Gilmore, Warner disagree sharply at debate

ROANOKE — Former governors Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner found a new topic to disagree sharply about in their Senate-race debate Friday night after Congress passed the Wall Street bailout bill.

Gilmore called the bill “a travesty for the United States of America” that means inflation and higher taxes await taxpayers. Gilmore, the Republican candidate to succeed retiring Sen. John Warner, said he would have voted against the bailout.

Warner said he would have voted for the bill because, although it wasn’t a perfect answer to the financial crisis, an answer of some sort was essential.

“We didn’t have the luxury of waiting” to design a bill that might have avoided tax breaks inserted in the bailout that Gilmore singled out as pork, Warner said.

More job losses were imminent, Warner said after the government reported earlier Friday that employers cut 159,000 jobs in September.

Warner, a Democrat, also said the bailout received bipartisan support from Sen. Warner, R-Va., Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., and both presidential candidates, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain.

Gilmore, who has been lagging far behind Warner in polls and also in fundraising, said Warner received almost $3 million from financiers and corporate lobbyists who stand to gain from the bailout.

Gilmore said he was “opposed to asking America’s hard-working families to cover the bets of Wall Street high rollers.”

When a panel of interviewers asked the candidates what areas of federal spending they would cut in attempts to balance the budget after the bailout, neither was specific.

Gilmore cited his record as governor of reducing car taxes by 70 percent, and Warner said he slowed down the state’s Medicaid payments along with temporarily closing some Department of Motor Vehicles offices to save money.

The debate was the third between Warner and Gilmore, and the first to be televised statewide. It was sponsored by WSLS 10, and held in the soon-to-open Taubman Museum of Art.

Both debaters were aggressive, often talking over each other and pushing past the time limits with their answers.

Questions from interviewers touched on Warner’s and Gilmore’s records as governor, their positions on energy and drilling, immigration, the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and an Iraq-war timeline for withdrawal.

Most of the topics had been hashed out in earlier debates.

Gilmore again insisted that when he left office as governor in 2002, he left a balanced budget for Warner to manage. State law required the balanced budget, he said.

Warner said Gilmore used “budget gimmicks” to balance the document and he actually inherited a revenue shortfall of more than $1 million, with a transportation department in more disarray than any other part of Virginia’s government.

Gilmore said his administration accomplished two major construction projects on Northern Virginia roads; Warner said Virginia almost lost $50 million of federal dollars because one of them was mismanaged.

Gilmore repeatedly steered the debate back to the bailout, replying to a question about Congressional earmark funding by listing interest groups that get tax breaks in the financial rescue package.

“Listen to some of them — Puerto Rican rum producers, wooden-arrow producers, Hollywood — everything was put in this bill to buy votes to get it passed,” Gilmore said.

Warner compared the bailout to the budget Gilmore left for him. “You pushed off the budget shortfalls” on his new administration, Warner said.

Warner, who earned a fortune in early days of the cell phone business, said he has the business expertise to make sure that when taxpayer dollars are used to bail out troubled mortgages, they will be acquiring securities whose worth can be restored and taxpayers made whole again.

“I’ve had some experience cleaning up fiscal messes,” Warner said.

Gilmore said the bailout amounted to buying up bad debt.

“Nobody that reads a balance sheet would do that,” Gilmore said.

“This was a bad and wrong thing that happened to the American taxpayer” and will lead to larger budget deficits, a weaker dollar and inflation, he said.

“The tax man will come, I assure you,” Gilmore said.