ROANOKE | Far behind in the polls and desperate for a break in his U.S. Senate campaign, Republican James S. Gilmore III denounced Friday’s federal bailout of the financial industry during the race’s final debate and relentlessly attacked Democrat Mark Warner for supporting it.
“It rewards people with $700 billion of taxpayer money and sends that money into the hands of Wall Street high rollers who in fact took risks and should not have taken those risks,” Mr. Gilmore said during the debate, held at the Taubman Museum of Art.
Combative throughout the televised and hourlong confrontation, Mr. Gilmore, 58, put Mr. Warner, 53, on the defensive several times, frequently cutting into the Democrat’s rebuttals. Mr. Warner explained that while he disliked the bill and the pork spending inserted into it, he would have voted for it to avert a failing credit market, millions of job losses and global economic catastrophe.
“I would have supported this package, not because it’s a perfect package, but too often in politics, the perfect can be the enemy of the good,” Mr. Warner said, noting that the bailout had bipartisan support.
Mr. Warner, who succeeded Mr. Gilmore as governor, hit back at the Republican by linking the bailout to the state government’s fiscal meltdown he inherited from Mr. Gilmore during the last economic downturn in 2001.
“You can’t simply push off problems the way you tried to do when you pushed off the budget shortfalls we inherited when I became governor of Virginia,” Mr. Warner said.
Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Warner are vying to replace retiring Sen. John W. Warner, a Republican not related to the candidate.
Unlike the leisurely pace of their previous two debates, this one often was visceral. Looking for the magic-bullet issue to revive his faltering, poorly funded campaign, Mr. Gilmore steered the debate back to the deeply unpopular financial rescue plan Congress had approved just hours earlier.
He was looking for a game-changing issue, and wagered that the bailout would provide it.
“You don’t go and vote in the Senate, as Mark Warner said he would have done, to have taken 700 billion of the taxpayers’ dollars and put it into these high rollers on Wall Street,” Mr. Gilmore said.
“Furthermore, it will not do to simply say that, ’Well, John McCain felt this way and President Bush felt that way and Nancy Pelosi felt that way,’” he said.
Hours before the debate began, a new poll showed Mr. Gilmore still far behind Mr. Warner. The Mason-Dixon Polling and Research Inc. survey showed 57 percent of voters favored Mr. Warner to 31 percent who backed Mr. Gilmore. The phone poll, conducted Monday through Wednesday of 625 registered voters, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
Through June, Mr. Warner’s campaign had raised nearly $10 million in contributions to Mr. Gilmore’s $1.2 million. New federal fundraising figures are due within two weeks.
In a steel-and-glass modernistic art museum absent an audience other than a handful of VIPs, the two former governors competed with end-of-the-workweek parties, movies and dining and high school football for attention on the worst night of the week for television viewing.
Eight stations across Virginia televised the confrontation live, but none was in the state’s most populous and politically potent region, Northern Virginia.
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