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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 Mehlman also sits on the board of the Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, which plans to put a monument to the civil-rights leader on the National Mall, near where King delivered his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. He cites King as one of the most influential and inspiring leaders of the twentieth century for forcing America to confront its history of racial bigotry. “Our nation was never a perfect nation and still isn’t, but what is so great about America is that we don’t believe we’re perfect,” Mehlman says. “We realize we constantly have to improve, evolve, and make ourselves better.” Former Virginia governor Mark Warner, J.D. ’80, has always been a big-ideas guy. After law school, he made a fortune in the emerging cell-phone industry and then spent much of the 1990s as a venture capitalist in northern Virginia’s technology corridor. Today, with the presidential election little more than a year away—and continued speculation that he will be tapped as a vice-presidential nominee—he wants to see some new big ideas. Voters, he says, are looking for “a leader who’s willing to do not the incremental fix, but the big fix, the Rooseveltian fix. They want a leader who won’t be afraid of the future.” At one time, Warner might just have been that figure. But a year ago he chose not to run for president, placing time with his family—his wife and three teenage daughters—above his political ambition. As he sought the counsel of others who had faced similar decisions, he says he was told, “If you can live with yourself not doing it, you should probably not do it.” Still, stepping back was hard for a man who has always sought to be at the center of political debate—and for whom the current crop of candidates often falls short. Politics has been Warner’s focus ever since an eighth-grade teacher inspired him to work for social and political change during the turbulent year of 1968. He grew up in Indiana and Connecticut, but applied only to colleges in Washington, D.C. While attending George Washington University (he was the first in his family to graduate from college), he interned on Capitol Hill, riding his bike over early in the morning to open mail for a series of Connecticut representatives. Next came Harvard Law School (HLS), where classmates remember him as everybody’s friend and where he was recruited to coach the school’s first women’s intramural basketball team. The school for him was less about lawyering—he jokes that he was not a natural lawyer and so was the only member of his class not to receive a job offer from either firm he worked for one summer—and much more about forming friendships. “Our class was more cohesive than others, and in part that was really Mark’s influence,” explains Helen Marinak Blohm, J.D. ’80, who played on that basketball team. “He would often be the one planning the party, getting the group together, or doing social things that made us seem more connected to each other.” To this day, some of his closest friends, including top adviser Howard Gutman, now a partner at Williams & Connolly, are old HLS classmates. Back in Washington after graduation, working for the Democratic National Committee as a fundraiser, Warner observed the plight of candidates burdened by large campaign debts and decided to secure his financial future before entering public life. His first two ventures failed, but his third, buying and trading spectrum licenses—the airwaves upon which cell-phone calls are transmitted—earned him an estimated $200 million. His reentry into politics, managing a gubernatorial bid for Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, came just months after he nearly died of a burst appendix while he and his wife, Lisa Collis, were on their honeymoon in 1989. Wilder won the race and Warner took over the state party, making more friends and building a network that launched him into the 1996 U.S. Senate race against the popular Republican incumbent, John Warner. Warner versus Warner was not particularly close, but Warner still laughs about the time he was campaigning in southern Virginia with signs that read “Mark not John,” and a driver pulled over to ask, “Is that a biblical reference?” Following the loss, Warner retired to his Alexandria venture-capital firm, Columbia Capital, and got involved in projects around the state that kept his contacts and networks alive for another campaign. Among other things, he set up programs to help students learn computer skills and, as the dot-com boom of the late 1990s took offin Northern Virginia, he developed a website to help senior citizens navigate healthcare choices. In 2001, stepping into a political void, Warner ran for governor at a time when Democrats did not hold a single statewide office. To the surprise of nearly everyone, he won by a narrow margin, thanks to aggressive outreach to sportsmen and rural Virginians in the southwestern corner of the state, where he was helped by a bluegrass theme song and a NASCAR truck sponsorship. The nation was grappling with the recent shock of September 11; Warner had watched the Pentagon burn from the roof of his campaign headquarters. Because Virginia allows its governors to run again, but not to succeed themselves, Warner knew from the moment he entered office that the clock was ticking down on his four-year term. He confronted a softening economy and financial chaos, including a state deficit that soared from $700 million to $3.8 billion. He soon became known as the “PowerPoint governor” for his tireless jawboning across the state with charts, graphs, and presentations. His efforts resulted in a budget deal with the Republican-dominated legislature that raised taxes and added reforms to close the deficit without severe budget cuts. The money, he asserted, preserved the state’s coveted AAA bond rating and paved the way for record-setting investment in the state’s K-12 educational system. By the time he left office in 2006 (leaving matters to his hand-picked successor, Timothy Kaine), Warner was wildly popular across the state. He had helped to install a massive broadband network for rural areas and to revitalize the state’s economy and government; during his tenure, Virginia was named one of the two best-managed states in the country by Governing magazine. He had also set himself up for presidential-level politics. Much of 2006 was spent on his undeclared campaign, which included building a staffof 40, raising some $10 million, and traveling extensively: throughout small towns in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, and to fundraisers in New York and California. But the thought of the road ahead and the time away from his daughters was daunting, he says now, and in the end, he decided he could live without the presidency. A year later, he is not sure he made the right decision. The scope of the presidency is so huge, he said in a recent interview, the challenges and decisions made in the Oval Office so monumental, that “I’m not sure that you don’t want someone with some ambivalence or some question in their minds. If you’ve got so much confidence that you think you’re absolutely the right person, absolutely capable, I’m not sure that’s the best criterion.” These days, Warner has again retreated from front-line politics to figure out his future. Back at Columbia Capital, he is involved in a myriad of causes, committees, and task forces looking at the emerging challenges of this century. He has been weighing whether to run for the U.S. Senate in 2008 (which would likely take him out of the vice-presidential running, because it would be hard for Virginia Democrats to find a new Senate candidate just months before the election), or possibly to run for governor again in 2009. Whatever the next year or two may bring, Warner’s not ready to exit the political debate. He’s anxious to see the nation’s leaders address the looming issues of globalization and technology, and knows that major changes will be needed to ready the country for the future. “The political class in this country has gotten institutionally conservative about being willing to offer challenging ideas, big ideas, but I think people are ready for a bigger idea,” he explains. “They expect national leaders to call them to some greater purpose—in conjunction with government—to see if we can get some of our problems fixed. We need a win. The country needs a win. They need to feel proud of the direction our country is going.” ~Garrett M. Graff Garrett M. Graff ’03 is editor at large at Washingtonian magazine, where he covers media and politics. His first book, The First Campaign: Globalizaton, the Web, and the Race for the White House, will appear this December. In 2002-2003, he served as one of this magazine’s Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellows.  
 
 
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