Preview Of NYT Mag Article On Mark Warner

Five years ago, I watched voters at the annual fiddlers' festival in Galax, Va., clap Warner on the back and dance along to his campaign song, an impossibly catchy bluegrass tune, while his Republican opponent, the state's former attorney general, milled about uncomfortably. Even after the terrorist attacks that September, which froze the campaign and rallied the country around the president and the Republican Party, Warner won by five points, scoring more support in rural Virginia than any Democrat in recent memory.

Considering that he has served only four years in government, Warner has plenty to brag about. Relentlessly wooing his Republican Legislature at a time when the two parties in Washington were growing ever more belligerent toward each other, Warner managed to erase a potentially catastrophic $6 billion budget shortfall by working out a bipartisan deal to raise some taxes (on sales and cigarettes) and lower others (on income and food). He passed the plan, in part, by selling it in frequent meetings with voters across the state, earning him a reputation as a nonpartisan deal maker who was willing to deliver unpopular news.

Warner's constant theme, which a lot of Washington politicians talk about but few seem to actually understand, was the need to modernize for a global economy. The days when you could walk down the street and get a job at the mill were over, Warner would say, and new jobs — the state gained more than 150,000 of them on his watch — would require new skills and infrastructure. So Warner, working with Nascar, pushed through an accelerated program that enabled 35,000 more Virginians to get high-school equivalency degrees, and he introduced a program to deliver broadband capacity to 20 Southern counties. "In the 1800's, if the railroad didn't come through your small town, the town shriveled up and went away," he told me once, explaining his rural program. "And if the broadband Internet doesn't come through your town in the next few years, the same thing will happen."