You've heard all the armchair commentary, but it's still a surprise. Did Warner decide, given Hillary's rightward tendencies, the new, pro-Edwards calendar, and the possibility of Gore that he lacked a fighting chance, and shouldn't sacrifice the next two years of his life atop the altar of unlikely ambitions? Is there a scandal lurking in the back? I'm an optimist, so tend to go for the former, but as a friend of mine insightfully pointed out, "politicians can never tell that they can't win...any politician smart enough to deduce that he can't win from where Mark Warner is at this point should actually stay in the race, since he'd be way smarter than any of the others and could probably pull it off."
So who knows. The obvious winner here is Edwards, whose position just keeps on improving. Warner may well have dropped out because the primary schedule -- first Edwards-loving Iowa, then the union-heavy Nevada, then New Hampshire, then Edwards' birth place of South Carolina -- looked likely to favor a candidate who wasn't him. The big shadow over all of them -- Warner, Hillary, and Edwards -- was and remains Gore, who would instantly suck up both the anti-Hillary support and, if my talks with DC establishment types are indication, a fair amount of Hillary's backing.
In any case, Warner was a candidate from a different time. As my boss points out:
Hillary's decision to position herself in the center-right of the party set the stage for Warner's fall and John Edwards's rise in this year's sorting of Democratic presidential hopefuls. Her positions on the largest economic questions, particularly her advocacy of education, broadly defined, as the solution to the dislocations of globalization, anchor her firmly in the Robert Rubin wing of the party. Her don't-rock-the-boat-too-much-capsizing-though-it-be position on Iraq, while by no means close to Joe Lieberman's embrace of administration policy, still puts her slightly right of the mushy center of Democratic opinion in the Senate.
So what were the issues and where were the votes that Warner could have picked up to Hillary's right? He could not have plausibly run as Gary Hart to Hillary's Fritz Mondale, first because Hillary isn't Fritz Mondale, second because slot Hart occupied -- the champion of the entrepreneurial and somewhat more deregulated new economy -- is no longer a slot, what with the economy now deregulated up the wazoo.
There just wasn't space this year for a bipartisan, economically centrist, technocratic executive type to capture the soul of the party. Whether that's the reason Warner actually dropped out, it's precisely the reason he should've, and it makes it a good idea either way. Now Warner can remain involved in politics, campaign nonstop for Webb, and set himself up for the Senate in 2008.
