DENVER | Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner would love it if Democrats and Republicans would move beyond partisan bickering, but this week’s Democratic National Convention and next week’s Republican convention appear to offer little reprieve.
Mr. Warner, a U.S. Senate candidate, said both major parties need to tone down their partisanship, an opinion reflected in his keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention. And in a wide-ranging interview Wednesday with The Washington Times, he also suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama simplify his message.
With Republican leaders staging protests at the Democratic convention this week, and plans by Democrats to rally outside the Republican National Convention next week, Mr. Warner said both sides need to cut it out.
“If not, the country’s up the creek,” Mr. Warner said Wednesday. “I don’t think the American public trusts either party enough to give them a blank check.”
Mr. Warner emphasized his entrepreneurial successes and failures in his Tuesday keynote speech to the Democrats and preached a platform based on results, and post-partisanship.
“This election isn’t about liberal versus conservative. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about the future versus the past,” he said in his speech.
He also, by his own admission, left out much of the partisan “red meat” party regulars look for in a keynote address.
“The only criticism I’ve heard, and it’s been pretty much exclusively from the punditry, is that it wasn’t partisan enough,” he said. “Guilty as charged.”
Mr. Warner, a moderate, pro-business Democrat, also cautioned that Mr. Obama will have to beef up his campaign operation in southern Virginia and other Republican-leaning areas where Mr. Warner has done well, to continue on the state’s trend toward the Democrats.
“I think he still has some work to do in the rural parts of the state,” said Mr. Warner, who campaigned heavily in his victorious 2001 gubernatorial race in the traditionally conservative parts of southern and western Virginia often neglected by Democrats running for statewide office. “The good news is it’s not like John McCain has closed the deal with those folks.”
Mr. Obama will have to do what Bill Clinton did when running for president in 1992, exemplified in his message “it’s the economy, stupid”: simplify economic issues to a handful of key points.
“What are those two or three takeaways?” he asked. “How are you going to deal with gas prices? Or how you going to deal with making sure the jobs are there? It’s got to be more than just the rhetoric it’s got to be some kind of rhetoric that captures people’s imagination.”
Mr. Warner has continued his appeal to rural areas in his campaign for the U.S. Senate against former Gov. James S. Gilmore III, a Republican. If elected, Mr. Warner would join Sen. Jim Webb and Gov. Tim Kaine in giving Democrats a monopoly of the top statewide offices.
Like other successful Virginia Democrats, he has maintained a moderate pro-business tone, regardless of the audience. He hesitated to include a line in his keynote speech Tuesday that Democrats should embrace ideas regardless of what party supports them.
“I think there was some trepidation,” Mr. Warner said. “It wasn’t met with thundering applause; there was 20 percent applause. I thought there was some chance of getting booed down on that.”
Democrats looking to win the governor’s office in 2009, including state Delegate Brian Moran and state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, need to focus on producing results, Mr. Warner said.
“I think that the Democrats’ recent success in Virginia has been about showing they can actually govern,” he said.
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