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Notable term for Gov. Warner

January 1, 2006 12:50 am

By CHELYEN DAVIS

RICHMOND--This time four years ago, Mark Warner was getting a rather nasty surprise.

Newly elected governor, he was discovering that the state's budget was far less healthy than he had believed.

A recession was beginning, budget cuts would be looming on his watch, Republicans dominated the legislature and were fighting him and each other.

He'd just spent a campaign promising to raise teacher salaries, spend more on the environment, finish eliminating the car tax, and not raise taxes.

Now there was no money for any of those things.

Fast-forward four years, as Warner is preparing to leave office next month.

By most reckonings--except for those who despised his tax package of 2004, which broke a campaign promise by raising taxes--he has had a remarkably successful term.

His approval ratings are consistently high, the state's budget is much healthier, Virginia's Department of Transportation is more efficient and reliable, and he was able to make some of the changes and investments he promised four years ago.

"It's been a very successful term. It's hard to describe it any other way," said University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato. "He came in at a tough time. There was no money. The Republicans had just taken a landslide in the legislature. Things didn't look good. But he worked through the problems and ended up triumphant. It's a storybook ending. I didn't see that coming. Frequently these businessmen governors who've never been elected to anything before, flop. So he's the exception."

Warner's first few months in office wouldn't have earned him such praise. Trying to find his way in his first elected office, Warner worked hard to compromise with Republican legislative leaders--and wound up watching them hand him legislative defeats.

The Republican majority was still new, and it was the first time Republicans had controlled the legislature under a Democratic governor. Political observers wondered if the new governor was ever going to stand up for himself.

"He was frustrated. I don't know whether he remembers or not, but he was very frustrated for a long while," Sabato said. "He really wanted to be a success, and nothing was coming together for him. [People thought], what in the world would his legacy be? How can we sell a paragraph about this guy, much less a book?"

But Warner soon learned that while business-style compromise was all well and good, a governor sometimes had to play hardball.

"The private turning point was his own personal education about how things worked in the real world of politics as opposed to business. Only experience gives you that vision," Sabato said. "The programmatic turning point was the passage of his tax and spending bill."

In the 2004 legislative session, Warner proposed a sweeping tax package, which made some changes to the tax code and lowered some taxes but raised others. Conservative Republicans in the House of Delegates had no intention of letting it through.

But more moderate Republican senators came up with an even larger tax plan, making Warner's look reasonable by comparison. He and the senators hung tight, resisting the House's opposition even as the session drew to a close with no budget, and went on into overtime. Finally, Warner's overtures to moderates in the House resulted in success for a tax package that was pretty similar to the one he'd first proposed.

"I'm very proud of the way we approached it. We started with cuts," Warner said in an interview. "This administration has cut more spending than any administration in Virginia history. What became glaringly evident to me was that we had a structural budget deficit, that wasn't going to self-correct.

"That's why we had to take on the issue of tax reform. What I was proud of was that people all across the state, regardless of party, stepped up and said yeah, we're willing to fix this."

That may have been Warner's largest legislative victory. But, he said, defining the administration by that shows too narrow a focus.

"The budget battle of 2004 probably had the most drama, but I don't think it was the thing more Virginians talk to me about," he said, adding that people outside Richmond talk to him about advances in jobs and education, or the state's response to Hurricane Isabel or the sniper attacks.

"I don't want to underestimate the budget battle, but I can always remember the fact that I said in the first few months that I was going to try to have a bipartisan administration and get things done," Warner said. "Inside Capital Square [that] was kind of viewed as being naive, but in the rest of Virginia it was viewed as a refreshing change. Stuff got done. It was measurable results, it wasn't all about Democrat versus Republican."

Proud of job growth

Ask what accomplishment he's most proud of, and Warner doesn't even mention that tax package--he cites bringing new jobs to rural parts of the state, particularly high-unemployment areas in Southside and Southwest Virginia.

He also lists accomplishments such as raising school test scores, downsizing government agencies to make operations more efficient, and putting additional money into cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.

"Things like being out in a lot of these communities after Hurricane Isabel and just trying to show people that hopefully help was going to be on the way," Warner said. "It really struck me that the value of the governor being there, even if it didn't speed up the aid was important."

Accomplishments and high popularity ratings notwithstanding, there were disappointments. Teacher salaries are not yet up to the national average. The car tax is still capped, not eliminated. There's still no long-term solution for the state's transportation problems.

"We don't have a long-term transportation funding solution. [It] wasn't for lack of trying. We had a plan for transportation 2004 that did not make it, and we clearly were not successful in those referendums, so there's still work to be done there," Warner said.

He was referring to the regional transportation referenda, which he championed and which failed at the ballot box in 2002.

In retrospect, Warner said, there were some flaws in the referendum plan, and if he could do it over again, he would have focused more on mass transit projects and on convincing environmental and slow-growth groups that the projects listed in the plan would not promote sprawl.

Warner's greatest frustration of his term is tied to the work left undone, but more endemic in nature--he's still unhappy with the partisanship that blocked a number of his ideas during his term.

"The number of legislators who've said to me, 'This is a great idea but I'm going to be in trouble if I look like I'm working with you too closely' If there's any indication of how the vast majority of Virginians think the state's moving in the right direction, that's because of that very approach of being able to show that you work together," Warner said.

He wishes he'd been able to convince legislators of that earlier.

"I wish I could have done that quicker. I'm not sure people actually knew that this whole notion of being bipartisan, that was more than a political sound bite, that was the way we were going to try to operate," Warner said. "If I could have made some of those relationships earlier it probably would have helped."

'And it was never dull'

Overall, though, the job of governing seems to have suited Warner--at the least, it didn't bore him.

"The highs were higher and the lows were lower. And it was never dull," Warner said. "There was never a week that went by that there wasn't something unexpected that would come up. I particularly remember those first 12 or 18 months when it seemed like there was almost divine interference in terms of the number of droughts and floods and avian flu and hurricanes and snipers and tire fires. You name the catastrophe, natural or man-made, and it seems like we had them all in those first months."

When asked if he'll miss it when he leaves office Jan. 14, Warner says: "Absolutely.

"I can't deny that come Jan. 14, I'm going to be more than a little bit wistful as I slip off the stage and [Gov.-elect Tim Kaine] takes the oath of office," Warner said.

Warner's family has already moved back to their home in Alexandria; Warner will join them permanently next month.

As for his post-governorship plans, Warner noted, in passing, that he's got this federal political action committee--set up, most people believe, in preparation for a possible 2008 presidential bid.

Warner won't really comment on that. He said he has invitations to speak around the country, as well as potential job offers from some universities and think tanks, as well as his old venture-capital firm.

But he hasn't made a decision as to future employment, and said he's actually put it off "probably longer than I should."

For now, he's spending his last days in the Governor's Mansion doing eleventh-hour work on things such as economic development, and trying to build legislative support for issues including research and development funding that he put into his budget, which he leaves in the hands of Kaine and those legislators.

Perhaps Warner's inability to let go until the last minute is due to what Sabato said is an unusual amount of energy in a governor.

"Very few of them have that much energy. He had his hand in everything. He was interested in everything." Sabato said. "That's a governor making the most out of a term."

To reach CHELYEN DAVIS: 804/782-9362
Email: cdavis@freelancestar.com