RESTON, Va. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Mark Warner defended his reputation as a centrist Monday in the face of attacks from Republican challenger Ed Gillespie, who argued at a town-hall forum that the voting record of the Virginia Democrat reflects lockstep support for President Obama.
The candidate forum — not a debate, as the two Senate candidates made consecutive appearances rather than squaring off directly — was sponsored by the Northern Virginia Technology Council, an influential group that has represented a swing voting bloc in Virginia, a business community in northern Virginia that sometimes backs Democrats and sometimes backs Republicans.
Monday’s forum delved into nitty-gritty details about cybersecurity policy, immigrations visas for skilled workers and other issue important to the tech community, and the candidates generally expressed similar views on those issues.
But the broader question turned on who would better represent the centrist, pragmatic band of the political spectrum. Gillespie said Warner’s record as senator does not match his rhetoric or his bipartisan work as governor, and continued to criticize Warner for voting with President Obama 97 percent of the time on Senate floor votes, according to statistics kept by CQ Weekly, a Washington news service.
“He’s not been the senator he said he would be,” Gillespie told the crowd of about 200 tech executives. “If he’d been a senator like he’d been a governor, I probably wouldn’t be standing here … Unfortunately, Gov. Warner wouldn’t recognize Sen. Warner.”
Warner, for his part, said the 97-percent statistic is misleading. He said it primarily counts Warner’s votes to approve Obama’s nominations to serve in a variety of federal posts. The big picture, he said, is reflected by the fact that he has received more endorsements from Republican officials this year than he did when he first ran for the Senate in 2008, and his high-profile work with a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Six to strike an overarching budget deal that included entitlement reform and increased tax revenue.
He said the Senate needs more people willing to “make both sides mad” and criticized Gillespie as a longtime GOP operative.
“He calls himself a partisan warrior,” Warner said of Gillespie. “If you believe that’s what Washington needs, then he ought to be your candidate.”
