Democrat Mark Warner, candidate for the U.S. Senate seat that Republican John Warner (no relation) will soon vacate, is coming to Charlottesville.
He’ll be on the Downtown Mall on May 6 at 2:15pm. You can RSVP here.
I’ve spoken with Warner two times, once when he came to Darden and the other at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. Both times he came across as funny and on-point. At the JJ Dinner, where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were scheduled to speak, I tried to pin him down on which candidate he was going to back.
Governor Tim Kaine and former Governor L. Douglas Wilder were Obama supporters. Warner, though, had a little more to lose by backing the wrong candidate and then having to deal with a president that he’d snubbed, so he played those questions close.
In one of his answers, he talked about the need for the Democratic candidate to be able to win rural Virginia voters, something that Warner himself was able to do with marked success. So I asked him which candidate’s message played the best to those folks.
He didn’t take the bait. Instead, he said something like, "Oh no, that’s your job. I don’t want to put you out of work."