Profile of Mark Warner: Ivy Leaguer with rural NASCAR draw

“There’s nothing I’ve ever done that I haven’t failed in at some point,” Warner says. “The greatest lessons of my life have come from failure.”

Born in Indianapolis, Ind., Warner grew up in a small town 15 miles from Peoria, Ill., before moving to Vernon, Conn.
His father, Robert, was an insurance agent and lifelong Republican; his mother, Marge, a housewife. In an eighth-grade debate, he played the Nixon surrogate. Even then, he says he had “a little bit” of the political bug.

“In 1968, I was in the eighth grade – old enough to get touched by the idealism of the ‘60s, but not old enough to get jaded by it,” he says. “This world was transforming around the whole notion that you could make change, but I wasn’t out marching, because I was too young and, besides, my parents would have killed me,” he says.

Warner graduated from George Washington University in Washington D.C., the first in his family to complete college, and from Harvard Law School in 1980. Looking back, he says that he never expected to do well in business.

“I got drawn into this enormous wave of entrepreneurship, and it was cool to get things done. Being in that world, you shouldn’t be afraid of the future,” he says. “You can’t predict it, but I’m sure not afraid of it, and that has awesome potential.”

After losing his 1996 Senate race, he began reaching out more to rural parts of the state with a series of public/private initiatives to help raise prospects for local economic growth.

He concluded that there were things you could get done, but “think of what you could do if you could get back into the public sector.” In 2001 he ran and won his race to be governor.

Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, who worked with Warner on rural strategy in those years, credits him with cultivating a genuine respect for Virginia’s rural culture. “He was the first Democrat to get a majority of the rural vote in a statewide election in Virginia,” he said in a telephone interview.

“The key is that Mark understood – and it’s a lesson so many Democrats ought to be taking from him – that you don’t have to be from the culture to be accepted by the culture. He was genuine with us, it’s that simple,” he says.

“He seemed down-to-earth and interested in talking to you,” said Dr. Ralph Stanley, a Virginia bluegrass icon who publicly supported Warner in his run for governor in 2001.

As governor, Warner faced a Republican legislature that outweighed Democrats two-to-one.

He threw the weight of his office behind an ongoing rural campaign to keep and create jobs, along with the infrastructure to sustain them. He launched a Virginia Motorsports Initiative to encourage NASCAR jobs to move to southwest Virginia, an area battered by a loss of manufacturing jobs.

Limited to one term by state law, Warner left the office in 2006 to prospect a run for the White House. He opted out of a presidential campaign in October 2006, citing family concerns, and is now heavily favored to replace retiring John Warner in the US Senate.

Last Wednesday Warner and Obama met with workers in a warehouse in Martinsville, Va., financed by the Motorsports Initiative.

“Mark, as governor, I think understood that for a state to be successful, you’ve got to grow all areas of the state,” said Senator Obama.

Delaware Treasurer Jack Markell (D), who is currently running for governor, worked with Warner in the early days at Nextel.

“When people tell me that you seem like a Mark Warner Democrat, I take that as a great compliment,” he says.

Previous

1 | 2