ICYMI: Roanoke Times – “Mark Warner’s moment”

Editorial: Mark Warner’s moment
By Roanoke Times

Mark Warner’s moment is about to arrive and America will be the better for it. Russia, maybe not so much.

For the benefit of any Russian readers we might have out there today, let’s review just which Mark Warner we’re talking about.

The Warner we remember was an enormously popular governor in the early 2000s who went on to become an enormously popular (for a time) United States senator. Warner’s popularity was always rooted in his background as a forward-thinking businessman and his reputation for not being particularly partisan. We once heard someone in the Roanoke business community use “Mark Warner” as a verb, as in “we need someone to take this problem and Mark Warner it,” a construction that underscores his image as a serious-minded problem-solver.

Service in the United States Senate — a body not often associated these days with problem-solving — has taken a toll on Warner’s standing. In 2014, he unexpectedly had a political near-death experience, barely eking out re-election. Warner approval ratings have rebounded, though, and even now he consistently polls as the most popular politician in the state — though not as popular as he once was. We’re simply living in different times.

When Warner went off to Washington, many in Virginia thought eventually he’d wind up at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. However, the things about Mark Warner that appealed so much to Virginians — his braininess, his earnestness, his business sense — never really excited a national Democratic Party. Critics might look at Warner’s voting record and pronounce him a pure liberal (as they did in that 2014 campaign), but his mien remains the embodiment of moderation, very much out of sync with these polarized times. The New York Times recently called Warner “a former rising star in the party, frozen in the ascent for years now.”

Warner is more naturally at home digging into issues that don’t fit easily onto bumper stickers. That worked to his advantage in the 2001 governor’s race, when voters in Southwest Virginia — still reeling from the loss of traditional industries — were thrilled to find a Northern Virginia politician coming to them to talk about how they could build a new economy through high technology start-ups. To this day, when you ask Warner about the issue of the day in Washington, he’ll deliver a dutiful Democratic answer – but he becomes positively animated when he starts talking about small business incubators popping up in communities like Marion and Wytheville. It’s clear that politics bores him, but policy energizes him.

The past few years, Warner has devoted himself to the wonkiest of topics: The emergence of the “gig economy,” where workers float from contract job to another. Some left-leaning Democrats reflexively see this as corporate America taking advantage of desperate workers; the more nuanced Warner sees the entrepreneurial opportunities, but worries about a generation of workers operating outside the normal structures of employment benefits. He talks about the “social contract” and how America needs to re-invent what he calls “Capitalism 2.0.” He joins with Republicans to figure out solutions and goes off to retreats with experts at the Aspen Institute. He is not exactly Bernie Sanders railing against Wall Street and promising “free stuff.”

Warner might simply have disappeared into his study of the gig economy and never again been heard from on the national stage had it not been for one thing: Russia. When the new Congress convened in January, Warner became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which means he is now the top Democrat on the panel that is investigating whatever Russia did, or didn’t do, to influence the 2016 election.

There are actually two different Russia inquiries going on — one by the House, one by the Senate. The House inquiry devolved into chaos, and controversy, from the outset. The Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, has embarrassed himself, and tainted the whole investigation. The Democratic chairman, Adam Schiff, has become a television chatterbox.

By contrast, the Senate committee has promised an investigation that will be bipartisan — and boring, which in this context is a good thing. Washington badly needs some adults in the room. The reputation of the Senate inquiry depends heavily on how the Republican chairman — Richard Burr of North Carolina — and his Democratic vice chairman comport themselves. The early reviews are surprisingly good.

Burr, a Trump supporter, has elevated the discourse by pointing out that this is more than just about last year’s American election. “I think it’s safe by everybody’s judgment that the Russians are actively involved in the French elections,” Burr has said. Probably the German ones, too. That makes this inquiry about a lot more than Trump; it’s about the integrity of elections everywhere. Even if nothing else is proven, we now know that Russia fielded an army of Internet trolls to flood social media with posts that look like they’re from ordinary Americans in the Midwest. Should that be regarded as a simply a prank, or, as former Vice President Richard Cheney recently suggested, “an act of war”?

For his part, this may turn out to be the perfect role for Warner, a chance for him to “Mark Warner” a problem on an international scale. Warner’s penchant for bipartisanship – which has sometimes alienated him from his own party — will serve him especially well here. So, too will his own seriousness of purpose. He told the New York Times this role would be “probably the most important thing I’ve done in public life.” He’s acting like it, too.

“The Virginia Democrat is losing himself in a book about the Romanovs, eager to absorb the country’s theories of war, teasing staff members for insufficient knowledge of Tolstoy and Nabokov,” the New York Times tells us. “He has taken to deploying phrases like ‘personal cyberhygiene’ in conversation and discusses Russian incursions into French politics with a fluency once reserved for Virginia budget skirmishes.”

By the time this is over, Democrats may come to have new respect for Warner’s preference for bipartisan solutions, and Americans on all sides may come to see why Virginians still regard Warner as their most popular officeholder.

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