Gilmore, GOP Face a Hard Senate Fight

The News & Advance
Published: June 1, 2008

To say that Jim Gilmore and the state Republican Party face a tough fight to retain John Warner’s U.S. Senate would be to utter the understatement of the year.

Saturday, in Richmond, the former governor and state attorney general barely won his party’s nomination against a woefully underfunded, super-conservative state legislator from Northern Virginia whose two main issues are abortion and gay marriage. Gilmore, who served as governor from 1998 until 2002, won by the slimmest of margins — less than one percentage point and fewer than 65 delegate votes — against Del. Bob Marshall.

The Prince William County delegate raised less than $80,000 in his efforts to wrest the nomination from Gilmore, who had a war chest of almost $1 million. The fact that he came within 65 votes is nothing short of astounding.

What the outcome portends for Gilmore and the state party as the November battle nears is rather ominous, for the Republicans will be facing one of the most popular Democrats in the state for the seat.

Mark Warner, the high-tech millionaire who succeeded Gilmore as governor, has more than $8 million in the bank, a personal fortune of more than a quarter of a billion dollars and positive ratings from more than 70 percent of likely voters.

Elected in 2001, he came into office facing a budget shortfall of more than $6 billion, created in no small part by the Gilmore administration’s efforts to eliminate the so-called car tax.

He righted the faltering ship of state by reaching across the aisle in the Republican-controlled Assembly to senior GOP legislators such as Sen. John Chichester and Del. Preston Bryant, earning the approval of the majority of Virginians but the opprobrium of the vociferous, anti-tax wing of the Republican party.

Going into the race with Warner, Gilmore and the Republicans face a daunting task: defeating a popular former governor who can print his own money. How they plan to accomplish that task is what has us concerned.

As governor, Warner was definitely a moderate, pro-business politician; only the most partisan Republicans would argue with that assessment. As the state’s top Democrat, he set the tone the party in Virginia would take.

In the U.S. Senate, however, he would be just one among many Democrats, and those running the national party and calling the shots in Congress — the Nancy Pelosis and Harry Reids — are far to the left of where most commonsense Virginians are.

Gilmore has a history of being a scrappy, tough-as-nails fighter who has done what he needed to do to triumph. During his four years as governor, he even had a hard time getting along with his fellow Republicans in the General Assembly.

Gilmore’s history portends a bitter, no-holds-barred fight against Warner, the kind of street brawl campaign you normally would expect to come across in New Jersey or New York.

That’s not what Virginia, or the nation for that matter, deserves.

Please, Gov. Gilmore, give the state’s voters a campaign of ideas and civil debate, not the slash-and-burn techniques that have characterized the past.