WSLS 10 - Star City Showdown: Warner Gilmore debate

News Article

WSLS 10 - Star City Showdown: Warner Gilmore debate

By BOB LEWIS
AP Political Writer

Far behind in the polls and desperate for a break in his U.S. Senate race, Republican Jim Gilmore denounced Friday's federal bailout of the financial industry and relentlessly attacked Democrat Mark Warner for supporting it in their final debate.

"It rewards people with $700 billion of taxpayer money and sends that money into the hands of Wall Street high rollers who in fact took risks and should not have taken those risks," Gilmore said.

Combative throughout the televised hourlong clash, Gilmore put Warner on the defensive several times, sometimes cutting him off. Warner explained that while he disliked the bill and the pork spending packed into it, he would have voted for it to avert a credit market failure, millions of job losses and global economic catastrophe.

"I would have supported this package, not because it's a perfect package, but too often in politics, the perfect can be the enemy of the good," Warner said, noting that the bailout had bipartisan support.

"We didn't have the luxury of waiting. I joined with Sen. (John) Warner, I joined with Sen. (Jim) Web, I joined with John McCain and Barack Obama - both our presidential candidates" in backing the bill, Warner said.

Then Warner, who succeeded Gilmore as governor, jabbed back by likening the bailout to the state government fiscal meltdown he inherited from Gilmore during the last economic downturn in 2001.

"You can't simply push off problems the way you tried to do when you pushed off the budget shortfalls," Warner said.

Unlike the leisurely pace of their previous two debates, this one was often visceral, and Gilmore made sure one issue would dominate the discussion.
At least times, regardless of the topic, Gilmore steered the debate back to the deeply unpopular rescue plan Congress approved just hours earlier.
"You don't go and vote in the Senate, as Mark Warner said he would have done, to have taken 700 billion of the taxpayers dollars and put it into these high rollers on Wall Street," Gilmore said.

"Furthermore, it will not do to simply say that, `Well, John McCain felt this way and President Bush felt that way and Nancy Pelosi felt that way,"' he said.

Gilmore was looking for a game-changing issue and wagered that the bailout would provide it. He noted that the bill included spending earmarks for Puerto Rican rum production, wooden arrow manufacturers, Hollywood television and movie production.

The most heated moment came after Warner, a telecommunications multimillionaire, suggested Gilmore didn't understand the intricacies of finance and tied it to Gilmore's fiscal stewardship as governor.

"The politically popular thing might have been to say, ‘Oh, I wouldn't have done this. I don't have another plan but I'd simply put off the decision," Warner said. "That's what Governor Gilmore did when we had the shortfall and he used budget gimmicks to cover it up."

"Mark, don't talk down to me about how I don't understand," Gilmore thundered back. "You don't understand. It is a travesty, it is wrong, and to suggest that somehow this is pushing something off, it is not right."
Gilmore was desperate for a game-changing issue and wagered that the bailout would provide it.

Hours before the debate began, a new poll showed Gilmore still far behind Warner. The Mason-Dixon Polling and Research Inc. survey showed 57 percent favored Warner to 31 percent who backed Gilmore. The poll, conducted Monday through Wednesday of 625 registered voters had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. It is in line with two others during the past week that showed Gilmore trailing by about 30 points.

They also sparred over familiar issues. Gilmore accused Warner of putting U.S. troops in Iraq at risk by supporting a withdrawal timetable. Warner countered that it's the same timetable even President Bush now supports.
Warner abandoned the conditional support he had once voiced for offshore drilling and called for robust drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific continental shelf. Gilmore said it didn't go far enough, adding that he also supported drilling in Alaska's unspoiled wilderness.

Gilmore accused Warner of being indecisive and repeatedly lectured Warner that in the Senate, his only option would be to vote yes or no. Warner, in turn, contrasted his centrism with Gilmore's conservative rigidity by saying, "The last thing Washington needs is one more over-the-top my-way-or-the-highway partisan ideologue in the United States Senate."
Through June, Warner's campaign had raised nearly $10 million in contributions to Gilmore's $1.2 million. New federal fundraising figures are due within two weeks.

In a steel-and-glass modernistic art museum absent an audience other than a handful of VIPs, the two former governors competed with end-of-work-week parties, movies and dinner dates and high school football for attention on the worst night of the week for television viewing.
Eight stations across Virginia televised the confrontation live, but none were in the state's most populous and politically potent region, northern Virginia.

Source