No subject

success. "In my opinion, he's the one to watch as an outsider in this race,"
Korge told me. "He seems presidential. He's a big guy." (By this he meant,
literally, that Warner is well over six feet tall, with a well-coiffed head
that requires extra-large baseball caps.) "I think he has a presence. He's
very confident. He speaks very well, but he also can speak plainly to
people."

There are, as yet, no announced candidates for the 2008 Democratic
nomination, and even those who expect to run probably won't make their final
decisions before the end of the year. But the process is playing out earlier
and more visibly than ever, in part because candidates like Warner are
scrambling to make sure this nominating season isn't over before it begins.
Usually when there isn't an incumbent Democratic president or a vice
president with title to the nomination, the presidential field would feature
a blended ensemble of candidates, some better known than others but each
singing the part of some distinct constituency. At this time in 2002, for
instance, the prospective Democrats included the candidate of the
foreign-policy establishment (John Kerry); the candidate favored by many
Clinton New Democrat types (John Edwards); the anti-Washington candidate
(Howard Dean); the Big Labor candidate (Dick Gephardt); and the
African-American protest candidate (Al Sharpton). Races like this winnow
slowly. On the eve of the Iowa caucus in 2004, with the exception of
Sharpton, each of these candidates ‹ and, additionally, Wesley Clark ‹ were
still very much in contention for the party's nomination.

The Democratic field now emerging, on the other hand, is looking a lot like
Gladys Knight and the Pips ‹ and you can guess who gets to be Gladys. The
party's insiders, expecting Clinton to be a virtually unstoppable force,
seem to be falling in line behind her, which means there will be only so
much additional money and organization left over for those who would
challenge her. But more than anything, Democrats will tell you that they are
desperate to win next time around, and a lot of pragmatic activists and
voters worry that Clinton is simply too divisive a candidate to take back
the White House. (In a Gallup poll in January, 51 percent of respondents
said they would definitely not vote for her.) These Democrats are actively
shopping for a candidate who can derail Clinton before the party, as they
see it, dooms itself to yet another near miss. And so the conventional
thinking holds that there may only be room for two serious candidates by the
time the primaries roll around: Hillary and the anti-Hillary. What Mark
Warner needs to do now, just as his rivals do, is to begin making the case,
as subtly as possible and before most of the country has even started to
think about 2008, that the senator from New York is the wrong candidate for
the party ‹ and that he's the only guy who can stop her.

If Hillary Clinton does decide to run for president, no matter who
ultimately runs against her for the party's nomination, she will begin with
the kind of institutional advantages that have been reserved, in the past,
for vice presidents like Walter Mondale and Al Gore. It starts with money.
At the end of last year, according to the Hotline, the venerable Washington
online digest, Clinton had more than $17 million in the bank for her
re-election campaign in New York ‹ and no serious opponent to spend it
against. By contrast, Warner, capping what was widely considered a
surprisingly sound fund-raising season, had amassed a little under $2.5
million for his political action committee, Forward Together. But that's not
the whole story. Thanks to the inscrutable wonder of campaign finance laws,
Clinton can roll every penny that she doesn't spend on her Senate campaign
into a presidential account, which is why she could well start a bid for the
White House with as much as $75 million, on course to obliterate the party's
previous fund-raising records. No matter how much a governor like Warner
raises in his political action committee, on the other hand, the rules say
that he can't spend any of it on a presidential run; it can go only for
general political activity, mostly backing other candidates. This means that
should Warner decide to run, he'll have to start again from zero, while
Clinton is backing up 18-wheelers to the bank.

What's more, Clinton will arrive in early primary states with a built-in
base of voters. She has been campaigning in these states, off and on, for 15
years and knows every stop along the way; she can count on the endorsements
of most of the local elected officials and interest groups, all of whom come
with their own e-mail lists and organizers. By contrast, Warner, during a
recent trip to the foreign territory of New Hampshire, made the standard
politician's pilgrimage to the Stonyfield Farm yogurt plant near Manchester
and then wondered aloud just how many candidates in years past had also
taken the tour. (Answer: So many that at the height of primary-season mania,
they would seem to outnumber those Americans who actually eat Stonyfield
Farm yogurt.)

So formidable are the obstacles to challenging Clinton that even a lot of
party operatives who don't think she's the best candidate are likely to work
for her, just to be on the winning side. And this is precisely the strategy
that her team has thus far cultivated. Just as Karl Rove set out to make
George W. Bush's nomination seem inevitable in 2000, successfully freezing
much of the money and talent that might have flowed to his competitors, so,
too, do Clinton's advisers seem to be sending out signals that resistance is
not only futile but also dangerous. When I asked Warner's aides for
permission to attend some of his policy briefings in January, word came back
that the outside experts who had been asked to make presentations, some of
whom worked in the Clinton administration, balked because they were afraid
the Clinton camp would find out that they were granting courtesies to
another candidate. No one wants to cross the party's presumed nominee.

Given all that, it's a wonder that so many Democrats are thinking seriously
of offering themselves up as an alternative. There are various
interpretations among the party's cognoscenti as to which hopefuls belong in
the coveted "top tier" of potential candidates. As of the end of 2005, Kerry
had more than $15 million in contributions stashed away for another bid, as
well as a handful of major fund-raisers who remain loyal to him, but the
general assessment among Democratic insiders is that his Swift boat has
already sailed. Edwards and Clark, meanwhile, won three primary states
between them last time around; both have the potential to be serious players
in 2008, but neither will appeal to those Democrats who say that the party
needs an unfamiliar face.

What remains is a genuinely impressive field of hopefuls whose perceived
flaws, in any other year and against any other opponent, might not prompt
such dismissiveness from the party elite. Conventional wisdom holds that Joe
Biden, who last ran in 1988, can't raise enough cash, and that the populist
Russ Feingold has currency mostly as a protest candidate. Evan Bayh, a
centrist senator and former governor, comes across as thoughtful and steady
on foreign policy (he also looks the part, bearing a remarkable resemblance
to the actor Kevin Kline), but the early word is that he's a bit too stilted
and senatorial, prompting insiders to discourse, yet again, on how few
sitting senators are ever elected president. (For the record, there have
been only two, and both of them died in office, presumably a coincidence.)
Among the governors, Tom Vilsack of Iowa gets high praise from big-time
donors, but the next thing they tell you is that he can't compete
financially. As a former United Nations ambassador and energy secretary,
Bill Richardson, now New Mexico's governor, has as wide a range of
experience as anyone in the race, but his aggressively extroverted
personality makes party insiders uncomfortable ‹ and that was true even
before his female lieutenant governor, a Democrat, publicly complained in
December that he wouldn't stop poking her at official functions.

That leaves Warner, onto whom a lot of anti-Hillary Democrats have suddenly
projected their hopes. The negative rap on Warner is a lack of relevant
experience; he's a one-term governor (he would still be in office if
Virginia allowed its governors to serve consecutive terms), and critics
argue that a credible candidate needs to have foreign-policy experience to
run in the new, terror-obsessed world. Nonetheless, Warner, on paper, fits
the party's most conventional and tested idea of what constitutes an
electable candidate. Though he doesn't speak with a drawl (he grew up in
Indiana, Illinois and Connecticut and moved to Virginia when he was 32),
Warner was the popular centrist governor of a Southern state ‹ just like the
last two Democrats to actually win the White House, Jimmy Carter and Bill
Clinton. He's also really, sickeningly wealthy. As a co-founder of the
cellular-telephone company that ultimately became Nextel, Warner has access
to a personal fortune that is said to approach $200 million, and he has
already demonstrated, during an unsuccessful run for the Senate and then in
his gubernatorial campaign, that he's willing to use it.

Because of his previous life as a businessman, Warner is also expected to
tap a network of donors in the high-tech and venture-capital fields who are
outside the orbit of traditional Democratic fund-raising, just as Bill
Bradley did when he ran against Al Gore in 2000. To party insiders in search
of a Clinton alternative, all of this is crucial; it means that even if she
manages to suck up all the money flowing from the party's usual
contributors, Warner might still have a lifeline that other candidates
don't. "The only one I think can get some traction is Mark Warner, because
he can write his own checks," says Susan Estrich, who ran Michael Dukakis's
1988 campaign. Estrich recently wrote a book called "The Case for Hillary
Clinton" (as if Clinton needed any help), but, she told me, if someone's
going to stop Clinton, "Warner's the only one who really makes sense."

That Warner has suddenly become a commodity, even among those who know
little about him, was obvious at the Florida Democratic Party convention in
December, where he swept into a party for the delegates, led by an escort of
state police. "That's Governor Warner!" one woman said excitedly. "He's so
good-looking!"

"He's got a huge head!" her companion observed, craning her neck to see over
the crowd as Warner signed autographs. "He sort of looks like
Schwarzenegger."

"I do think he has the best chance," I heard another delegate say knowingly.
Warner's speech to the convention the next morning drew a
more-than-perfunctory standing ovation.


When a lot of National Democrats first took note of Warner in 2001, they
didn't love what they saw. Running for governor in a state where Democrats
were in sharp retreat, Warner courted the National Rifle Association and let
it be known he'd support parental notification for minors seeking abortions.
His outreach to Nascar devotees and bluegrass fans in southern Virginia
struck Democrats in the urban North ‹ as well as many of those across the
Potomac River in Washington ‹ as unseemly pandering.

Warner was determined, however, not to let Republicans portray him as a
cultural elitist. He never made any pretense of being an avid hunter or
Nascar fan himself; he's a Presbyterian who wears pressed khakis, and he
spends weekends at his private farm and vineyard outside historic
Fredericksburg. But Warner, who is 51, grew up mostly in small towns, in a
middle-class family, and in the 2001 campaign he made it clear that he
genuinely appreciated the cultural pastimes of his rural voters. The respect
he showed was reciprocated. Five years ago, I watched voters at the annual
fiddlers' festival in Galax, Va., clap Warner on the back and dance along to
his campaign song, an impossibly catchy bluegrass tune, while his Republican
opponent, the state's former attorney general, milled about uncomfortably.
Even after the terrorist attacks that September, which froze the campaign
and rallied the country around the president and the Republican Party,
Warner won by five points, scoring more support in rural Virginia than any
Democrat in recent memory.

Considering that he has served only four years in government, Warner has
plenty to brag about. Relentlessly wooing his Republican Legislature at a
time when the two parties in Washington were growing ever more belligerent
toward each other, Warner managed to erase a potentially catastrophic $6
billion budget shortfall by working out a bipartisan deal to raise some
taxes (on sales and cigarettes) and lower others (on income and food). He
passed the plan, in part, by selling it in frequent meetings with voters
across the state, earning him a reputation as a nonpartisan deal maker who
was willing to deliver unpopular news.

Warner's constant theme, which a lot of Washington politicians talk about
but few seem to actually understand, was the need to modernize for a global
economy. The days when you could walk down the street and get a job at the
mill were over, Warner would say, and new jobs ‹ the state gained more than
150,000 of them on his watch ‹ would require new skills and infrastructure.
So Warner, working with Nascar, pushed through an accelerated program that
enabled 35,000 more Virginians to get high-school equivalency degrees, and
he introduced a program to deliver broadband capacity to 20 Southern
counties. "In the 1800's, if the railroad didn't come through your small
town, the town shriveled up and went away," he told me once, explaining his
rural program. "And if the broadband Internet doesn't come through your town
in the next few years, the same thing will happen."

If he ultimately decides to run for president, Warner will try to build a
national campaign around this same technology-driven approach. When I asked
Warner to name the issues that would be most important to him, the four
domestic issues he ticked off, before he got to terrorism and national
security, were fairly standard for a Democratic candidate in the era after
Bill Clinton: slashing the federal deficit, improving schools, working with
business to reform the health-care system and devising a new energy
strategy. What makes Warner, the former entrepreneur, sound more credible
than your average Democrat is that he comes at these issues primarily from
an economic, rather than a social, standpoint. On health care, for instance,
most Washington Democrats will, as a matter of both habit and perspective,
talk about the moral imperative of covering workers and the uninsured ‹ and
only then might they add, as an afterthought, that the current morass is an
impediment to business too. Warner, on the other hand, begins with the idea
that if American businesses can't keep up with spiraling health-care costs,
the nation will lose the competition with India and China for jobs. The same
principle applies with education and the deficit. His fixation on the global
economy brings a coherent framework to issues that otherwise seem disparate
and abstract.

He doesn't yet have the specific proposals he will need to make this vision
feel as concrete in a national campaign as it did when he was governor.
Instead, everywhere he goes, he emphasizes that Virginia was named the
"best-managed state in the country." (In fact, Governing magazine, the trade
publication for state and local officials, gave both Virginia and Utah the
overall highest grades of any state in its 2005 study.) "Results matter,"
Warner often says, contrasting his record with what he characterizes as the
Bush administration's incompetence. At times, it sounds a bit too much like
Michael Dukakis's "competence" argument ‹ the kind of technocratic appeal
for hands-on government that has never inspired voters to choose a candidate
as president. (Dukakis had his "Massachusetts miracle"; Warner talks up "the
Virginia story.") It is possible that Warner and his top advisers, most of
whom are loyalists from his days as a businessman or as governor, have
overestimated the political value, even after Hurricane Katrina, of bland
efficiency.

This emphasis on reforming government, however, is part of a larger argument
about electability that Warner is just now beginning to sharpen.
Essentially, if he and Clinton ultimately run, he will campaign against her
in much the same way that her husband campaigned against the Democratic
establishment as a governor in 1992. Like Warner, Bill Clinton leapt into a
race that was supposed to be dominated by a bigger name from the liberal
Northeast. (That Mario Cuomo decided not to run was one of several lucky
breaks that helped propel Clinton from anonymity to the White House.)
Clinton's argument then was that the party had become too ideologically
rigid, and that its adherence to dogmatic social policy was driving away
middle-class voters who might otherwise respond to a new kind of economic
agenda. It's easy to forget now, given how thoroughly the party has
internalized Clinton's language on so many issues, that talking in the early
90's about the tragedy of abortion or the rethinking of welfare policy
constituted a kind of apostasy to much of the party elite.

Now it is Hillary Clinton of New York who represents that coastal elite, and
while she employs much of the same rhetoric her husband used, Warner argues
that, nationally, the cultural perception of the party and its most visible
leaders ‹ Clinton, Kerry, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi ‹ isn't much different
from what it was back then. Results do matter to voters, Warner says, but
only if you make it impossible for Republicans to paint your nominee as
another protester-turned-windsurfer who looks down on people who go to a
megachurch and like to watch the stock cars race. "You can't keep sending
people out there who check every box of the Democratic orthodoxy, or that at
least check every box of the East Coast-West Coast Democratic orthodoxy,"
Warner told me during a conversation in his Capitol office in his final days
as governor. Only a Democrat who had a proven ability to transcend cultural
issues, he said, could broaden the party's base.

"You have to make that argument," Warner went on to say. "You have to make
it not just as a Democrat, but as an American. Let's assume the Democrats
continue to run on a 16-state strategy and hope for a 17th state. Can you
really govern? Can you govern if you cede two-thirds of the states?"

It was hard not to notice, as we had this conversation, that Warner never
mentioned Hillary Clinton. It is a perilous mission that Warner and other
Democratic hopefuls undertake as they try to cast doubts about her
electability without appearing to attack one of the party's iconic figures.
And it's risky not just because she is a Clinton, beloved by most of the
party's important interest groups, but also because she is a woman; a lot of
voters may wonder if a woman can really be elected president, but they would
most likely turn on any male candidate who was crass enough to imply as
much.

In his conversations with contributors and activists, Warner meanders up to
the boundary of personal criticism, but he is careful not to step across it.
His manner suggests that he himself would happily call Clinton "Madame
President," but he just doesn't think the voters he knows in Southside
Virginia can ever be made to feel the same way. In contrast, Warner argues
that there is a universe of moderate Republicans out there who would be
comfortable in crossing party lines to vote for him.

Is Clinton, I asked Warner, an "electable" Democrat? "I think she's a very
strong senator," he said slowly, pausing several times. "And I think what
she showed in New York was an ability to really make her case among people
who might not initially be supportive."

We stared at each other. "O.K.," I said. "But is she electable?"

"If she decides to run, she'll be the front-runner," Warner replied
carefully.

Even should it prove to be an achievable goal, persuading Democrats that
Clinton can't win gets you only so far. Warner also has to persuade them,
ultimately, that he's the best choice to oppose her. And so he must now
travel the country more or less constantly, borrowing private planes from
wealthy friends when possible, asking for meetings with contributors,
activists and elected officials whose money and influence will matter in the
later stages of the campaign. For all the perennial conjecture about which
hopefuls seem "presidential" and which don't, the truth is that presidential
candidates who lack national stature always start out looking somehow
smaller than they should, hustling unrecognized from one conference room to
the next, like interstate speed daters in search of a thousand soul mates.

"I intend to be out campaigning for folks around the country who share some
of the views I've shared tonight and the approach we've taken in Virginia,"
Warner told a crowd of about 60 at a fund-raiser given by a fellow
entrepreneur in Chapel Hill, N.C., in January. "If this makes some sense to
you, I'm going to be in California next week, and I'm in New Hampshire
Friday. I'm in Texas the week after next. If you like what you hear, maybe
you can call your friend there and say: 'Hey, I heard this guy Warner the
other night. You should go check him out."' This was great ‹ maybe we could
go out again sometime. Or if you've got some friends you're looking to set
up. ...

Warner isn't what you'd call a natural candidate. He speaks haltingly and
sometimes in circles. He likes personal contact, but he can be physically
awkward with voters, stiffly patting their arms or crookedly grasping their
shoulders in what looks like an impersonation of the Vulcan Death Grip. He
compensates, however, with eagerness and perseverance; like all of the best
politicians, Warner loves to be liked. It's easy to imagine Warner, the
president of his high-school class, infiltrating the various social circles
at Harvard Law School through the sheer discipline of remembering every name
and hometown he came across. After graduating, rather than join some huge
firm, Warner worked as a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee ‹
in a job that enabled him, even then, to collect new and wealthy friends who
had an interest in politics.

As governor, he was known for inviting his opponents over to the mansion for
drinks and then inviting them back again, until he'd earned their trust. The
less inclined you are to like Warner, the more inclined he is to court you,
which probably explains his counterintuitive bond with Virginia's rural,
less-educated voters.

Among the wealthy contributors and liberal activists who have met Warner
recently, the most common observation is that he genuinely listens. "I think
he will, over time, find a very strong following here," Mark Gorenberg, a
San Francisco venture capitalist, told me. An important player in the
politics of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, which has supplanted Los
Angeles as the epicenter of Democratic money on the West Coast, Gorenberg
was Kerry's top bundler in the last election, and he told me he remains part
of Kerry's national "leadership team." But Warner clearly impressed him:
"He's a very interesting candidate, especially to the tech industry. He's
garnered a lot of interest out here. What he's done differently is that he
hasn't raised money. He's the only one who comes out here mostly to meet
people."

For the past several months, the 2008 hopefuls have been attending a circuit
of private dinners in Washington, as well as a series of meetings in the
headquarters of powerful interest groups. In a party long dominated by
single-issue constituencies, these meetings can take on the feel of a job
interview with an especially inquisitive employer. "First, I want to know
why they're running," says Linda Lipsen, the top lobbyist for the
Association of Trial Lawyers of America, describing the conversations she's
had with most of the 2008 hopefuls in recent months. "Not the pat answer
that they've rehearsed, but why they really want to do this. Why they want
to go through this ordeal. Who they really are. Where they take their
vacations. What they do in their spare time. What books do they read?" Of
Warner, Lipsen says: "He was very comfortable in his skin, very willing to
learn. He doesn't make you feel uncomfortable."

The presidential cycle is just beginning, however, and the Oprahesque
questions won't last very long. The problem for Warner is that, a year from
now, liberals who like the idea of a Southern governor on the ticket will
nonetheless want to know where he stands on the party's perennial issues.
Then Warner will have to explain to his party's power brokers why he
believes that Medicaid should be retooled and why he embraces free trade and
why he believes that nuclear power should be explored. Bill Clinton managed
to secure the nomination in 1992 even after confronting Big Labor and
African-American activists, but he didn't face a serious challenge from the
party's more liberal wing ‹ and he didn't have to run against his wife.

Warner may have glimpsed a piece of his future when he attended a dinner of
wealthy Democrats last summer at the Bay Area home of Mark Buell and his
wife, Susie Tompkins Buell, well-connected contributors and close friends of
the Clintons. Warner made some introductory comments about "the Virginia
story," but the first several questions were not about taxes or schools or
health care, but about gay marriage (which he's against), the death penalty
(which he's for) and abortion (he's in favor of parental notification but
vetoed a bill banning all late-term abortions). Warner thought his liberal
guests would be interested in his policies to improve Virginia schools and
raise the standard of living in rural areas; instead, it seemed to him, they
thought that they understood poverty and race in an intellectual way that
he, as a red-state governor, could not. Like a lot of politicians, Warner
can be snappish when he feels he isn't being heard, and the dialogue quickly
grew testy.

At the end of the evening, according to people who were there, as some of
the guests walked Warner to his car, one woman vowed to educate him on
abortion rights. That was all he could take. "This is why America hates
Democrats," a frustrated Warner blurted out before driving away. (Still
piqued a month later, Warner, speaking to The Los Angeles Times, summarized
the attitude of the assembled guests about their plans to save the country:
"You little Virginia Democrat, how can you understand the great
opportunities we have?")

Warner seems unconcerned about the damage done by such comments. "If
somebody wants a purist, I'm not the guy," he told me. What struck Mark
Buell about Warner that night, however, wasn't so much the substance of his
answers as the time it took him to formulate them. To him, Warner seemed
tentative and unpolished. "You could see him thinking through the questions
as he was up there," Buell recalled. "If anybody's on a learning curve for
national politics, it's going to be him."

This seems to be the concern arising about Warner as he introduces himself
around the country. Normally, a governor like Warner, unschooled in foreign
policy and military issues, would have at least until after the midterm
elections coming up in November to study up and calibrate positions. It
wasn't until 1999, for instance, that Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice started
running a virtual academy in Austin for Governor Bush, who had barely ever
been out of the country. Warner, who is considerably worldlier but just as
inexperienced in military matters, has started receiving dozens of briefings
in his Alexandria office, just a few blocks from the stately house
overlooking the Potomac where he lives with his wife and three daughters.

What's different for Warner is that he has, in just the last few months,
become the subject of scrutiny unusual for this early in the race, as more
Democratic insiders speculate that he could be the guy to take on Clinton.
He can feel the change; suddenly, audiences really want to know what his
positions are on the Iraq war and the Iranian nuclear program, areas in
which he acknowledges that he still has much to learn.

In small meetings with donors or interest groups, Warner seems comfortable
admitting that he doesn't yet know all the things he needs to know. Among
larger crowds, however, or with the media, he sometimes seems to be
improvising. This has been a particular problem on Iraq, an issue that
arises, not surprisingly, everywhere he goes. Several times, I watched him
string together a disconnected, banal series of observations ‹ the Sunnis
need to be involved, the military should be seen as problem-solvers rather
than as occupiers and so on ‹ while continually looking down and pausing, as
if he were trying to recall a briefing paper. It was a sharp contrast to the
confidence with which Warner discusses almost any domestic issue, and I had
the sense that he felt compelled to demonstrate his proficiency in the
specific details of Iraq policy rather than offer the more basic statements
of principle that are sufficient for most candidates at this stage of an
undeclared campaign.

That Warner isn't ready for all the questions a presidential candidate must
field was apparent during a somewhat calamitous interview in January with
George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week." Warner seemed surprised and
uncomfortable when the host tried to pin him down on questions that divided
the country and his party. He refused to say whether he thought Samuel Alito
should be confirmed for the Supreme Court or whether he thought the
president had the authority to order domestic wiretaps without a court's
permission.

When Stephanopoulos pressed him to say whether he supported the Iraq
invasion in 2003, Warner replied that it was pointless for Democrats to
continue that argument. Logically, this wasn't an unreasonable response ‹
the decision to go to war is now well past debating, and Warner never had
access to classified intelligence ‹ but it sounded oblivious to political
reality. Whether the war was justified remains an important question for a
lot of liberal voters, especially since Clinton and most of her potential
challengers in the Senate (Feingold being the only exception) voted for the
2002 war resolution. It's unlikely that Warner can simply avoid the
question.

Having been through the 1992 Clinton campaign, an incredulous

Stephanopoulos couldn't help asking, "You think you can keep that position
through the primaries?"

"Time will tell," was Warner's uncertain response.


The exchange with Stephanopoulos on the war hints at another, more tactical
question that Warner will have to confront. If you accept the premise,
however theoretical, that the Democratic race two years from now will come
down to Clinton and a single challenger, then the candidate who gains enough
anti-Hillary momentum to meet her head-on will, by definition, have to run
an insurgent campaign against the party's Washington establishment, in the
same mold as Jimmy Carter in 1976 or Gary Hart in 1984.

To be a successful insurgent in 2008, a candidate probably needs a serious
following online. The activists in the so-called Netroots, people who
connect to politics primarily through MoveOn.org and the liberal blogs, will
be even more populous and more motivated than in 2004, and while it's
impossible to generalize, it seems that most of the Netroots are eager to
find a candidate who isn't Hillary Clinton. Among the anti-Hillary
contenders, Russ Feingold and Wesley Clark have the strongest constituencies
online. But perhaps the most viable candidate who is making a strong bid to
inherit Dean's activist base is John Edwards, who now directs an antipoverty
center at the University of North Carolina. In the last year, Edwards's
support among the Netroots appears to have surged as he has explored the
world of blogging and podcasting, renounced his initial support for the Iraq
war, campaigned for hotel workers in a union drive and railed against what
he calls the "phony" culture of Washington. When I sat with him in a Chapel
Hill cafe in January, Edwards, appearing more relaxed and confident than he
did at any time during the 2004 campaign, told me that he now understood
that specific policies weren't nearly as important in modern presidential
politics as telegraphing a sense of conviction.

"Just being myself and standing up for what I believe, and not being coached
and not being consulted, is what it's all about," Edwards told me. "I would
be totally comfortable with myself as a candidate now. I don't need to spend
time with advisers." He reached for an example. "What do I think about the
killing in Darfur? We have to stop it. That's what I think."

The political argument most often and most forcefully proffered online has
very little to do with ideology, per se, and everything to do with
partisanship. Rather than arguing for any particular agenda, what MoveOn.org
and the bloggers demand from Democratic politicians is unwavering opposition
to what they see as a corrupt Republican majority and to the supposed
capitulation of Washington Democrats. Clinton encounters ambivalence online
because she is a fixture of official Washington, and because she continues
to emphasize her cooperation with like-minded Republicans. The party's
online activists don't want to hear about the compromises it takes to
govern; they want someone who will derail the Republican agenda, even if he
(or she) has to strap himself to the tracks with two fistfuls of dynamite to
do it.

All this would seem to pose a problem for Warner, who does not make for an
especially convincing partisan. He is, at heart, a cooperative, compromising
kind of guy ‹ which, he would argue, is how he managed to get so much done
in Virginia. "I think there are still people of goodwill in both parties,"
he told me at one point. When I asked Warner if the G.O.P. was a corrupt
party, as Democratic activists insist it is, he visibly cringed. "I don't
think you can paint with that broad a brush, just as I don't think in the
90's you could paint the Congressional Democrats with that broad a brush,"
he replied.

When I asked him to assess Bush as a president, Warner went out of his way
to praise his handling of the terrorist attacks of 2001, though he said Bush
had failed to use that opportunity to ask the American people to sacrifice.
He called Bush "the president of missed opportunities" ‹ a valid criticism,
perhaps, but not exactly the moral condemnation that Kerry, Dean and other
Democrats heaped on Bush during the last campaign, and that a lot of liberal
activists long to hear. When I made this point, he shook his head. "That's
not going to be me," he said. "If I choose to go down this path, it's going
to be more about what I'm for than what I'm against."

Similarly, Warner, an unapologetic pro-business Democrat, rejects the
reflexive anti-corporatism that permeates much of the populist fervor
online. Aides said Warner wants to set up a briefing with the American
Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy center, to get its libertarian
perspective on policy issues. "If the move is truly back to old-line 70's
populism, then I'm probably not the guy," Warner told me, in a variation on
what was becoming a familiar theme.

And yet, Warner, like most of his rivals, intends to make a play for
Dean-style Democrats. One of Warner's first hires, even before he left
office, was Jerome Armstrong, an architect of Dean's online strategy and the
founder of the influential blog MyDD.com, which in 2003 and 2004 spawned
many of the other well-trafficked liberal blogs. (Armstrong and Markos
Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of Dailykos.com, invented the term "Netroots,"
and they have just published a book, "Crashing the Gate," about the emerging
power of online activism.) Armstrong's job is to design Warner's Web site ‹
it will include a miniaturized Warner strolling across your screen as he
talks to you, like something out of Willy Wonka ‹ and to blog for the
candidate. Just as important, Armstrong, like the fund-raisers Warner
visits, is influential in his own milieu; his role is to give Warner street
cred in the blogosphere.

Over lunch a few months ago at Olives, the popular downtown restaurant for
Washington consultants and lobbyists, Armstrong dismissed the idea that
Warner was too centrist and bipartisan for the blogosphere. He reminded me
that Warner started out as a Democratic fund-raiser and later served as
chairman of Virginia's state party before he was governor, an unusual route
to elective office that signaled a longstanding party loyalty.

"Democrats have our backs against the wall with a Republican machine,"
Armstrong said. "We want to know: are you going to stand with us? Or are you
going to act like you're not a part of us?" The Netroots activists would get
their answer, he said, when they saw Warner out in critical states later
this year, campaigning hard for Democratic candidates on the state and
federal levels. "Partisanship doesn't always have to deal with calling
people names," Armstrong said. "Partisanship can be working hard to elect
Democrats and fighting for Democratic principles."

In fact, this may not be as wishful as it sounds. In an online poll on the
Dailykos site a few weeks after Kaine won the Virginia governor's race last
November, Warner, who had been near the bottom of the pack of potential
candidates in previous iterations, shot up to third, behind only Clark and
Feingold. Of course, the "poll," which compiled the views of 11,000
volunteer respondents, had about as much scientific value as a Bush
administration memo on global warming. But it did reflect an awareness that
Warner had risked his personal prestige to help get Kaine elected, and that
he had succeeded in reviving the Democratic Party in Virginia. For the
moment, at least, whether he was soft on the enemy was immaterial; the point
was that he knew how to win. To a lot of online activists ‹ and to Democrats
everywhere ‹ that may yet be the thing that matters most.


Democratic strategists have a kind of "silver bullet" theory of the 2008
race. The thinking goes that if Hillary Clinton is indeed running for
president in the fall of 2007, then whoever emerges as the Hillary
alternative will have just two shots at beating her, in either Iowa or New
Hampshire. As Democrats learned in 2000, when Gore beat back Bradley in the
first two contests, and again in 2004, when Kerry surged past Dean and Dick
Gephardt in Iowa and never looked back, it is almost impossible to stop an
establishment candidate if he or she rolls through the first few primaries.
So the insurgent has to hope for an explosion of popular support in that
first caucus ‹ or possibly, a week later, in New Hampshire ‹ that will send
the front-runner reeling backward and puncture the notion that her
nomination is preordained. If an insurgent can do that, then the resulting
media frenzy might create enough momentum to propel him to victories in
subsequent primaries, overwhelming the party apparatus.

The problem with this theory, it should be said, is that the party's
establishment has spent the last 35 years, more or less, making sure it
won't be realized. The modern primary process was born in the period before
the 1972 campaign, when antiwar activists seized control of the party's
nominating rules from the bosses of the old urban machines and put in place
a more participatory system, whereby voters would get to choose their
candidate directly, rather than delegating the task to a bunch of aging men
in a clubhouse. This was a good idea, except that, in just a few years'
time, the 60's activists became insiders themselves, and they found, much to
their dismay, that primary voters still tended to like outsiders ‹ even
relatively conservative outsiders like Jimmy Carter. And so the story of the
last two decades is one of insurgent candidates (Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson,
Bill Bradley, Howard Dean) coming perilously close again and again to
toppling the party's chosen nominees, while the party regulars respond,
periodically, by tinkering with the rules ‹ collapsing the primary calendar,
creating hundreds of "superdelegates" who can cast their convention votes
however they like ‹ in order to tighten their hold on the process.

The result of all these machinations is that an establishment candidate like
Clinton can rely on a kind of built-in fire wall. Even if she loses in Iowa
or New Hampshire, the process is front-loaded, as they say, so that the
campaign immediately becomes a national contest, diffused into large states
in every part of the country. This requires both huge sums of money and some
amount of star power, as well as lots of surrogates ‹ that is, governors,
senators and the like ‹ who will fan out across their states to do your
campaigning for you.

In 2008, the party is likely to add contests in a few more racially diverse
states before and after the New Hampshire primary. But this, too, would seem
to benefit Clinton, since her husband can be expected to campaign hard for
her. As Donna Brazile, the veteran organizer who ran Gore's campaign, says,
in critical black districts, "Bill Clinton is beloved, and to the extent
that these voters have a chance to cast their votes early in the process, it
will be very difficult to stop her nomination." Little wonder, then, that
when I asked Joe Trippi, the highly-caffeinated Internet genius who
orchestrated Dean's insurgency, how Warner or one of the other candidates
would go about taking the nomination from Clinton, he actually laughed at
me. "It's not possible," he said. "The way for Mark Warner? Leave the
freakin' party."


This is why, with almost two years to go before the first votes are cast,
some insiders who question Clinton's electability dream of finding yet
another candidate who has the national profile and who could generate enough
excitement among the base to match her. The question is, Who? "This sounds
absolutely strange coming from me, because I never in life thought I would
utter these words again," Brazile says, "but Al Gore." It's true that Gore
has been a fiery critic of Bush in recent months, but former advisers who
still talk to him say he seems genuinely uninterested. Meanwhile, Barack
Obama's keynote address to the Florida Democratic Party convention in
December was interrupted by delegates who stood up and shouted for him to
run in 2008. Obama, a first-term senator, has ruled it out ‹ at least for
now.

Nonetheless, there is still reason to think that the barrier that has
historically insulated insider candidates from outsider challenges may yet
be breached. The best illustration of this is Dean, who came closer to
upending the nominating process than any insurgent candidate since Hart. In
gaining enough momentum to become, at one point, the presumed nominee, Dean
highlighted two critical changes in American politics in recent years. The
first is the proliferation of a cable-TV news media that can, virtually
overnight, transform an unknown candidate into a coast-to-coast sensation,
neutralizing the value of expensive ads and direct-mail campaigns. The
second, and probably more transformative, is the advent of the Web as a
fund-raising and organizing tool, which, under the right circumstances, can
go a long way toward erasing a front-runner's advantage, especially if the
insurgent manages to win one of the early primaries. "The fire wall is more
vulnerable now," Susan Estrich says. If Clinton should falter in Iowa or New
Hampshire, "whoever beats her won't have to put out buckets to collect cash.
He'll have the Internet."

Because of these changes, the process of choosing a candidate is now more
democratic, less predictable and harder for the party elite to control than
it has been for 20 years. The question for a potential candidate like Mark
Warner is just what kind of outsider he intends to be. The problem with
Warner's theory of the race ‹ that he can run, like Carter and Clinton, as a
centrist, electable Southern governor ‹ is that neither Carter nor Clinton
had the misfortune of having to unseat a de facto nominee. They ran as
outsiders pounding at the door of the party apparatus, but the weary party
more or less invited them in. That won't happen in 2008. If Hillary Clinton
does decide to run, the best Warner or any other rival can hope for is that
this next election will be more like 1984, when Mondale, the insider, had to
use every advantage at his disposal, including the superdelegates, to hold
off Gary Hart's torrid attack on the interest groups that made up the
Democratic establishment.

It's fine for Warner to say now that he doesn't need purists or populists,
that he wants to run a campaign that is about what he's for rather than what
he's against. But such aspirations are a luxury generally afforded to
front-runners and fools, and Warner is neither. The party's more successful
insurgents have all had one thing in common, whether they came from the left
or center: each ran hard against the party machine itself. However much
Warner may want to avoid this kind of populist appeal, recent history
suggests that if you want to emerge as the alternative candidate in 2008,
you probably have to be willing to harness and exploit the anger of
Democrats who feel disconnected from the Washington establishment and who
resent the idea that powerful insiders seem to be choosing a nominee for
them. You have to be ready, as an earlier generation of Democrats would have
put it, to take on the Man ‹ even if the Man this time happens to be a
woman.

Matt Bai, a contributing writer who covers national politics for the
magazine, is working on a book about Democratic politics.

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