Warner Out for '08Mark Warner, who was considered by many to be a strong candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president has
dropped out of the race.
Warner scheduled a late morning news conference in Richmond to make the announcement, according to two Democratic officials who refused to be identified because they did not want to upstage Warner's announcement.You mean they didn't want to be identified as the guys who upstaged the announcement.
This might come as a surprise to some, but I had long thought that Warner was facing an uphill battle. First, of course, is the 800-pound gorilla. No matter how he tried, Warner wasn't going to get to the right of Hillary Clinton; at least there was no way he could do it and claim to represent a sizable chunk of Democrats.
Warner did make a lot of sense in some ways; he's a red state governor, which is a qualification that the last two Democrats elected to the Oval Office (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) had in common. He could reasonably claim that he, unlike Hillary could bring over a red state into the Democrats' column.
But it would also mean that the Democrats would have to settle for a moderate, and they strike me as in no mood to do that. From their standpoint it's a shame that Howard Dean didn't get the nomination in 2004, because the Vermonster would have gotten the McGovern treatment from the voters, convincing the Democrats that they needed to tack back towards the center. Instead, they went with the "electable" guy, heh.
The big winners from this announcement? Hillary and the Republicans.
