OPINION:
You could be forgiven if you do not believe Sen. Mark R. Warner’s promise last week that, if reelected in November, it will be his final term in the Senate.
Call us skeptical, because we have heard similar talk about term limits before from the liberal Virginia Democrat.
When he first ran for the Senate, albeit unsuccessfully, Mr. Warner announced at a candidates’ debate on July 20, 1996: “I don’t want to be a lifelong politician. My view of public service is something you do for part of your life, not all of your life. That’s why I’ve said that if I’m elected to the U.S. Senate, I will serve no more than two terms.”
That was then, and this is now.
Mr. Warner’s second bid for the Senate was successful in 2008, so if he had kept his campaign promise, he would have stepped aside in 2020 at the end of his second term. He did not. Instead, he ran for a third term and is now asking Virginia voters for a fourth six-year term.
Apparently, Mr. Warner does want to be a lifelong politician after all. He is now 71 and would be 78 at the end of another term in January 2033.
“I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’m so grateful to everybody,” Mr. Warner said at a July 22 campaign stop in Staunton, according to The Daily Press of Newport News. “I’m here to ask you to support me for my last campaign.”
Mr. Warner told his Staunton audience that it was time to move on and to bring younger people into elective office — but then he completely contradicted himself.
“But I can tell you this much: I sure as hell was not going to quit while Donald Trump was sitting down the street,” he said.
That nastily partisan statement about the Republican president in turn belied another of Mr. Warner’s claims dating back to the beginning of his Senate career.
Mr. Warner has long masqueraded as a moderate, early on characterizing himself as “a bipartisan, radical centrist.” He has been nothing of the sort as a senator.
The centimillionaire telecommunications mogul and venture capitalist came to Washington in the same year that fellow liberal Democrat Barack Obama became president. Virginia Republicans, citing data compiled by CQ Weekly, claimed in 2014, during Mr. Warner’s first reelection bid, that he reflexively voted with Mr. Obama 97% of the time.
Mr. Warner would likely have lost — that is, had term limits been imposed upon him by Virginia voters — that year if a third-party Republican-turned-Libertarian spoiler had not siphoned off far more than enough votes from the Republican nominee to hand the race to the Democrat.
Mr. Warner continued his rigid party-line voting record during the four years of Democrat Joseph R. Biden’s wretched far-left presidency.
His lockstep liberal record in the Senate could explain why, despite having a net worth estimated at $215 million, Mr. Warner has escaped the obloquy from his party’s far left and socialist wings of being branded as a “1 percenter” and an “oligarch.”
Mr. Warner initially faced token opposition in the Democratic primary this year, but he is unopposed in the Aug. 4 party primaries. He will face the winner of a three-way Republican contest pitting retired Maj. Gen. Bert Mizusawa, who served 36 years in the Army; Marine Reserve Lt. Col. David Williams; and Kim Farington, a retired certified public accountant for the federal government.
Whichever Republican is nominated to take on Mr. Warner will have an uphill slog, in no small part because of Mr. Warner’s enormous personal wealth. The Republican National Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee will need to pony up big time to avoid a repeat of 2020, when Republican nominee Daniel Gade was outspent 4-to-1, and Mr. Warner won by 12 percentage points.
That said, Virginia voters in November should impose on Mr. Warner the term limits he will not impose upon himself.
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