Warner brings his blunt talk to Seattle
By JOEL CONNELLY
P-I COLUMNIST
Seven weeks before being elected governor of Virginia in 2001, Mark Warner stood on the roof of his campaign headquarters in Alexandria and watched the Pentagon burn.
"It still burns me up when I hear Karl Rove accuse Democrats of having a 'pre-9/11 worldview,' " reflected Warner, who is exploring a presidential bid, during an interview in Seattle on Monday.
Warner, 51, left office in January, basking in the fact that 150,000 jobs were created in the Old Dominion -- in Washington, D.C., suburbs as well as in small rural towns -- under his watch.
The governor's 80 percent approval ratings boosted a fellow Democrat, Tim Kaine, to succeed him in a Republican-leaning state. It started buzz that Warner is best equipped to emerge as the alternative-to-Hillary candidate in the Democrats' 2008 race.
A co-founder of the cellular phone company that became Nextel, Warner sounds more like a driven, analytical business or foundation leader than a hail-fellow politician of either party.
He faults President Bush for intellectual laziness, in not asking tough questions about Iraq and failing to show much curiosity about a world economy that is turning at Internet speed.
"The job of an executive is not just to go along with subordinates," he said. "It is to ask the next question. It is to find a hole in the plan. It is to keep questioning until you are satisfied.
"You have to be relentless. And you must also be willing to hear bad news. It's true even if you have the policy right. This is a gang that can't shoot straight when it comes to execution."
Warner draws bipartisan inspiration.
He lauds the unceasing pressure that President Kennedy put on subordinates with the solution that avoided nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis. He credits President Reagan with implementing "real changes" in his administration after the Iran-Contra crisis enveloped ideologues in his administration.
In Warner's view, bad judgment by ideologues has left America with a list of bad options in Iraq. Iraq was to have become "a shining beacon in the Middle East," a dream fast dying.
"A failed Iraqi state right now is not in America's interests," Warner said. "This war, at the beginning, did not have anything to do with al-Qaida. Now, Iraq could be a base for al-Qaida. At the beginning, our intervention had nothing to do with Iranian expansionism. Now, a failed Iraqi state could serve Iranian expansionism."
What to do? Warner would give Iraq's feuding politicians "weeks, not months" to form a viable government. They would get "months, not years," to show progress at achieving order.
"At least we should not leave Iraq a significantly more destabilizing force than before we went in," he added.
Warner is more anxious to talk economics and jobs.
He confronted a ballooning shortfall in Virginia, and cut $858 million out of the state budget. After that, however, he persuaded a Republican-run legislature to push through a tax reform plan that significantly boosted spending on education.
He is proud to have brought tech jobs to rural towns, and broadband capacity to southern Virginia counties.
Looking at national policy, Warner notes that the federal government spends about $2 billion a year on energy research and development -- but $7.1 billion a month on the Iraq war.
"We're 16th in the world in broadband development in this country: This is the country that invented the Internet," Warner said. "We seem to have no strategy at all. We should be moving aggressively to tell small towns, 'Your kid does not need to move to a big city to find a job.'
"We have not built a know ledge economy in this country. Small-town America, what hope has it gotten in the last 20 years? Back to the last two years of Clinton, we've accumulated years of lack of focus, of lack of attention to competitive policy."
In his days of seeding telecommunications firms, Warner came to Seattle to deal with the McCaw cellular phone empire -- a bastion of local Republicanism.
He was on a whirlwind schedule Monday, meeting and greeting Democrats, huddling with King County Executive Ron Sims, and raising money for his political committee.
And Tuesday, there was a morning trip to Microsoft -- for presidential aspirants, our political equivalent of a pilgrimage to Lourdes.
"I have Sacramento and San Jose this week, and Israel next week," he joked. "It is like the longest road show in the world."
Virginia was home to several of America's early, visionary presidents.
In the past half-century, it has veered from the "massive resistance" policy of Sen. Harry Byrd toward school desegregation to the election of an African American, Douglas Wilder, as governor.
Wilder made a brief, disorganized bid for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination.
Another Virginian touted as White House timber, Sen. Charles Robb, saw his career mortally damaged by attendance at cocaine parties and controversy over how he spent time with former Miss Virginia Tai Collins alone in a hotel room. (An affair, she alleged. A rubdown, he claimed.)
Two more formidable Virginians are potential contenders in the wide-open 2008 race. Republican Sen. George Allen Jr. has national ambitions, but must first get re-elected.
Of Warner, Democratic strategist Frank Greer observed yesterday: "He is competent and knows how to succeed and how to actually accomplish things."
P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com.
seattlepi.nwsource.com |
