IN 1998, on the day Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska dropped out of the 2000 Democratic presidential race, Steve Jarding got a call from Mark Warner, a wealthy Virginia politician looking to be governor. Jarding, 43, was Kerrey’s chief political strategist. Now Warner wanted him, though Jarding is from South Dakota and had never worked in an election in Virginia. The reason for Warner’s eagerness: Jarding specializes in helping Democratic candidates win in Republican states. And no state, not even Texas, has trended Republican more sharply in the past decade than Virginia. The Warner-Jarding alliance has worked wonders. Warner, who ran against GOP senator John Warner in 1996 as a conventional liberal, has undergone a transformation. He’s changed his position on guns, taxes, ending parole, welfare reform–and become a moderate. “Have I gotten more conservative as I’ve grown older?” he said in a televised debate with Mark Earley, his Republican opponent. “Probably. Don’t we all?” Warner’s shift to the right has put him in a strong position to be elected governor on November 6–this in a state where Republicans currently occupy all statewide offices, control both houses of the legislature, and hold the two U.S. Senate seats and 8 of 11 House seats, and where President Bush won easily last fall. A money advantage has aided Warner. He’s raised $12.4 million, about 30 percent more than Earley, with $800,000 coming from his personal fortune of $200 million (made in the cellular phone industry). But money isn’t the decisive factor. Warner’s methodical morphing into a different kind of Democrat is. One by one, Warner and Jarding have broken down the obstacles to statewide success for a Democrat. Jarding had done the same in Tom Daschle’s first Senate race in South Dakota in 1986 and in Bob Kerrey’s two successful Senate campaigns in Nebraska in 1988 and 1994. Virginia, however, has required more effort. The first problem was rural voters, who’d shifted massively to the GOP. Warner, 46, not only has made 40 visits to southwest Virginia, he’s sought to become culturally rural as well. He sponsors a NASCAR driver. He got a country music band to come up with a bluegrass song for his campaign. It won’t make the Top 40 charts, but it’s effective. “Mark Warner is ready to lead our commonwealth, / He’ll work for mountain people and economic health, / Get ready to shout it from the coal mines to the hills, / Here comes Mark Warner, the hero of the hills.” More important, Warner has courted the National Rifle Association, normally a no-no for Democrats. “I believe strongly in Second Amendment rights,” he says. And he wants to expand Project Exile, which provides quick prosecution of criminals who use guns and is touted by the NRA as an alternative to gun control. The NRA initially was neutral in the race, which amounted to a victory for Warner. But Earley was seeking a last-minute NRA endorsement. Next was the business community. Warner picked off a number of normally Republican business leaders and was endorsed by realtors and the Farm Bureau. Business backing, says Jarding, is an important “verifier” that Warner isn’t a liberal. He also recruited enough moderate Republicans, including former governor Linwood Holton, to form Virginians for Warner. And he has stayed away from hot-button “locating” issues like abortion rights and gun control. In past gubernatorial races, these issues simply located Democratic candidates in voters’ minds as liberals. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia says Warner has “run a Cadillac campaign.” In a backhanded tribute, a Republican official says Warner “has done a masterful job of fooling people.” But the Warner campaign has one drawback: He’s not identified with any issue or position. His support is wide but shallow. What most voters know about him is he’s a vaguely moderate fellow who passionately wants to be elected to statewide office. The good side of this for Warner is that Earley, the former state attorney general, has had difficulty finding a vulnerability to attack. Earley wasted the summer and didn’t find a message until September–after party officials dispatched Chris LaCivita, the political director of the National Senatorial Republican Committee, to run his campaign. The message, it turns out, is a hardy perennial for Republicans: taxes. In his transportation plan, Warner left an opening. The plan includes $900 million from a sales tax hike. But that increase would occur only if a referendum were passed by voters in northern Virginia, and the tax increase would apply only in that region. Some Republican legislators favor the referendum, but Earley says if elected governor, he’d block it. For his part, Warner says he won’t raise taxes. But if voters in northern Virginia want to do so, that’s a different story. He backs the referendum. “Mark,” he told Earley in a TV debate, “trust the voters.” Earley’s response: “You’re not looking for a referendum to raise taxes unless you want to raise taxes.” The trouble with Earley’s tax issue is it’s negative. Rather than concentrating on a striking new tax cut, as Republican Jim Gilmore did in winning the governor’s race in 1997, Earley chiefly warns about a tax increase if his opponent wins. Thus, it may not be a sweeping enough issue to grab voters. Jarding argues it’s not even a tax issue. “It’s a traffic issue,” he says, since the $900 million would go for new roads to ease traffic congestion. Earley, by the way, also advocates trimming the sales tax on food, but he failed to mention it in either of the televised debates with Warner. With voters distracted by the September 11 attacks and the war on terrorism, turnout is likely to be low. This gives Earley a shot at winning, if he can excite the GOP base. The key is getting President Bush to stump for him. Bush had planned a quick trip across the Potomac River to northern Virginia on September 19, but that was cancelled. “It has to be a series of events across the state and a day that will electrify the Republican base and independents,” says Sabato. Given the war, that may be asking for too much of Bush’s time. Plus, notes Earley, there’s a “security concern.” In Virginia, though, the biggest concern among Republicans is that Mark Warner may bring a decade of GOP domination to a halt. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard. October 29, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 7
