A Businessman Bridges the Political Aisle

Biography: Gov. Mark R. Warner Article: On the Other Side: a Republican Who Worked With Virginia's Democratic Governor Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By SARA HEBEL

Richmond, Va.

Gov. Mark R. Warner is grinning, a glass of white wine in hand, as he greets state lawmakers and other guests attending a reception at the governor's mansion here on a balmy evening in January.

Mr. Warner, a tall, sandy-haired Democrat, has just delivered his final State of the Commonwealth address, and he has reason to celebrate.

He is still basking in a legislative victory of the year before, when he and moderate Republicans cobbled together a coalition of lawmakers in the Republican-controlled General Assembly to pass a $1.3-billion package of tax increases and reforms.

The governor argued that the infusion of dollars was needed to bring public colleges and other core state agencies back from the brink of decline after several years of budget cuts.

In his State of the Commonwealth speech, Mr. Warner touted the fact that the budget that passed last year included, among other things, $267-million more for the state's colleges. "As a result," the governor said, "Virginia ranked second in the nation last year in increased spending for higher education."

Improving Virginia's public colleges, and how they serve the state, has become one of Mr. Warner's top priorities as governor, even as he embarks on his last year in this one-term state. As the first in his family with a college degree, Mr. Warner says he has seen firsthand the power of higher education to transform a life and wants to improve access to that opportunity across Virginia.

A former businessman who has amassed an estimated net worth of $200-million through investments in cellular phones and other technology ventures, Mr. Warner has also tried to ensure that Virginia gets a better return on the money it provides to higher education. To that end, the governor has tried to get Virginia's independent-minded colleges to push more students through the system, and more quickly, and to contribute to regional economies through increased research and by other means.

"I'm a huge supporter of higher education," Mr. Warner says in an interview. "I'm a friend, but just because I'm a friend doesn't mean I'm going to agree with everything they say."

At a time when college leaders in many states are complaining that their governors are cutting their budgets and are focused on other issues, Mr. Warner's efforts here, and elsewhere, are attracting national attention. As chairman of the National Governors Association, he is spending this year urging other states to adopt reforms he has pressed for in Virginia that would make the senior year of high school more productive. He wants seniors to be able to earn a full semester's worth of college credit or to pursue training to win certifications they need to gain certain technical jobs.

Mr. Warner's efforts to position himself as a governor with a strong education legacy, in Virginia and across the country, may also serve to raise his political capital. The Southern governor's ability to coax tax increases from a Republican-controlled legislature while remaining popular among constituents has already fueled talk about where Mr. Warner might try to take his agenda next. He could try to unseat U.S. Sen. George Allen, a Republican, in 2006; he might make a play for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008; or he might even run again for governor in 2009.

Mr. Warner is not without his critics. Anti-tax activists, for example, say they are salivating over the possibility that Mr. Warner would campaign for president or for the U.S. Senate. They note that he pushed for tax increases after promising in his campaign that he would not.

"He lied his way into office," says Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. "We bury Democrats who do this on a regular basis."

How Mr. Warner's legacy on higher-education and budget issues plays out may be tested later this year, in the race to succeed him. Jerry W. Kilgore, a former attorney general in Virginia and the likely Republican candidate for governor, opposed last year's tax increases and is expected to make them an issue against Timothy M. Kaine, the lieutenant governor and presumed Democratic candidate, who has embraced Mr. Warner's budget strategy.

Businesslike Approach

As governor, Mr. Warner operates much like a businessman. He is data-driven, traipsing around Virginia last year with a PowerPoint presentation to argue his case on the budget. He homes in on bottom-line realities: In talking about the importance of getting more students to graduate from college, he says people need to be made aware that their earning power increases more with an associate degree than if they spend three years at the University of Virginia without graduating.

He is also pragmatic. Limited by state law to one term, Mr. Warner has staked out an agenda in higher education and other areas that he hopes will produce measurable results in a short time frame. He delights, for instance, that he was able to get public and private colleges in the state to agree last fall to a set of subjects in which high-school students could take advanced courses and be assured of receiving college credit.

And he says he chose, as chairman of the national-governors group, to push reform of the senior year of high school because the goal is "doable." Other governors in that role, Mr. Warner says, have selected campaigns like curing poverty, tackling health-care problems, or fixing every school. "While those are noble goals," he says, "a lot of times the recommendations end up sitting on a shelf."

In conversations Mr. Warner is intense and animated. He makes sustained eye contact and often leans forward to emphasize points. But he is also quick to crack a joke and break into a wide, embracing smile. After practicing his State of the Commonwealth address with aides, for example, he laughs about his pronunciation gaffes and suggests having a football referee interrupt his speech and call a penalty if he becomes too long-winded or performs poorly, as in a recent series of beer commercials.

"This is a person who is overwhelmingly relaxed and personable," says Aims C. McGuinness Jr., a senior associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit group that works to improve the way colleges are run. When Mr. Warner first asked to meet with him, in February 2003, Mr. McGuinness remembers that he had donned a formal suit, but the governor arrived wearing blue jeans.

Mr. Warner is, at the same time, serious and thoroughly engrossed in exploring policy nuances, Mr. McGuinness says. Their meeting, he estimates, lasted four hours.

Learning the Ropes

Nevertheless, many college leaders say Mr. Warner got off to a slow start on higher education.

When he took office in 2002, his attention was largely consumed with attacking the $3.8-billion budget deficit the state then faced and with meeting other high-priority needs, such as transportation. The governor slashed state appropriations to colleges, along with those of most other agencies, to try to get Virginia out of the red. The first spending plan adopted under his watch cut higher education by 9.3 percent in 2002-3 and by 12.4 percent in 2003-4.

"There was kind of a general disappointment in years one and two as he was feeling his way and learning the ropes," says David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

Even as he was cutting college budgets, though, Mr. Warner was beginning to win some favor from higher-education leaders. Within a month of taking office, he issued an executive order to establish a commission to screen candidates for university governing boards. Many college presidents praise the action for improving the quality of their boards, which they felt had become too political under previous governors.

Mr. Warner also reached into the community-college ranks for his education secretary, selecting Belle S. Wheelan, president of Northern Virginia Community College.

In the fall of his first year in office, Mr. Warner aggressively campaigned for a $900-million bond package, which had been proposed by Republican lawmakers, to pay for campus construction projects. Proponents of the package credit the governor with helping to persuade voters to approve the plan by an overwhelming margin. The next spring, Mr. Warner immersed himself in helping to get Virginia Tech into the Atlantic Coast Conference in athletics. He pressured administrators at the University of Virginia, already a conference member, to lobby on behalf of Virginia Tech, which stood to gain greater national visibility and more television money by becoming an ACC member.

Charles W. Steger, president of Virginia Tech, says Governor Warner's involvement was significant in getting his university invited to join the conference. "Many times a university president may not speak to a governor more than four or five times in one term," Mr. Steger says. During the ACC negotiations, "I talked with him four or five times in one day."

Mr. Warner's tenacity serves him particularly well in one-on-one encounters with lawmakers, college leaders, and others, and it is in those private meetings where many say he is most effective.

In last year's budget debate, Mr. Warner says, he worked to appeal to the "sensible center" of Virginia's political parties as he went back to lawmakers, again and again, to try to persuade them to vote for the tax package. "You can't be some raging partisan," Mr. Warner says. "I don't think every good policy idea comes with a D or an R next to it. You have to be relentless in making your case."

The governor also had allies in the budget debate among higher-education and business leaders.

Paul S. Trible Jr., president of Christopher Newport University, who formerly served Virginia in the U.S. Senate as a Republican, led a group of college presidents and others who stumped for the tax package. Mr. Trible says that budget cuts earlier this decade had forced him to eliminate his university's programs in nursing and other areas, increase class sizes, and lay off faculty members.

"One can be conservative and also believe there are times that it is necessary and important to make investments in important government services," Mr. Trible says. "Mark deserves much of the credit that higher education once again is now a priority in the minds of the people of Virginia."

Critics of some of the governor's policies, though, argue that such praise for Mr. Warner overstates his impact and overlooks how Republican lawmakers pushed for higher education, such as in the 2002 bond measure.

G. Paul Nardo, chief adviser to Del. William J. Howell, speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, says that most members of the General Assembly want to support the state's high-quality colleges as much as the governor does. And he questions how far some of the governor's policies, such as his plan to improve the senior year of high school, will go in making widespread changes.

"Some of the things he pledged in higher education is amorphous stuff," Mr. Nardo says.

Meeting State Needs

For his part, Mr. Warner hopes that some of his higher-education legacy will evolve from a debate this year over university governance.

Last year the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech began pushing a proposal to sever many of their ties with the state and become state-assisted charter universities, a new kind of institution. Governor Warner was skeptical about how much money the institutions would actually save by winning some of the operating flexibilities they sought. And, like many lawmakers, he was hesitant to create a whole new class of university, fearing that the institutions might stray from their public missions.

Timothy J. Sullivan, president of the College of William and Mary, says he got a phone call last summer from the governor. "He said, 'OK, Tim, I've been reading in the newspapers what all of you want,'" Mr. Sullivan recounts. "'Do you think we ought to sit down and talk about it?'"

Mr. Sullivan says he and other university presidents seeking charter status shared a two-hour lunch with the governor to discuss their views. "In my 13 years as president, that has never happened," Mr. Sullivan says, praising the governor for being candid and establishing a clear process for continuing talks.

The legislation now moving through the General Assembly, and supported by the governor, does not go as far as the three universities had proposed. But Mr. Sullivan and the other presidents praise the plan for granting them more flexibility and laying out a process by which they could seek more freedom in management decisions. The state's other college leaders also embrace the legislation for extending the new leeway to all state colleges.

In exchange for less regulation, the state's public institutions would have to develop six-year financial, academic, and enrollment plans to spell out how they would help meet state needs. Colleges, for instance, would have to detail such factors as how much tuition they would charge each year under different scenarios for how much state aid they might receive, and how they planned to forge closer ties with elementary and secondary schools.

That is where Governor Warner hopes he can help make a lasting mark. "Governors come and go," he says. "Even legislators come and go. The people with the longest terms often are college presidents.

"This is a way to get a long-term commitment from them. If we can get them to put that in writing, that'd be pretty cool."

Governor Warner's approach to higher education has won plaudits from some national experts. Gordon K. Davies, executive director of the National Collaborative for Postsecondary Education Policy and a former director of Virginia's higher-education coordinating board, especially praises Mr. Warner's way of approaching institutions as a means to fulfilling broad state needs rather than as an end in themselves.

"This is a crucial shift in policy perspective," Mr. Davies writes in an e-mail message. He adds that it is an especially hard one to make in Virginia, where all of the state's universities strive to be elite, like the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary.

Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, also credits Mr. Warner with pulling Virginia out of a spiral of declining spending on higher education. "He has a remarkable set of initiatives moving forward in Virginia and is starting to energize the discussions around the country," he says. "I can't imagine that he's not going to be a player in American politics for a long time to come."

Presidential Aspirations

But Governor Warner, who is 50, says he is not so sure what his future holds. As he sits in his office in the Capitol, just over a week into his final legislative session, he is flanked by portraits of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the wall behind him. Just below them, on side tables, he has displayed several photos of his wife, Lisa Collis, and their three daughters.

He says he will have to reconcile his political and personal worlds in deciding what to do next. His wife and children aren't "real keen on all of this," he says.

Just the day before, in chilly Washington weather, the governor attended President Bush's second inauguration. So with all the buzz around him as potential presidential material, did he indulge in any visions of himself on the podium?

Mr. Warner smiles, shakes his head no. Then, he adds, "Also, I had cold feet."

It takes a moment for him to catch his double entendre. His smile widens, and he nods. "That was a good one," he says, chuckling. But before he dwells too long on the prospects, he pulls himself back to the present.

The businessman is back on task. People keep asking him to reflect on his term as governor, he says. But "we've got a lot of things still to do this year," he notes. "I've still got 25 percent of my job left."

• B.A. in political science, George Washington University, 1977
• J.D., Harvard University, 1980

• Governor of Virginia, 2002-present
• Chairman, National Governors Association, 2004-present
• Virginia's Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, 1996; spent $10-million of his own money on the campaign, which he lost to U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, a Republican (to whom he is not related)
• Chairman, Virginia Democratic Party, 1993-95
• Campaign manager for L. Douglas Wilder's successful run for Virginia governor, 1989 Business-career highlights
• Co-founder and managing partner, Columbia Capital Corporation, an Alexandria, Va.-based venture-capital firm, 1989-2001; co-founder of Nextel Communications Inc.
• Founder, Tech Riders, a program that provides free computer-training classes in places such as churches and libraries across Virginia, 2000
• Founding partner, SeniorNavigator.com, a nonprofit group that provides free online information about health care to elderly Virginia residents, 1999

• Chairman, Education Commission of the States, 2003-4
• Served on the boards of the Appalachian School of Law, George Washington University, Virginia Union University, and the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges
• Founder, Virginia High-Tech Partnership, which connects students at Virginia's historically black colleges with internships and jobs at technology companies, 1998