Sen. Mark Warner Pledged To Serve Just Two Terms. That Was 29 Years Ago.
Lucky us.
Democrat Senator and full-time whiner, Mark Warner, announced Tuesday that he’s running for a fourth term.
Sigh.
This 70-year-old multi-millionaire businessman has been sitting in the Senate (when he isn’t in his car making cringy videos about how much he hates Trump) since 2008.
Although he initially presented himself as a moderate “Blue Dog”Democrat, it wasn’t long before he revealed himself to be a partisan hack. Six years into his Senate career, during a dogfight over control of the Virginia State Senate, Warner jumped into the fray and nearly lost the next election.
In an October 2014 column headlined “So Long Mr. Above-It-all, Warner Is A Political Operative After All” I expressed my, ah, disappointment.
Just like that, it’s gone.
Sen. Mark Warner’s carefully crafted persona, that is. The bipartisan brand he relentlessly burnished from his earliest days in the Governor’s Mansion has now all but evaporated. So has his image as an ineffective, but guileless, U.S. senator whose specialty was reaching across the aisle.
Now that The Washington Post has revealed the extent to which Warner meddled in petty politics on behalf of desperate Virginia Democrats last spring, the senator’s I’m-above-politics aura has vanished.
“This undermines Mark Warner’s presentation of being a centrist,” said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a University of Mary Washington political scientist who told me Tuesday that the revelations may tighten the race between Warner and his challenger, Republican Ed Gillespie, but that Warner will likely win.
In case you missed it, The Post reported that Warner made a curious phone call in June to the son of state Sen. Phillip Puckett. The state senator was about to step down to avoid nepotism rules that barred his daughter from a full-time judgeship in Southwest Virginia. Puckett’s eventual resignation gave the Republicans control of the upper chamber of the General Assembly.
To dissuade Puckett, Warner reportedly discussed possible jobs for his daughter and may have dangled a federal judgeship.
All to keep Puckett in the Senate and to help shove through Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s agenda.
Of course, around the same time Warner was dialing Puckett’s number to convince him to stay put, Republicans were reportedly tantalizing the state senator with job offers of their own to hasten his departure.
Raw, ugly politics.
This level of grubby political interference isn’t what’s expected of U.S. senators, especially not of Warner.
Voters want the politicians they send to Washington to leave slimy statehouse score-keeping behind and devote themselves to broad issues of national importance: security, energy and immigration.
We now know Warner didn’t do that.
At Monday’s debate, Warner was prickly. Gone was the boyish, earnest Mark Warner of the past. In his place was a cranky pol who seemed offended when he was asked if he peddled jobs to a fellow Democrat’s daughter to keep Virginia’s Senate in Democratic hands.
The senator clumsily two-stepped around the issue. He tried to pass the phone call off as a conversation between old friends.
Next he insisted that no job offers were made. Warner conceded only that he “reached out” to the Puckett family, “brainstormed” and talked “possibilities.”
Semantics, senator.
“It certainly was not the senator’s finest hour,” said Farnsworth, noting that Virginians have long had unrealistic expectations for their elected officials, foolishly believing that politics as practiced in the Old Dominion is “cleaner” than elsewhere.
If nothing else, this past painful year has gone a long way toward disabusing naive Virginians of that notion.
“People looking for saints in politicians are going to be disappointed,” joked Farnsworth.
During the debate, Warner repeatedly dug deep into the Democratic playbook to link Gillespie to Grover Norquist, an anti-tax advocate who tries to get Republican candidates to sign no-tax pledges. For his part, Gillespie repeatedly went to the Republican playbook to link Warner to President Barack Obama.
No surprises there. That’s what politicians do.
In the end, that’s exactly what Warner didn’t want us to see: That he’s just another politician.
Ed Gillespie nearly beat Warner - losing by just .8% - in the closest Senate race of the 2014 cycle.
Warner first ran for the senate against John Warner in 1996. He won his first term in office in 2008, after one term as governor.
Here’s what Mark Warner had to say about how long he’d stay in office when he first campaigned in 1996 and lost to Sen. John Warner.
He’s just another political hack who doesn’t want to leave the Senatorial nursing home.
