Republicans Are Scared To Death Of Mark Warner

[ruggerson]

From Michael Barone. Idiot rightwing savant.

The drumbeat is starting. They're already trying to portray Warner as disingenuous. The usual Republican line. Every Democrat is either a phony or a crazed ultra liberal.

Something tells me, people won't buy it about Warner.


http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/columns/barone_051109.htm

<snip>
The Virginia result also produces a loser and a winner in Democratic presidential politics. The loser is Hillary Rodham Clinton. That's because the winner is Mark Warner, who evidently has decided not to run against Sen. George Allen next year but has instead embarked on a candidate for president. There is something faux about Warner: He portrays himself as an entrepreneur who just happened to enter politics. The fact is that he is a guy who has been interested and involved in politics all his life, who won a lottery to get a cellphone license and then made a huge fortune off it, and then used the money he earned to run against Sen. John Warner in 1996 and to get himself elected governor of Virginia in 2001. (Not entirely a faux entrepreneur, I would concede: If I had won that lottery, I would probably have frittered away the business, whereas Warner had the competence to make it successful.) Warner evidently wants to run as the moderate candidate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, as a candidate who has shown that he can win in a state that voted for George W. Bush (and indeed every Republican presidential candidate starting with 1968). He won in 2001 and, running on his coattails, Tim Kaine won in 2005. Kaine's victory gives him a pretty strong argument against Clinton—and for that matter against the Republican nominee (could it be Allen?) in 2008. This was a big win for Mark Warner.

<snip>