Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner appears to be distancing himself from the loudest voices within his party protesting the spending and deficits in the budget proposed by the Obama White House.
MoveOn.org and other groups have targeted Warner, a freshman member of the Senate Budget Committee, and other fiscal moderates in an ad blitz seeking to pressure members of Congress to support Obama’s $3.55 trillion spending plan.
Others targeted by the push from liberal and labor groups — Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. and Bill Nelson, D-Fla. — are part of a group of Democratic budget hawks in the Senate that includes Warner.
In a recent letter to the president, Bayh, McCaskill, Nelson and others warned that the projections of red ink in the plan “threaten our recovery and the long-term economic health of this country.”
The voice of concern came after new estimates revealed that the president’s spending blueprint would lead to a $9.3 trillion deficit over the next decade.
Conspicuously absent from the signatories to the letter was Warner, a member of Bayh’s “moderate Dems working group” who built his political career on a message of fiscal sanity.
Warner’s spokesman, Kevin Hall, sought to dispel the notion that the working group was the Senate’s version of the “Blue Dog” Democrats, casting it as an “informal, fluid group of like-minded moderates.”
“People seem to think it’s some lockstep bloc of votes, dead-set against the White House or challenging the leadership, and it’s neither one of those,” Hall said.
Warner does, however, “have some heartburn over the deficits,” and successfully tagged on transparency measures to the budget in committee, Hall said. But Warner voted last week to send a modestly scaled back version of Obama’s original proposal to the Senate floor.
Obama’s spending plan has put Warner in an awkward position, said University of Richmond political science professor Dan Palazzolo, “because he wants to be supportive of the president, obviously, but at the same time, clearly there are issues with this budget.”
“He’s finding it difficult to be an extreme centrist,” Palazzolo said.
Bayh spokesman Brian Weiss said the working group, which meets every two weeks, “is unlikely to agree on all major issues before the Senate,” and was formed to be “constructive, not obstructive.”
