Originally published 05/27/14; updated on 05/28/14
Sen. Mark Warner has begun a tour of Virginia localities to start his campaign of whitewashing his record ahead of this fall’s election. In other news, he continues to fail to take a stand on behalf of Virginia veterans.
UPDATE: The Bull Elephant gets results! OK, so maybe it wasn’t just us, but we didn’t see anyone else busting Warner for the tone-deaf rollout of his campaign, and now Warner has joined a growing list of Democrats up for re-election who have called for the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. Good for him.
Recently, the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s PolitiFact outfit made news by confirming as completely “True” the Republican Party of Virginia’s assertion that Mark Warner has voted with President Obama 97% of the time. That degree of lockstep partisanship is simply astonishing for a politician who has always billed himself as a “radical centrist.”
Now, Warner has begun his campaign-year messaging, saying essentially that up is down, black is white, and true is untrue:
Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., is taking his re-election campaign on the road for the first time, making 14 stops across the state beginning today.
The events on his “Working Together” tour, an effort to tout the senator’s “plans for finding bipartisan solutions,” will stream live to house parties in all 133 localities in the commonwealth, according to a statement his campaign released Tuesday.
The six-day tour kicks off in Wise County and will take Warner to Richmond on Thursday, where he will “join supporters, elected officials and community leaders to discuss his bipartisan approach to finding commonsense solutions that will strengthen the economy, create jobs in Virginia and reduce the burden of student debt.”
(Emphasis added). That’s right. In keeping with Warner’s campaign moderate/vote liberal record, he’d have Virginia voters believe that being in lockstep with Harry Reid and the Obama administration 97% of the time is a “bipartisan approach to finding commonsense solutions,” when in fact all his “approach” has been is to be a reliable back-bencher vote for the most radical left-wing administration in history.
Perhaps equally disturbing is the glib, focus group-tested language surrounding the roll-out of Warner’s campaign. Right now, America’s veterans are suffering badly under the government-run healthcare system of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Indeed, RPV Chairman Pat Mullins, among others, has called on Warner to take a stand for Virginia’s considerable population of military veterans:
It seems like every day we hear another horror story from the Veteran’s Administration. Nearly two dozen veterans have already died, victims of a bureaucracy that cares more about pushing paper than caring for our combat wounded.”
“Barack Obama has failed to lead on this issue. Secretary Shinseki has failed to lead on this issue. Thus far, no one has lost their job at the VA, even though veterans have lost their lives. Mark Warner should join groups like the American Legion in calling for Secretary Shinseki to resign. Every day he fails to seek accountability for this travesty is another betrayal of our veterans.”
So what does Warner do? He talks about reducing “the burden of student debt.” Not a peep about protecting the lives and health of our veterans.
Priorities. Integrity. Leadership. Mark Warner. Which one of these is not like the others?
