late-term abortions). Warner thought his liberal guests would be interested in his policies to improve Virginia schools and raise the standard of living in rural areas; instead, it seemed to him, they thought that they understood poverty and race in an intellectual way that he, as a red-state governor, could not. Like a lot of politicians, Warner can be snappish when he feels he isn’t being heard, and the dialogue quickly grew testy.
At the end of the evening, according to people who were there, as some of the guests walked Warner to his car, one woman vowed to educate him on abortion rights. That was all he could take. “This is why America hates Democrats,” a frustrated Warner blurted out before driving away. (Still piqued a month later, Warner, speaking to The Los Angeles Times, summarized the attitude of the assembled guests about their plans to save the country: “You little Virginia Democrat, how can you understand the great opportunities we have?”)
Warner seems unconcerned about the damage done by such comments. “If somebody wants a purist, I’m not the guy,” he told me.
That’s why I like Mark Warner, and that’s why I think a majority of American voters will like Mark Warner.
There’s another aspect of the article that captures something that I’ve given a lot of thought to in the past couple of years. In mid-2005 we saw the netroots lashing out against Tim Kaine. Narrow-minded Democrats found that various aspects of Kaine’s beliefs didn’t fit their own worldview, and condemned him for it, declaring that accepting Kilgore would surely be better than “selling out” with Kaine. (The October Steve Gilliard incident is a perfect example of this, with Markos having only made it worse. Witnessing this really bothered me; I lost a lot of faith in Markos after this, and I haven’t looked at Gilliard’s site since.) This is easy to say for a progressive safely ensconced in Oregon or California, but it demonstrates an ignorance of political realities that frightens me. So many bloggers have virtually no political experience, and they reach an audience that far exceeds what their abilities should permit in any rational knowledge economy. They’re like baby Supermen who haven’t grown into their powers just yet, smashing cars and tossing kittens over the horizon just because they can. On this, Bai writes:
The political argument most often and most forcefully proffered online has very little to do with ideology, per se, and everything to do with partisanship. Rather than arguing for any particular agenda, what MoveOn.org and the bloggers demand from Democratic politicians is unwavering opposition to what they see as a corrupt Republican majority and to the supposed capitulation of Washington Democrats. Clinton encounters ambivalence online because she is a fixture of official Washington, and because she continues to emphasize her cooperation with like-minded Republicans. The party’s online activists don’t want to hear about the compromises it takes to govern; they want someone who will derail the Republican agenda, even if he (or she) has to strap himself to the tracks with two fistfuls of dynamite to do it.
Tim Kaine gained the support of Democrats in Virginia because the Virginia political blogosphere is unusually savvy and, in part, because the blogosphere was so much smaller a year ago. The American Democratic blogosphere cannot be tamed by Mark Warner, but he will need to have a serious strategy planned to influence the discussion to favor him and his particular brand of politics. Warner is not going to “strap himself to the tracks with two fistfuls of dynamite,” and there will be thousands of baby Supermen shaking their tiny fists at his refusal. Here’s hoping his staff has a plan to deal with that.
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