An Endorsement: For the U.S. Senate, Mark Warner’s the One

For three decades, John Warner has served the commonwealth of Virginia and America with distinction in the U.S. Senate. For Virginians and his colleagues, he is the epitome of grace, charm and dignity, the very picture of a public servant.

The race to succeed Virginia’s retiring senior senator pits two former governors — Democrat Mark Warner and Republican Jim Gilmore — against each other. Mark Warner is far and away the better candidate to follow in John Warner’s footsteps, and The News & Advance editorial board is enthusiastic in its support of his candidacy.

The campaign has evolved into a referendum of sorts on the administrations of the two men; Gilmore was elected governor in 1997, followed by Warner in 2001.

Gilmore, often irascible and ascerbic, won a hard-fought election against then-Lt. Gov. Don Beyer; his signature campaign plank was his “No Car Tax” pledge. He made good on his promise to abolish the personal property tax on vehicles, pushing it through the General Assembly soon after his inauguration.

The phased-in repeal of the tax, which paid for a vast array of local government services, was supposed to be covered 100 percent by yearly infusions of state money. That never happened, for a variety of reasons, and Virginia’s fiscal outlook became increasingly gloomy as the 1990s ended.

Gilmore and his political advisers never took into account that the amount of money the state would owe localities would increase yearly as the value of the vehicles exempted from the tax would rise. (Thousands of new-car sales a year … what a novel concept.)

Republican leaders in the Assembly, fearful of the long-term outlook for the state, resisted the total abolition of the tax; Gilmore fought back; and the two sides came to loggerheads in more than one session of the Legislature.

Politics came into play in the final 18 months of the Gilmore administration when his advisers projected a continued economic expansion in the state, even as the tech bubble burst in spring 2000, sending the nation into recession. It was all to keep the car tax repeal on track for full abolition.

The trouble is that it was political smoke and mirrors, for in reality, revenues to the state’s coffers had slowed dramatically as spending under Gilmore had increased exponentially.

It was up to Mark Warner to clean up the mess after his election in November 2001. He came into office and found a state that was in fiscal disarray. The budget, constitutionally required to be balanced, in reality was almost $4 billion out of whack. Economically, it was a scary time for government planners, following the economic slump after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on top of the tech bubble recession.

Yet Warner, working with both Democrats and Republicans in the Assembly, slowly restored fiscal sanity to Richmond. Instead of panicking, Warner saw opportunity … opportunity to streamline government services, combine purchasing, outsource information technology, rethink how government interacts with its citizens. And he worked with all folks of all political stripes to accomplish his goals.

Conservative Republicans such as John Chichester (the former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee), Vince Callahan (the former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee) and Lynchburg’s own former Del. Preston Bryant saw in Warner a leader they could work with and support.

Together, they managed to pull Virginia back from the fiscal brink, implementing new revenue streams to make for those lost under Gilmore, restoring truth-in-budgeting in state government and saving the state’s coveted AAA bond rating.

Throughout it all, Warner never sought the limelight, content in the knowledge that he and others were doing their best for the people of Virginia.

It’s that dedication to Virginia and her citizens that Warner will take to the U.S. Senate this January.

The first person in his family to graduate college (an undergraduate degree from George Washington University and a law degree from Harvard), he’s a self-made millionaire who got into the wireless telephone industry in its infancy in the 1980s.

Normally, someone with those accomplishments would be awfully proud of themselves; Warner, though, it the picture of humility. As a business executive, he was much more comfortable in a collaborative, rather than dictatorial, setting, and he took that management preference with him to the Executive Mansion.

He’s not a natural stump-speaker; anyone who’s seen him campaign would know that. He doesn’t speak in 30-second soundbites or snappy little slogans such as “No Car Tax” or “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.” He actually thinks about his positions.

He has a list of items he wants to work on: innovative health care initiatives, achievable energy goals, a rethinking of the way states and the federal government interact, increasing America’s global competitiveness. The list goes on.

And we think he’s just the man for the job, a statesman with a track record of bringing Republicans and Democrats together to find common ground on issues.

He’s what Virginia and the nation need in the United States Senate: a leader and a statesman, not a populist demagogue.