Yes Virginia, We Have a Senate Race!

Yesterday’s excellent new television ad from the Gillespie campaign shows a new turn in the campaign and a welcome one. Ed has a good message, a great message, but more voters need to hear it.[read_more]

Kimberley A. Strassel has written an excellent piece for the The Wall Street Journal on the Gillespie campaign.  She has noted the significant difference between what Ed Gillespie will do as Senator in contrast to what Mark Warner has done in the Senate, nothing, other than vote with Obama and Harry Reid 97% of the time.  With Senator Gillespie in office we will see the end of Obamacare, something Mark Warner supported.

(Gillespie campaign) is a positive and optimistic reform agenda that he’s cleverly titled EG2 (Ed Gillespie=Economic Growth). Mr. Gillespie is one of the few Senate candidates pushing a fully formed replacement for ObamaCare, which centers on tax credits and insurance reforms. He’s got proposals to drive America’s energy boom, including drilling off the East Coast. He’s addressed the inequality debate with a tax-overhaul plan that would benefit everybody, but that also emphasizes policies to help the working poor. His stump speech includes details about regulatory relief, education competition and Veterans Affairs health-care reform.

Virginia’s critical northern suburbs, with their influx of minority voters, have proven an increasingly tough sell for Republicans, so the Gillespie campaign has also emphasized the outreach that Republicans like to talk about but rarely do: He’s meeting with black pastors, sitting down with Pakistani business leaders, doing interviews on Telemundo. He also has largely shut down the Democrats’ war-on-women attack, by coming out for allowing the sale of contraceptives over the counter, and by forthrightly talking about how his policies overall would help women in particular.

The entire article is worth a read.

Because Warner has done nothing in the Senate, and because some voters still confuse him with former Senator John Warner, Mark Warner has benefitted from both and seen as a nice, moderate, guy who doesn’t make waves. That ended last week with the news that Mark Warner had attempted to bribe Phil Puckett with the offer of a possible federal judgeship for his daughter if Puckett would remain in the Virginia Senate and not throw the balance of that body to Republican control. Warner proved that he’s just another democrat, political, hack, one who was willing to trade a federal judgeship for democrat control of the state senate.  It doesn’t get more partisan, or more wrong, than that.

From HamptonRoads.com

The bipartisan brand he (Warner) relentlessly burnished from his earliest days in the Governor’s Mansion has now all but evaporated. So has his image as an ineffective, but guileless, U.S. senator whose specialty was reaching across the aisle.

Now that The Washington Post has revealed the extent to which Warner meddled in petty politics on behalf of desperate Virginia Democrats last spring, the senator’s I’m-above-politics aura has vanished.

Warner has been exposed as, well, a partisan operator. Not the worst thing you can say about a politician. Many fit the description.

Yet it’s something Warner avoided. Until now.

“This undermines Mark Warner’s presentation of being a centrist,” said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a University of Mary Washington political scientist….

At Monday’s debate, Warner was prickly. Gone was the boyish, earnest Mark Warner of the past. In his place was a cranky pol who seemed offended when he was asked if he peddled jobs to a fellow Democrat’s daughter to keep Virginia’s Senate in Democratic hands.

The senator clumsily two-stepped around the issue. He tried to pass the phone call off as a conversation between old friends.

Next he insisted that no job offers were made. Warner conceded only that he “reached out” to the Puckett family, “brainstormed” and talked “possibilities.”

Semantics, Senator. 

Read the entire article here.