Sampling the diaries about Mark Warner's performance at YearlyKos I must say I'm astonished at the reaction to him (I couldn't go because I just stared a new job after 2 months of unemployment). Sure I can respect a person who says, "As a hardcore progressive I perfer a more liberal candidate -- Russ Finegold is my guy." but many are bashing Warner for being things he most certainly is not and applying limus tests that they don't seem to be holding others too. The stupidest by far was one poster who said he was a Democratic version of George Bush. Wrong. Really wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.
I grew up in Northern Virginia and call it my home, so I've had a front seat to Warner's rise to prominence.
First off I don't know why everyone keeps harping on the DLC thing. Hell the DLC tried to claim Senator Obama as one of their own. Compare Warner to Phil Bredesen of Tennessee and you'll see a Democrat who really sold the working class and poor down the river. "Membership" in the DLC isn't a deal breaker for me -- rather Leibermanesque behavior is!
Warner went up against a veto-proof GOP majority in the statehouse to get VA's financial house in order and preserve vital state services its citizens wanted to keep. Warner also tried (but sadly failed) to prevent the bigoted anti-gay bill from getting passed and tried to veto the worst it, knowing that while it was impossible to pervent it all from becoming law, there was a chance that some GOP moderates would support leaving out the worst of the bill.
People are also really harping on his foreign policy stances. Think about it for a minute though -- we shouldn't be electing a President based upon how angry they are about Bush's fuckups. Instead we should be electing a president based upon their ability to fix what's already happened because sadly we don't have a magic time machine to go back and warn Sandra Day O'Conner in December 2000 about how bad Bush will turn out to be.
I do believe that Warner in his term as Governor of Virginia demonstrated an ability to shift gears when the "facts on the ground" changed. To my ear Warner's foreign policy stances stake out a middle ground that isn't "neo-con" but "wishy-washy" because the situations belie easy answers. There is quite a spread in viewpoints on foriegn policy even on this very website, let alone the entirety of the Democratic primary voters. I'd rather vote for a guy who will be open to consulting a wide circle of viewpoints and changing his mind when the situation warrents it.
Many are dangerously niave when it comes to Iran and Venezuela. Both have countries for better or worse have bad relations to the US right now and are threatening to use oil as an economic weapon, mainly IMO because of the current administration. Even after Bush leaves office the damage will have to be repaired. Neither country will magically be singing Kumbaya with us the day Bush leaves.
At least with Pakistan the despot in power "gets" the danger in the Middle East and in a worst case will be kept in check by India.
And finally Mark Warner is not George W. Bush. He grew up in a modest middle class family, getting into college not by family connections but by his brains. He didn't have daddy's friends to set him up in business -- instead he had friend's couches to sleep on while staked his career on a wild hunch that became the billion dollar company called Nextel.
The Mark Warner of today is pretty much that guy who was sleeping on his college buddies' couches. He's not the candidate who you'd most like to have a beer with -- he's the candidate who would most like to have a beer with you. He knows what it is like to flying without a net as so much of the middle class is today. He knows about the struggles of the rural south as NAFTA causes jobs and hope to disappear.
So please guys don't let ideological litmus tests get in the way of deciding the best guy for fix the mess we're in. Instead we need to be looking for the guy who is best equiped to fix that mess. Maybe it is Mark Warner, maybe not but right now I'm not going to turn away any of those wanting to be the one to rescue us from Bush just yet...