I personally doubt it, but the Hotline folks are in speculation mode:We're not trying to start anything but with the decision by Evan Bayh to not run, there was a lot of commentary on the Sunday shows wondering if Mark Warner was having second thoughts.Personally, I believe that Warner thinks he's got a great chance at being the perfect Veep candidate on a Clark or Clinton ticket. He'd give Hillary a Southern chance and Clark's ticket some executive balance. (I think Edwards and Obama would want someone with more foreign policy experience). And running for Vice President (several months in 2008) is much less grueling than running for President (the next 22 months).And by sheer coincidence this week, one of our NH spies informed us they received a holiday card in the mail from... Mark Warner.
Could Warner get coaxed back into the race next summer once the euphoria of Obama and Hillary has worn off? He has the personal resources... Again, not trying to start anything but simply making an observation.
But, who knows? Warner could change his mind and storm back into the race - rested and rejuvenated - with plenty of new buzz timed right in the second half of 2007 (perhaps buoyed again by Democratic successes in Virginia). And his operations will have been humming along the whole time.
Time will tell....
The Democrats cannot win without the red states. But the current fatal delusion among the (Northern) Democrats comes from Tom Schaller's book "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South." This is the equivalence of the book and the idea (James Glassman, I think) in the mid 1990s that the stock market was going to go up to 35,000 although it was clear that the DOT.com stocks were fully undercapitalized and were going to bust. That didn't stop investors. Likewise, the Schaller book creates the illusion that fanciful Nantucket Democrats can win without the South and the Midwest. It defies reality and the numbers. Democrats have lost three times since post-war forty-something to one - to Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan. We head to the fourth and final catuistrophic failure with Hillary Clinton.
The reality candidates (Clark, Edwards, Vilsack - I'd like to add Kathleen Sebelius and Mark Warner) have an unforseen opportunity now with Senator Obama. He cannot win the red states either but he seems to be an honest, congenial and decent guy and one of the rare Democrats who spoke up against the removal of Habeas Corpus while the little peeps ducked out to Starbucks for coffee (and as Alan Dershowitz and others have pointed out, the Clintons do support torture situtations outlawed by the new bill & by the Geneva Convention). Obama can win against Senator Clinton in the primary, and neutralizes her candidancy, saving the Democratic party from catustrophic failure in the general election.
Northern Democrats are in denial of demographics and population shifts from the Northeast to the South, the Midwest, the Southwest and the West since 1950s. The North used to be the red states (red signifies the power principle), now they are the blue states. The Republicans have been winning because they acknowledge this. The Democrats in the Northern states are in denial of this historical transition and think they are going to "come back" to power but demographics consistently point to the red states.
Obama can’t win in red states but can carry the North in a Democratic red state strategy (which might otherwise go to John McCain). His presence in the race accelerates the Clark/Edwards/Vilsack position directly to the fore.
In the old paradigm Democrats and Republicans would pick a Kennedy, a Roosevelt or a Rockerfeller in New York and throw in some folkloric Western or Southern person like LBJ to "balance" the ticket; throwing a bone to the regions. Today the demographics have flipped. To win today we need a solid, primary candidate from red states (Wes Clark) and a balancing figure to satisfy the Northeast corridor and its West Coast annex like Senator Obama. Better yet, a South/Midwest ticket; Clark/Sebelius or Warner/Sebelius.