Marriage amendment – a lose-lose-lose situation?

It’s politics to some people – the debate over a proposed amendment to the Virginia Constitution that would prohibit gays and lesbians from being able to enter into a state-recognized marriage or civil union.

For those whose lives would be impacted directly by the much-talked-about change to the oldest Bill of Rights in the world, though, it’s about more than vote totals on Election Day – a lot more.

“These bans are not just gay-marriage bans – they’re bans on gay marriage and civil unions. And that’s a very big problem for gay couples. We don’t have gay marriage now – except in Massachusetts. And I really don’t think we have much of a prospect of gay marriage anywhere except Massachusetts and maybe New Jersey. But a majority of the public – 60 percent of the public – supports either gay marriage or civil unions. What these amendments are doing, under the guise of banning gay marriage, they are in fact banning the most popular compromise proposal. It’s not gay people’s first choice – but civil unions do a lot of what we need, most of what we need, and in a second-choice world, that solves a lot of our problems,” said Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution scholar and author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.

Rauch in his book suggests that it is not just gays and lesbians who lose out when marriage and civil-union bans like the kind on the ballot in Virginia are passed.

“You’ve got these gay couples out there, many of them have children, and you want these people to have stable, productive lives – particularly if they’ve got children. And marriage is the single most important stabilizing, well-being-enhancing institution that we know of. So unless your plan is to make gay people magically go away, or expect us to go back into the closet, marriage is actually a conservative proposition for gay people. That’s one of the great ironies of the gay-marriage movement – that this is, instead of flouting the rules and sexual liberation and anything goes, this is a movement very much back in the direction of family and traditional structures. Gay people want to be part of all that,” Rauch told The Augusta Free Press.

“These relationships are not going to go away,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College, the director of research at the Chicago-based Council on Contemporary Families and the author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.

“Whatever you think of them, alternatives to traditional marriage are out of the closet – and they’re going to stay that way,” Coontz told the AFP.

“You have 20 percent of gay and lesbian couples raising kids today – either kids that they’ve brought from previous relationships or have had themselves or have adopted. You have people incurring long-term obligations to each other. It’s in the interest of the state to make sure that a person who wants to keep an obligation to somebody else is able to do so – is able to take care of them, to take them home from the hospital, that sort of thing,” Coontz said.

“It is also the interest of the state that if people do make long-term obligations that they can’t just walk away from them without an orderly set of rules. I would say that one of the best arguments for same-sex marriage is that they don’t do relationships any better than heterosexuals. So they need to be held accountable – if they have been raising a kid together, or have pooled their resources, just as heterosexual couples are, to get through the day-to-day grind,” Coontz said.

It is a compelling argument, at least at first glance – that society would actually be better served by allowing gays and lesbians to marry or enter into a civil union than by going in the other direction and prohibiting them from doing so.

“What they’re doing is taking away the safety valve of these amendments by claiming to be banning gay marriage, but in fact doing much more than that. And Virginia is the perfect example of that – because its amendment goes far beyond gay marriage and could affect domestic-violence laws that could impact heterosexuals as well,” Rauch said.

This could very well be at the heart of the movement that seems to be afoot that has seen support for the passage of the amendment in Virginia dwindling in recent weeks – to 53 percent in a Washington Post survey released two weeks ago and 52 percent in a Mason-Dixon survey released last week.

“It is surprising that the polling numbers show that it is so close – particularly given the wide margins by which marriage amendments passed in 2004. There were 13 different states in which there were such referenda, and the margins were huge in those cases,” said Mark Rozell, a political-science professor at George Mason University.

The lowest pro-amendment vote percentage of the 13 measures on the ballot in 2004 was the 58.6 percent margin in Michigan.

Ten of the 13 passed with at least 65 percent of the vote.

“It may be a function of the wording of the amendment – and that the opposition has done a good job of communicating that there are difficulties in the wording of the amendment in that it will be much more broadly sweeping than the proponents are suggesting,” Rozell told the AFP.

It might just be the case, then, that conservatives who have been pushing for these amendments will be among the biggest losers on Election Day – even if they get a majority of the voters to cast their lots in favor of the passage of the amendment.

“I think it’s a moral defeat for amendment supporters if it doesn’t pass by a wide margin,” said Quentin Kidd, a political-science professor at Christopher Newport University.

“There are going to be stories that compare Virginia with other states that aren’t considered as conservative socially as Virginia – and those stories are going to say, Look, it passed in Virginia by such a small margin. And at this point, I think that there’s a chance that it won’t pass. But it’s a moral defeat if it doesn’t pass by a large margin,” Kidd told the AFP.

Amendment proponents like Dean Welty, the executive director of the Harrisonburg-based Valley Family Forum, aren’t focused on the politics scoreboard – and Welty, for one, makes it clear that he sees that nothing but trouble would come from legalizing gay marriage.

“How on earth can you claim to be strengthening the institution of marriage when you redefine it into meaninglessness? It’s impossible. To include other relationships renders marriage itself without meaning,” Welty told the AFP.

“We have a very clear standard – we, the people who support defining marriage as being between one man and one woman. We have two foundations for that standard. One is sheer common sense. You look at the physiology of a man and a woman, and you understand that that is what marriage is all about – one man and one woman for the safety and protection of our children. The second argument for those of us who believe that God is the creator, and that is that God designed marriage from the beginning to be between male and female to multiply and replenish the earth. That’s what marriage is all about – for the safety and protection and welfare of our children,” Welty said.

“We don’t think you can help the institution of marriage by essentially ending it,” said Ed Vitagliano, a spokesman for the Tupelo, Miss.,-based American Family Association.

“Our belief is that the underlying argument for the legalization of same-sex marriage is the same argument that basically would eventually or could eventually end the institution of marriage as we know it – because it changes the focus of marriage from something that is rooted in biology to something that is simply rooted in the preference of those who participate in it,” Vitagliano told the AFP.

“When you say that marriage is all about love, and so two people who love each other should be able to marry, no matter what their sexual orientation, you open the door to polygamy, for example. I know that’s been maybe an overused argument, but I think it is really to the point – that it’s arbitrary to limit marriage to two people if you simply base it on the emotions and the love of the people participating in it,” Vitagliano said.

“Once you do that, you’ve basically said that marriage can’t be limited in any way according to number – and so you’ve essentially ended the institution of marriage,” Vitagliano said.

“We can’t see how same-sex marriage can stabilize that institution if we believe in the end that it would end it,” Vitagliano said.

Coontz counters that the concept of marriage that conservatives seem to want to preserve has long since passed from the realm of being.

“For thousands of years, marriage was not an idyllic relationship between two individuals – a man and a woman. The most common marriage through history was one man, many women. For thousands of years, marriage was about property, political power, economic power, and it was also about men’s authority over women,” Coontz said.

“It was only 200 years ago that we decided that marriage should be about love – that two individuals should have the right to choose who they marry on the basis of who they love. It was only 100 years ago that we said that men shouldn’t control women’s property or have the right to beat them or imprison them. And incidentally, when the first married women’s property act was passed, people predicted that that would be the death of marriage.
“There were two major changes in the nature of marriage in the last 50 years that really opened this whole question up,” Coontz said. “First of all, there were advances in birth control so that people can be married and choose not to have kids – and second was assisted reproduction, so that even if you’re sterile, biologically incapable of having kids, you can have kids. These sorts of things led gays and lesbians to say, Well, if marriage isn’t about procreation, but is about love, why doesn’t that apply to us? If you can have childless marriages, if people who can’t have children together can still marry and get kids anyway, and if marriage doesn’t involve strict gender roles between a man who does one thing and a woman who does another thing, well, then, we ought to have the right to it,” Coontz said.

“It’s important to disabuse people of the notion that somehow if you roll back gay marriage, then heterosexual marriage would go back to some largely mythical past,” Coontz said.

“There’s a certain magical thinking that if you pass these laws you can make everything go back to some ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ version of family life that really wasn’t very accurate in the first place,” Coontz said.

“Marriage is already in trouble because of the high divorce rate and the growing acceptance of cohabitation,” Welty responds. “We have a sick man here – and opening that sick man up to all kinds of new arrangements would deal it, I think, a devastating blow. And when I say new arrangements, we’re not just talking about same-sex marriage. Somebody has to have a standard for marriage. There has to be a standard. Is it one man, one woman? Can it be expanded to include people of the same gender? If so, can’t it also be expanded to include people who are already married to allow them to enter into bigamous and polygamous relationships? And if it can be expanded that far, can’t it include adult-child relationships?”

“It’s important to remember this – it’s unhealthy for a culture to have cohabitation, whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual,” Vitagliano said. “We believe that God has ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman because of the fact that only one man and one woman can have a child. And so marriage becomes related to family and children – and I think that the social science is pretty clear that cohabitating couples are more likely to divorce, that cohabiting couples provide a less stable environment for children, because they’re more prone to breakup.

“And so the fact that cohabiting couples may exist outside the institution of marriage is a concern to us – as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage. We think it is deleterious for children. The culture ought to be encouraging people to marry – and of course, homosexuals will say, Well, we can’t. But our view is that that homosexuality is a lifestyle that people ought to be trying to leave – notwithstanding the fact that some people can’t or won’t,” Vitagliano said.

“That doesn’t change the fact that marriage is intended, has been intended, and across history has always been between a man and a woman, with few exceptions. And to tinker with that is to run the risk of huge, albeit at this point unforeseen, consequences. And that’s a risk we don’t think the culture should take,” Vitagliano said.

More and more gays and lesbians are chafing at the idea that they are risks not worth taking – and are beginning to take more risks of their own. According to a study by the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California-Los Angeles, the number of gay and lesbian couples in the United States increased 30 percent between 2000 and 2005 – with Virginia’s growth rate of 43 percent beating that by nearly half.

Study author Gary Gates said the numbers could suggest that gays and lesbians across Virginia and across the country are inclining themselves to be more open and up front about who they are.

“The data suggests that in this climate where you have all this political activity, that this in some ways has caused many gay people to be more open about their lives,” said Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute.

“Our findings suggest that in the time period between 2000 and 2005, which was arguably a hostile political climate for gay people, the result was that more people were willing to disclose the nature of their relationships at least on a government form. I can’t prove that that means that they’re going to be more likely to vote or vote differently or any of that – but to the extent that you think that that signals other kinds of behaviors, I think that’s a reasonable assertion that we’re making,” Gates told the AFP.

So maybe the idea that everybody will come out worse for the wear from the marriage-amendment debate is something that is not entirely accurate.

“What’s happening in Virginia now – with ballot measures being put out there that would ban marriage for same-sex couples, and obviously there have been intense debates about the lives of gay and lesbian people, and particularly gay and lesbian couples – is that many people are seeing their lives portrayed now for the first time on television and in the newspaper and on the radio. And they’re saying to themselves, Hey, this time they’re talking about me – and they’re thinking, Look, now is the time for me to be more open about who I am, and it’s time for me to participate in this debate,” Gates said.

“This could be the silver lining in this,” Gates said.

(Published 10-30-06)

Marriage amendment rally draws supporters, foes

Story by Chris Graham

It began to get out of hand when the group of people carrying a banner proclaiming that “Love Is Not Wrong” came face to face with another group carrying signs advocating that Virginians “Vote Yes 4 Marriage.”

Or was it when the self-avowed atheist started chanting satirical anti-gay slurs and jabbing a homemade placard reading “God Hates Fags – Don’t Let ‘Em Get Hitched” into the air?

Whenever it turned out to be this way, what had started as a pro-marriage amendment rally on the steps of the Rockingham County Courthouse in downtown Harrisonburg at high noon today ended up being quite the spectacle.

“It’s pretty strange,” said Linda Royster, an Augusta County woman who was married to her longtime partner, Barbara Kinsman, in a ceremony held on the street corner in front of the courthouse as the pro-marriage amendment rally got going in the background.

As a who’s who of Republican politicians – including U.S. Sen. George Allen, who is engaged in a bitter re-election battle with Democrat Jim Webb – spoke several yards away, Royster and Kinsman, who have been together for more than 20 years, tied the knot in an informal ceremony attended by a large gathering of family and friends.

“We’re here to be with our friends, celebrating our love and love for our friends and their love for us,” Royster told The Augusta Free Press. “We need, I think, constantly to stand up and tell people that we are a loving people, that we are no threat to anybody, and that we are in peace in our relationships and our friendships and our love for one another.”

Up on the courthouse steps, John Sloop, the minister at First Presbyterian Church in Harrisonburg, was opening the marriage amendment rally.

“At our September board meeting, our church leaders voted to encourage our people to support the marriage amendment, because we don’t think it’s a matter of left or right, or some political agenda, but right or wrong on God’s agenda,” Sloop said.

“We believe that our country was founded on Judeo-Christian Biblical principles. The Supreme Court of our country, if you walk through the Supreme Court, there are all kinds of illusions to Scripture and to the Ten Commandments carved into the marble there. That’s our history – and we stand against those who try to redefine what we have always understood to be marriage between a man and a woman,” Sloop said.

“I wish that we didn’t have to amend the Constitution. But against this kind of agenda, we have to take a stand. I formerly served a church in Georgia. I think 70 percent of the people of Georgia voted for traditional marriage, and one activist judge overturned the will of 70 percent of the people. That’s what we’re standing against,” Sloop told the AFP after the ceremony.

Also taking part in the rally was Luis Padilla, a Rockingham County man who was fired from his human-resources job at Cargill for posting a message on the back window of his pickup truck encouraging people to vote in favor of the amendment – before being reinstated to his job this week.

“I got my job back because of people – because people know my story, and it was up to them to decide what was justice and what was injustice,” said Padilla, whose story made national headlines.

“It was people who made a difference – calling to Cargill, sending e-mails. It made me feel great – because I am not alone. I have friends to support me. I have this community to support me,” Padilla said.

Padilla said he has no regrets about doing what he did – even at the risk of his job.

“I’m passionate about marriage and the marriage amendment – because I believe that God founded marriage between a man and a woman,” Padilla told the AFP.

Just as passionate about life are Royster and Kinsman – both of whom wonder what their life together will be like if the marriage amendment passes next month.

“It is very frightening to us,” Royster said. “I have no idea whether documents that we have carefully put together to provide for our health care and our financial affairs will continue to be effective. We just don’t know. We’re both blessed in having wonderful families that will support us – but it is very scary to think that all of the things that we have planned together for so long are going to be illegal in the state of Virginia.”

Royster said she thinks amendment supporters are “good people, Christian people, loving people.”
“But they believe somehow that we are evil – and that’s just wrong,” Royster said. “One of the things that I was very clear about wanting to do here was to be just us – Barbara, a little old lady in tennis shoes, 77 years old, Linda. We’re just people who want to live our lives in peace with our neighbors. And that’s all we’re asking here.”

“I think they don’t realize the second part of the amendment and what it will do,” Kinsman told the AFP. “I think they just focus on how so they’re so offended at gay people getting married that they don’t look on to the fact that they may be hurt or their relatives may be hurt if there are two people living together who are not married.

“I fail to see how two people getting married, no matter what sex, hurts them,” Kinsman said. “They say that all the time, but I have never heard them tell me how it hurts them. Family is the most important thing to us. We’ve brought up children, grandchildren, we volunteer, we pay our taxes. I don’t know how we hurt them.”

Webb, Warner draw Dems in Valley rally

Story by Chris Graham

The big news in Harrisonburg today wasn’t that former presidential hopeful Mark Warner was in town with Senate nominee Jim Webb.

It was that an event organized by Valley Democrats drew more than 400 people on a weekday afternoon.

“I said to Jim on the way in here, I’ve had an awful lot of political events in the Shenandoah Valley and Harrisonburg, and I cannot think of a crowd this size anytime in more than a decade,” said Warner, who toured Southwest and Western Virginia today with Webb.

Included in their tour was a stop at Court Square Theater in downtown Harrisonburg – which is not exactly what most political observers would consider Democrat-friendly territory.

But it was this afternoon – and the national media, including Fox News Channel, which broadcast live from downtown Harrisonburg, was on hand to see it for themselves.

“The entire country is watching this race,” said Webb, a former Republican who served as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, who characterized his challenge to GOP incumbent George Allen as “very much a referendum on the Bush administration.”

“If you go back to when I started this campaign, there was actually one story that said if you took George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and put them in a blender, you would come up with George Allen,” Webb said. “My opponent was being viewed as the natural successor to George W. Bush. He has been with the president – well, Mark said 96 percent of the time, we’ve been saying 97 percent of the time, it’s tempting to say 98 percent of the time, and let him deny it. But he’s been with the president on almost every single issue.

“The people who are in this administration and in the leadership of the Republican Party know that a vote that will unseat George Allen is a vote that is bringing discredit to the failed leadership of this administration,” Webb said.

Warner, who announced earlier this month that he will not seek the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination, despite indications that he was one of the top two or three contenders for the party nod at this early stage in the nomination process, said Webb will serve as an “independent voice” in Washington.

“I can’t think of anything more important than making sure that we have a United States senator who will go to Washington and be the kind of independent voice – the kind of voice that if the president’s right, he’ll side with him, but if the president’s wrong, will have the courage to step up and say no, we want to take our country in a different direction. And that is Jim Webb,” Warner said.

Referring to recent polls that have the Webb-Allen race basically neck-and-neck, Warner promised that Virginia Democrats “are going to surprise some folks.”

“You remember five years ago, folks said, Well, you know, a Democrat can’t win statewide in Virginia anymore. And we proved them wrong. A year ago, people would say, Well, Warner, you somehow slipped in, but there’s no way Virginia’s going to vote for another Democratic governor. Well, we’ve got a great governor in Tim Kaine right now. At the beginning of this year, the press and the pundits said, Well, let’s look at where there might be competitive Senate races. No one thought Virginia would be on that list. Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen. The most recent polling data that came out, from the L.A. Times poll, that just came out yesterday, shows Jim Webb ahead,” Warner said.

“We’ve got 12 days – and you’re going to see stuff coming over the airwaves from the other side. You’re not going to believe what they’re going to say, what kind of mud they’re going to sling,” Warner said.

“It’s your job – particularly here in the Valley, particularly in Southside and Southwest – you’ve got to be the advocates. You’ve got to be willing to talk to your friends and your neighbors, the folks you work with, go to church with, go to school with, to make them realize what’s at stake. It’s our country. If we want to make sure that this country rises up and meets the challenges, we’ve got to do our part,” Warner said.

Next on the Mark Warner agenda: Is former governor, White House candidate ready to again be a player on Virginia political scene?

Mark Warner made it a point to tell Virginia politics reporters covering the final year of his term as governor of the Old Dominion that he really felt he was hitting his stride in the job – and while the focus of their editors seemed to be on whether or not he would enter the 2008 presidential race, they shouldn’t rule out the possibility that they might see his name on another ballot a year later.

With Warner now out of the running for the White House, the commentariat is abuzz with speculation about what Warner’s next move might be – and whether he may be thinking about another four years in the governor’s mansion.

“That is the real story. There are a couple of things that we all know – anyone who pays attention to this know that he really liked doing what he was doing in the governor’s mansion, and he really felt like he was doing good things. He was trying to make sure that state government provided the services that it had to provide to citizens in the right way – and he felt like he was doing good. We also know that he felt like he didn’t have enough time – because in the first two years of his administration, he was trying to deal with budget crises, and so he felt like he only had the last two years to try to get anything accomplished,” Christopher Newport University political-science professor Quentin Kidd told The Augusta Free Press.“I think he not only enjoyed being governor, I think he was very good at it,” said Steve Jarding, a Harvard University public-policy professor who served as the campaign manager on Warner’s successful 2001 gubernatorial effort.

Warner was prohibited by the Virginia Constitution from running for re-election in 2005.

“He saw that he could accomplish some things, and he saw that he could do it in a bipartisan way. He wasn’t intimidated by the fact that the Democrats weren’t in control of the legislature. He has to look at that and say that in four years, we actually, as difficult as it was, got some things done. But there are still some agenda items that Mark didn’t have a chance to address and try to accomplish because of the limit of being able to serve only one term that he would still like to try to accomplish. So I definitely think that running for governor would be in the cards again – and if he ran, he would clearly be the frontrunner,” Jarding told the AFP.

Warner, of course, had been considered, if not the frontrunner, then certainly one of the top two or three contenders for the ’08 Democratic Party presidential nomination. But after a 10-month exploratory campaign in which he made public appearances in 28 states and five foreign countries, Warner decided against making a formal run for the nomination.

“Late last year, I said to Lisa and my girls, ‘Let’s go down this path and make a decision around Election Day.’ But there were hiring decisions and people who’ve put their lives on hold waiting to join this effort. So about a month ago, I told my family and people who know me best that I would make a final decision after Columbus Day weekend, which I was spending with my family. After 67 trips to 28 states and five foreign countries, I have made that decision. I have decided not to run for president,” Warner said in the Oct. 12 news conference in Richmond in which he made public his decision.

“This past weekend, my family and I went to Connecticut to celebrate my dad’s 81st birthday, and then we took my oldest daughter Madison to start looking at colleges. I know these moments are never going to come again. This weekend made clear what I’d been thinking about for many weeks – that while politically this appears to be the right time for me to take the plunge, at this point, I want to have a real life. And while the chance may never come again, I shouldn’t move forward unless I’m willing to put everything else in my life on the back burner,” Warner told reporters at the news conference.

The announcement had the attention of political observers up and down the line.

“I can understand and appreciate the difficult decision of my good friend, Mark Warner,” said Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who served as lieutenant governor under Warner. “I’ve known Mark for more than 25 years, beginning as law-school classmates. During that time, my respect and confidence in his judgment, business skill, and political instincts have only grown.

“I was proud to work with Mark to produce results for Virginia, and while I looked forward to campaigning on his behalf across the nation, I respect his decision today. Our country is better for his willingness to engage in public service, and I look forward to supporting Mark and his family in whatever decisions they ultimately make about the future,” Kaine said in a statement.

“I’ve seen the governor a couple of times over the course of the past year. He’d spent more time in other states than he had in Virginia. In fact, I talked to him in Buena Vista on Labor Day, and he told me he’d gone on 60-some-odd trips out of state since he’d left the governor’s mansion. That’s just a brutal schedule to keep,” Attorney General Bob McDonnell said.

“I guess he felt like he gave it a good-faith effort for nine or 10 months as well as giving it time to assess the personal sacrifices that he would have to make to run – and just decided that he just wasn’t going to do it. I think the governor gave his reasons for that decision, and I certainly respect his decision,” McDonnell, a Republican, told the AFP.

“It was a surprise,” Mount Solon Republican Sen. Emmett Hanger said. “I felt that the way he was positioned right now – his business interests are very strong, so I knew that he didn’t have to spend time with his business in order to make a living right now – it appeared to me that he really had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going ahead and at least engaging in an exploratory effort.

“The reason that he cited for not wanting to go forward was family – and I can certainly identify with that. Certainly, at state-level politics, I’ve had some of the same issues in the past. In fact, I had that kind of decision to make when I was approached about running for Congress once when my children were younger. So I can appreciate that,” Hanger told the AFP.

“It was a total surprise to me,” Weyers Cave Republican Del. Steve Landes told the AFP. “I can understand his reasoning from a family standpoint – but there could be other reasons than that. One of them could be the time commitment. But it could be that the Democratic Party, I don’t think, is as much a centrist organization as some people might want it to be – and I think Mark is more of a centrist, and maybe he also found nationwide that the party is more to the left than he is and is comfortable with.

“Mark is not as partisan as Gov. Kaine is showing himself to be. But when you’re running for president, that’s probably the most partisan thing you can do – especially when you’re going through the nomination process. And unfortunately, we’re seeing it this year with the campaigns across the country, it’s a very partisan battle – and maybe he just encountered that, and that could have been a deterrent to him moving forward,” said Landes, the chair of the Republican caucus in the Virginia House of Delegates.

“I’ve been fortunate to call Mark Warner my friend and my governor, and I was looking forward to calling him Mr. President. But I’m the father of two young children, and I know family comes first. I greatly respect the decision he made – he showed true family values,” Alexandria Democratic Del. Brian Moran said in a statement.

“I was hoping that Mark Warner would take our success in Virginia to a national stage that so badly needs his results-oriented message. Our country is hungry for the bipartisan leadership he brought to Virginia, and we are in desperate need of his hard work to put our country back on the right track. I was looking forward to being his first and most active volunteer and supporter,” said Moran, the chair of the Democratic caucus in the Virginia House of Delegates.

“It was a surprise to me. I, like everyone else, thought that since the guy was flying to Iowa and New Hampshire 60-plus times since leaving the governor’s mansion, he was seriously interested in running for president,” Kidd said. “I always thought he was raising money a little bit more slowly than I would have thought he needed to do – but I was comparing him to Hillary Clinton, who has $60 million right now. Compared to John Edwards and others, he was probably as competitive in fund raising as anybody other than Hillary.

“He was positioning himself to be sort of the anti-Hillary – the moderate who could appeal to Southerners, the moderate on social issues, the nonpolarizing candidate. He was going to have to compete with John Edwards and Evan Bayh and people like that to be that – but I think he had as good a shot as anyone at that because he was so successful in Virginia,” Kidd said.

There is a bit of disagreement on that point about Warner being a viable contender for the Democratic nomination in ’08, actually. Even as the second or third top contender in the field, he would have faced an uphill battle – and a steep one at that – to unseat Clinton, a United States senator from New York and former First Lady, from her perch atop the nomination field.

“Clearly, it’s going to be hard for anyone to overcome all the advantages that Hillary Clinton has at this point – but there is a strong argument for having a more moderate candidate, someone from the South, a governor, and Mark Warner was uniquely the best on-paper candidate for what the Democratic Party needs at the national level in order to be competitive in the Electoral College,” George Mason University political-science professor Mark Rozell said.

“The other side of it is whether primary voters in the Democratic Party would take those factors more seriously into consideration – particularly voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the polling data suggested that he was barely above an asterisk at this point,” Rozell told the AFP.

Also complicating things for Warner is that Warner and Clinton were seen by some observers to be competing for something of the same base inside the Democratic Party – the same base that propelled Bill Clinton, like Warner a former Southern governor, to the White House in 1992.

“If you look at the Democratic Party field, Hillary Clinton is running to the center, and John Kerry is running to the left of her – and then you’ve got a few other people deciding if they want to run.. Warner would have had to take on Hillary directly – and that didn’t seem plausible,” James Madison University political-science professor Bob Roberts said.

“He was way, way down in the polls in terms of name recognition – Kerry’s ahead of him, Hillary’s ahead of him, Edwards is ahead of him. So he didn’t seem viable unless he was willing to spend a lot of money and a lot of time with a fairly low chance of getting the nomination,” Roberts told the AFP.

Warner insisted at his Oct. 12 news conference that his decision was not made “based on whether I would win or lose.”

“I can say with complete conviction that – 15 months out from the first nomination contests – I feel we would have had as good a shot to be successful as any potential candidate in the field,” Warner said.

“As I have traveled the country, I have been amazed at what pent-up positive energy for change exists. In my speeches, I always acknowledge that what disappoints me most about this administration in Washington is that with all the challenges we face – and the tragedies we have experienced, from 9-11 to Katrina – that the president has never rallied the American people to come together, to step up, to ask Americans to be part of the solution,” Warner said.

“I think a number of our party’s potential candidates understand that. I think, in fact, we have a strong field. A field of good people. I think they’re all hearing what I heard: that Americans are ready to do their part to get our country fixed,” Warner said.

Virginia Tech political-science professor Bob Denton is among those who feel that Warner had as good a shot as anybody to win the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination and the general election that autumn. Denton is also among those who are wondering aloud if there isn’t more to Warner’s decision than meets the eye.

“He was widely seen as being in the top five, with some seeing him as high as the top two or three – with Hillary Clinton always being in the top spot. He was receiving good press, certainly was being taken seriously. He was receiving national coverage. So for it to be this sudden, and at this time – why not after the election, why not after the first of the year – it was very surprising,” Denton said.

“Something about this announcement, the way it was done, the timing of it, it doesn’t pass the smell test, as you journalists say. His staffers were blown away, had no idea – it caught them by surprise. Even the ones closest to him – they did not suspect that there was any doubt,” Denton said.

“The timing is very strange,” Denton told the AFP.

Jarding, for his part, takes Warner at his word as far as the reasons that he cited for deciding against making a run at the presidency.

“This was something that he looked at very hard,” Jarding said. “He’s someone who’s a very detailed person. He was putting together a strong organization. I think he understood the money that it took, and he did all the preliminary work. So in that sense, it was a surprise. But from a personal standpoint, not so much.

“Mark has three teen-age girls at home, and he’s been on the go pretty strong – there was a year and a half where he was running for governor, and then four years as governor, and then the last year running around the country. I suspect that at some point you come here, you see your girls, and you say, Whoa, they’re getting away from me, they’re getting older, and I haven’t spent enough time with them. So in that sense, it’s not surprising,” Jarding said.

“There’s never a good age to be gone as a parent – but I think the teen-age years are probably the toughest. These are very genuine issues for families – so he had to weigh that with Lisa and the girls. I’m sure that they ultimately told him, If you want to do it, do it. But I think he stepped back and said, I’m 51 years old, and I’ve got plenty of things I can still do, including running for national office if I choose. I’m just not going to do it now and keep my options open for down the road,” Jarding said.

Kidd also takes Warner at his word – and thinks that Warner’s decision to bow out of the race for family reasons is “emblematic of the exact kind of people that I think Americans want in public office.”

“I think his value system is what people want the value system of elected officials to be. The irony is that the very reason he steps out is the very reason why I think a lot of people would like him and want him to be the party’s nominee and possibly the president – and that is that family is important to him, his daughters are important to him, his wife is important to him, and he could still have a life and not be president. I think a lot of people want that – because so many politicians seem to try to live their entire life to be elected to the next highest office, and they don’t seem to have a core center,” Kidd said.

“Everyone who knows Mark Warner has always known that he’s a family man. When he was governor, he would go on these goofy vacations that normal people go on – mountain biking in a national park and breaking his wrist falling over the handlebars on his bike. That’s the sort of thing that normal people do. That wasn’t poll-tested. He was there because that’s where his family wanted to go, and in his busy schedule, that was what he could do in the little bit of time that he had,” Kidd said.
“I’m sure there were strategic questions there – like, Can I raise enough money, what are my odds of winning? But in the end, I don’t think those drove his decision. I think what drove his decision is, Do I have the support of my family? And how important is this in relation to my family?” Kidd said.

The question on everyone’s mind relative to Mark Warner and his political future is – what’s next on the Mark Warner agenda? Warner hinted that he has something in mind at his Oct. 12 news conference, but certainly left the door open for speculation as to what that might be.

“My decision does not in any way diminish my desire to be active in getting our country fixed. It doesn’t mean that I won’t run for public office again,” Warner said.

“I want to serve, whether in elective office or in some other way. I’m still excited about the possibilities for the future,” Warner said.

“He’s definitely going to come back into politics in one capacity or another – he’s probably just buying himself a year or two to think about his next move,” Rozell said.

“I think the key ingredient in this is that by national political standards, he’s a relatively young guy – in his early 50s. He has plenty of time. He’s younger than Ronald Reagan was when Reagan was elected to public office for the first time,” Rozell said.

Roberts thinks it might not be too long before we see Warner back on the national stage.

“Dropping out of the presidential race now puts him in a position of becoming the heir apparent for the vice-presidential nomination – because he doesn’t irritate anyone in the nomination campaign. Typically in a primary battle, you have to be mean to somebody – which means you don’t get the chance at running for VP,” Roberts said.

Rozell agrees with that assessment.

“I don’t think he has harmed at all his prospects for being a vice-presidential nominee,” Rozell said. “It might even make it more likely that because he’s not campaigning for the presidency against a potential nominee such as Hillary Clinton that he could be an attractive candidate to balance the ticket. And he would seem to be the best person to balance a ticket headed by, for example, a Hillary Clinton.”

“At this point, if his motivation is what he said, it seems to me that he would still be very viable as a ticketmate,” Denton said. “Coming from what some people think as a red state, a Southern governor with experience, without a lot of political baggage, very popular, there’s really no downside to having him on the ticket – especially if the Democrats are going to use what we might call a Southern strategy.”

There is also talk that Warner could have his sights set on the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican John Warner.

“I think the blinking this time about running against Allen is because there’s still not certainty about whether this is John Warner’s last hurrah or not,” Denton said, referring to Mark Warner’s decision to forego a possible run at the suddenly vulnerable George Allen in this fall’s Senate election.

Which brings us back to the idea that another run for governor could be in the offing in 2009.

“One thing that we have to pay attention to is that he said he was going to help Jim Webb get elected. If he does that, he was already the 800-pound gorilla of Virginia politics, but if he’s able to pull Webb into the victory column, and he’s able to, say, help some moderate Democrats in the exurbs of Northern Virginia knock off some conservative Republicans, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he were to decide to run for governor again. I think that’s more likely than the Senate – because a Senate run would do what a presidential run was going to do to him in terms of taking him away from his family more than governor,” Kidd said.

Warner’s name on the ’09 ticket would no doubt be considered a blessing by Virginia Democrats – who have to be wondering right now whom they might be able to run against likely Republican gubernatorial contenders Bill Bolling, the sitting lieutenant governor, Bob McDonnell, the sitting attorney general, and Jim Gilmore, a former governor whose name has surfaced in recent months as a possible entrant in the ’09 race.

“The Democrats don’t have anyone in a high-enough office right now to go on for the statehouse. Right now, they would either have to go into Congress, or they would have to look at somebody like (Bath County senator and 2005 attorney-general-race loser) Creigh Deeds. But none of those have the same kind of name recognition as a Bolling or McDonnell or Gilmore,” Roberts said.

Should Warner run for the top job in state government again and win, he would be only the second Virginia governor to be elected by the voters to a second term in the state’s storied history. That fact in and of itself should be an indication of how tough it can be even for a popular governor like Warner to come back four years after leaving office.

“Four years is an awful long time. The fact that he might have left office with high rankings bears no relationship to what people might think four years later when issues and circumstances have changed,” McDonnell said.

“Virginians will have to make their decisions on his record if he were to run for some other office. But in my dealings with Mark Warner, he’s a straight-shooter, he’s a very smart guy, he was an accomplished businessman, and he did a fair job as governor,” McDonnell said.

“He left the governor’s office on a very high note, but being governor sometimes is dependent on circumstances around you – and those circumstances were not good for him initially. We were in the throes of a recession when he came in, revenues were not there. He had to work with the General Assembly to make some tough cuts,” Hanger said.

“He had some challenges there – but he was willing to jump on board with the tax reform, and I think that most people understood that that allowed the state to firm up its financial structure. And then of course as he was leaving office, more prosperous times returned, and there was additional money available at the end of his term to do some things that we had hoped that we would be able to do that we couldn’t afford to do prior to that – restructuring mental health and providing monies to localities to upgrade wastewater-treatment plants, stuff that’s not terribly exciting, but things in those areas that need to be done.
“The bottom line was he left office on a very high note. Certainly, he would be viewed as a steady hand if he were to come back in again,” Hanger said.

“I think a lot depends on the Kaine administration – and how well they do or don’t do. And they’ve had a rocky start,” Landes said.

“The thing I think is going to come back to really be a question for both Mark and the current governor is promising to do one thing and then doing something else. I don’t always have to agree with someone, but I like someone to be consistent and to do what they say they’re going to do. Mark got off easy from the standpoint that he raised taxes, and the debate is still going on about whether we had enough revenue or not. Obviously, the state coffers are overflowing at this point – and were after that tax increase. About a third of that was from the tax increase, and the rest was from the economy growing. I think we will go back to the debate about taxation – about what’s appropriate and what’s not,” Landes said.

“People seem to have forgotten that you’ve had two Democrats who have said during their campaigns that they will not raise taxes, and then they went and wanted to raise taxes. I think that’s a problem that they’re going to have from a political standpoint,” Landes said.

“Mark would be a formidable candidate to run against – there’s no doubt about that. He’s much more bipartisan or nonpartisan than Gov. Kaine has been. But it will have been four years – and people’s minds are short when it comes to politics. And things change very quickly,” Landes said.

(Published 10-23-06)

Warner bows out of ’08 nomination field

Former Virginia governor Mark Warner was being talked about as a top contender for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

To say that his announcement in Richmond today that he will not seek the nomination was a surprise, then, is a pretty good understatement.

“It was definitely a surprise. This is one of the last things that you’d expect to come out of any kind of ’08 presidential talk,” said Matt Smyth, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Warner cited personal and family reasons for his decision to stay out of the ’08 fray.

“About a month ago, I told my family and people who know me best that I would make a final decision after Columbus Day weekend, which I was spending with my family. After 67 trips to 28 states and five foreign countries, I have made that decision. I have decided not to run for president,” Warner said in a statement e-mailed to supporters that he also read to reporters at this morning’s news conference.

“This past weekend, my family and I went to Connecticut to celebrate my dad’s 81st birthday, and then we took my oldest daughter, Madison, to start looking at colleges. I know these moments are never going to come again. This weekend made clear what I’d been thinking about for many weeks – that while politically this appears to be the right time for me to take the plunge, at this point, I want to have a real life,” Warner said.

Warner said the decision had nothing to do with considerations of his place in the ’08 nomination field.

“This is not a choice that was made based on whether I would win or lose. I can say with complete conviction that – 15 months out from the first nomination contests – I feel we would have had as good a shot to be successful as any potential candidate in the field,” Warner said.

Smyth said the talk of Warner being a top contender was serious.

“Warner had been as successful as any of the talked-about possible candidates who were exploring a run in ’08 – and had in fact raised as much money as anybody outside of Hillary Clinton among the Democrats. He was clearly among party insiders one of the favorites,” Smyth told The Augusta Free Press.

The Warner move would seem to be a benefit to New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, long considered to be the favorite for the 2008 Democratic Party nod. Clinton, the wife of former president Bill Clinton, might have had to compete with Warner for support among party moderates – and several former Clintonistas who had signaled their support for Warner, who like Bill Clinton is a former Southern governor and fiscal moderate.”

“Clearly, the frontrunner in Democratic circles right now is Hillary Clinton,” Smyth said. “She is getting about 40 percent support among likely primary participants. You can win a primary, you can win a nomination, with 40 percent, you can also lose it with 40 percent.

“I think the more moderate wing of the party, if they were looking to sort of coalesce around an anti-Hillary, so to speak, were looking at people like Mark Warner, like Evan Bayh, like Bill Richardson. Warner had sort of grown to be the top name among those moderates over the last few months – especially because he had been so successful in fund raising. The events that he had put on had been very well received in the primary states and the caucus states,” Smyth said.
“This could cause Democrats to scramble a little bit – but then, it’s still 2006. There’s still a lot of time. But this does throw a bit of wrench in things,” Smyth said.

Warner appears to realize that the window of opportunity for someone like him to be able to run for the White House can close in an instant.

“While the chance may never come again, I shouldn’t move forward unless I’m willing to put everything else in my life on the back burner. This has been a difficult decision, but for me, it’s the right decision,” Warner said.

Significantly, he did not rule out a run at another elected office in the near future – speculation is already centering on the possibility that Warner could join Clinton on the 2008 Democratic Party national ticket or make a run at John Warner’s U.S. Senate seat in 2008 or a run at a second term as Virginia governor in 2009.

“My decision does not in any way diminish my desire to be active in getting our country fixed. It doesn’t mean that I won’t run for public office again. I want to serve, whether in elective office or in some other way. I’m still excited about the possibilities for the future,” Warner said.

“He’s probably got one of the highest outgoing approval ratings of any governor in Virginia – so I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all, especially when it’s an open-seat race every time because of the one-term limit,” Smyth said. “And if John Warner, who seems to be ageless, decides to retire in 2008, I think that would be a natural fit, if that was something that he wanted.

“I doubt that we would see him running for Congress or for something else like that. I think Senate and governor are the two natural fits – and the two that there could be an opening for in the next two years,” Smyth said.

(Published 10-12-06)

Senate candidates on Iraq

The Top Story by Chris Graham

Jim Webb says that the George Allen campaign has tried to paint a picture of the two Senate candidates’ positions on the war in Iraq that has them basically agreeing with each other on what needs to be done.

The Democrat Webb wonders how his Republican opponent can even begin to do that – given the widely diverging views that the candidates have on the Iraq war.

“Our foreign policy is in total disarray. The beginning of fixing that is to get our combat troops out of Iraq. And we can do that with the right leadership,” Webb said at a campaign event in Staunton last month.

“These people have blinders on. The mantra used to be, Cut and run, cut and run, cut and run. Now it’s, Stay the course, stay the course, stay the course. As Colin Powell said the other day, in one of his rare breaks with the administration, Every course has a finish line. And they aren’t defining the finish line. And it’s going to be up to us to define a finish line that will allow us to get our combat presence out of Iraq and at the same time improve over time the stability of the region. And that can be done – that can be done with the right kind of leadership,” Webb said.

Later, in an interview with reporters, Webb spelled out what he means by the phrase “right kind of leadership.”

“The first thing we need is a clear announcement of United States policy that we have no desire for a long-term occupation of Iraq. And they have not said that clearly and unequivocally. That would calm down the insurgency, I think,” Webb told The Augusta Free Press.

“The second thing that we need to do is to get an international consortium of the leaders of countries that are in that region and have historical and cultural ties with Iraq to get them to overtly become involved in a diplomatic solution. There’s only so much you can do with military force. That is the step that we’ve been needing to take for the last two years. And until we do that, I don’t think we’re going to be able to solve it,” Webb said.

Allen laid out his own vision for Iraq during a debate with Webb on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month that is clearly different from what Webb thinks needs to be done.

“Staying the course is meaning that we don’t tuck tail and run, that we don’t retreat, that we don’t surrender,” Allen said. “This is a central battle front in the war on terror, and it’s not just the president or the vice president or me saying that, that’s what Al-Qaeda says, because Al-Qaeda’s designs and their goals are to have a caliphate, Islamic caliphate from, from Indonesia to Spain, with the capital being in Iraq, an oil-rich area.

“We cannot allow Iraq, which – where Al-Qaeda was and is now – we cannot allow them to have that haven for terrorist activity,” Allen said.

Webb said his chief criticism of Republicans with regard to Iraq is that they “have no plan” for going about doing what they say they want to do.

“And anyone who tries to advance some sort of a solution, they just try to knock down the specifics of one plan rather than the approach,” Webb said.

“Once you can convene that international conference, get the parties to the table, you can start getting our conventional troops out of there relatively soon,” Webb said.

“And getting all of them together, there is historical precedent. For instance, right after 1991, Gulf War I, we convened a conference in Madrid where they got the leaders of the countries together to talk about the future of the region – and actually after the invasion of Afghanistan, when we were starting to talk about how to put the Afghani government together, we got all the countries around that region, including India, Pakistan and Iran, to the table to try to work on a formula. So I don’t think this is an enormously difficult thing for the United States to do. We just need the kind of leadership that will put the energy in it and do it,” Webb said.