Lesson from Virginia

With Election 2001 now history, Maine’s 2002 gubernatorial race can begin in earnest. Candidates pursuing victory here would do well to follow the course laid out by the winner Tuesday in Virginia.

Virginia’s governor-elect is Democrat Mark Warner, a telecommunications multimillionaire who has never held elective office. His opponent, Republican Mark Earley, is a former state senator and attorney general. The overarching issue in Virginia, however, was not political experience but economic development. Virginia, like many states, including Maine, is struggling with economic disparity that the boom of the 1990s did not equalize and that the current downturn aggravates. While the regions around Washington, D.C., and Richmond, the state capital, enjoy ever-increasing prosperity, rural southwestern Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, struggles with poverty, unemployment and population flight. It is Virginia’s northern Maine.

Mr. Earley acknowledged the problem, but, like many statewide candidates before him, offered southwestern Virginians no solution beyond patience, perseverance and vague assertions that an improved business climate eventually would send economic growth trickling down their way. Mr. Warner also acknowledged the problem but made specific, concrete solutions the center of his campaign.

It was a campaign spent, to an unprecedented degree, in southwestern Virginia. Mr. Warner, in fact, campaigned so extensively there that many political observers wondered if investing so much time, energy and money in a part of the state with so few votes was a sign of the candidate’s inexperience.

It was a strategy that paid off in two ways. Mr. Warner carried rural precincts Democrats hadn’t won in decades. And his message that investing in the economic self-sufficiency of southwestern Virginia was better than continuing to prop up its decline rang true with voters in prosperous regions.

Mr. Warner did not, however, merely give a lot of speeches in southwestern Virginia – he gave details, at least to a degree not common in campaign speeches. He outlined targeted economic-development initiatives, from specific transportation, utility and telecommunications upgrades to business-development loan funds and tax incentives.

Rather than just wish for greater access to higher education in rural areas, he proposed taking 2 percent off the top of state revenues every year – some $250 million – to actually expand access. With legislators in a long stalemate over whether limited highway funds should be used to improve roads in neglected rural regions or to relieve the strangling traffic congestion around fast-growing Washington, Mr. Warner did what no other statewide candidate had ever dared – he endorsed allowing Virginians to vote on local-option sales taxes to fund local road projects.

Mr. Warner’s ability to deliver on these proposals depends upon many things, including the Virginia legislature, the House of Delegates, which is famously fond of impasse, and a state charter that limits governors to one term. What’s immediately important to Maine’s candidates, and to its voters, is not how well he does in office but how he got there.