MSNBC on Mark Warner

MSNBC has done another profile on potential 2008 contenders and this one was on Mark Warner.

IMNSHO (as are all my opinions) this article was much less kind than the one done on the Senator. First off, look at the title of the article - "Warner looks left, looks right, looks toward '08". The title to me says "Warner is looking to anyone who he can pander to for support in 2008".

The article does say some nice things about his accomplishments as Governor of Virginia, but then goes into his shortcomings.

Warner attended this years Yearly Kos, but wasn't well received.

“He’s not the favorite (of the bloggers). But I think he’s getting a good hearing, and I think it’s the fact that he was the first candidate to commit to a conference that nobody was taking seriously,” said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of Daily Kos web site.

and

It was striking that in his speech to the Yearly Kos convention, when Warner discussed Iraq, he did not use the line that he used the previous weekend at the Democratic state party convention in Manchester N.H.: “Going out (of Iraq) without a plan is just as bad as going in without a plan.”

A Warner aide said the line was omitted because the Las Vegas speech was edited for length.

and

The Kos crowd remained silent when Warner said “we are all glad” to have seen al Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed last week by a U.S. air strike.

The crowd also sat silently during the part of Warner’s speech in which he discussed the threat of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

On top of the luke warm response from the Kos crowd Tom Curry lists some unresolved questions about Warner:

• Is one term as governor too thin a resume for a war-time presidential candidate?
• How credible is Warner’s claim that he knows how to win in the South? After all, the northern Virginia counties of Arlington, Loudon and Fairfax, and the city of Alexandria, where Warner did so well in the 2001 election (far outperforming Al Gore’s showing in those same places in the 2000 election), are culturally indistinguishable from the suburbs of Chicago or Denver, partly because so many non-Virginians like Warner have moved there.
• Is Warner vulnerable to the charge that he is too calculating in becoming whatever voters want him to become?