gorkay
Jr. Member
Posts: 995
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« on: August 31, 2007, 04:14:58 PM » |
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Barring unforeseen events. Mark Warner would be a shoo-in if he ran. I don't see any Republican out there who can beat him. Tom Davis would probably be the GOP's strongest candidate. I think Jim Gilmore and George Allen have fantasies of running, but they wouldn't stand a chance.
If Warner doesn't run, it puts the Democrats in a quandary. The only other Democrat I can think of who would be a really strong candidate would be Tim Kaine, but if he runs and gets elected, it hands the governorship to the GOP, since our lieutenant governor is a Republican. On the other hand, the Dems may well decide gaining a Senate seat is worth giving up a lame-duck governorship.
John Warner was a good Senator and a good man. Although I often disagreed with him on the issues, I always respected his integrity. I will always remember how, even under intense pressure from the state and national GOP establishment, he refused to endorse Oliver North when he ran for the Senate. BTW, I wonder how many of you remember how he came to win that Senate seat in the first place? He ran for the Republican nomination in 1978 and actually finished second to Richard Obenshain. (The seat was open because William Scott, elected in the Nixon landslide of '72 and subsequently named "the dumbest man in the Senate," decided not to run again, under threat from the Republican party of being deprived of the nomination if he did.) But Obenshain was killed in a plane crash and Warner was named to replace him. In the general election, he won a very narrow victory over Andrew Miller, who had been a very popular two-term attorney general. (Miller had been considered a sure thing to be elected governor in '77, but he shockingly lost the Democratic party primary to Henry Howell. The sense that his heart wasn't fully in his Senate run cost him votes, and maybe the election.)
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