Cigar Store Centrists

What do Senator Hillary Rodham Evilyn Hughie Long Ardra Cerebus Clinton and Virginia Governor Mark Warner have in common besides party affliation? They're both make-believe moderates:

Governor Warner's pitch is thoroughly Clintonian - Bill, not Hillary. He attacks Washington Democrats for "defending the same government programs, thinking they are going to get us new results." Then he adds, "We need leaders who can see a little bit farther down the road." This sounds like a man who wants to build a bridge to the 21st century. He lobs rhetorical grenades at the party leaders for running presidential campaigns that immediately surrender 33 mostly Southern and Western states and then "try for a triple bank shot" to win all the other 17.

Governor Warner's favorite theme is right out of the Bill Clinton/Robert Rubin playbook: fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction. He pontificates routinely about taking on "the big task" of reducing the budget deficit and tackling health care. He's been meeting with Republican governors on Medicaid reform, and asking Washington to give the states more flexibility and independence in running the program.

If all of this sounds a little too good to be true - well, it is. As governor of Virginia, Mr. Warner can best be described as a fairly boilerplate tax-and-spend liberal. Even Democrats in the state agree that his only real "victory" in three-and-a-half years in the state house has been to enact a giant tax increase last year that he plotted to enact over his entire term....

Governor Warner alleges that the tax hike was necessary to balance the budget and preserve the state's triple-A bond rating. That was mostly a canard. Months before the tax hike was enacted, the state's revenue office reported a massive 7.5% surge in tax receipts from the previous year due to the national economic recovery. This year, with the higher tax rate, tax receipts have exploded by 12% and the state legislature is swimming in a green river. Just as Governor Warner's opponents had warned, these extra taxes have not been dedicated to balancing the budget, but to spending on every program imaginable - from schools to mass-transit boondoggles, to day-care subsidies.

What's the moral of this story? You can trust a successful Democrat in one area, and one area only - no, make that two: to be a liberal, and to be dishonest about it. And whereas Mark Warner's national image, unlike Hillary's, hasn't been written yet, Mrs. Clinton has a thirteen year experience advantage on the ins, outs, and finer points of continental propaganda. Which means that if Warner does run in 2008, his fate is far more likely to be ignominy and ruin than it is Hail to the Chief.

Don't be surprised if Queen Mean doesn't take a prominent supportive role in Warner's 2006 challenge to his gubernatorial predecessor, George Allen, though. Eliminating her most viable potential GOP opponent in 2008 and making a Senator Warner beholden to her for his seat, and thus with leverage over his decision to run for her '08 Dem nomination, would be a quintessentially Clintonian coup.

Say, if Hillary does win, won't that tune have to be changed to Hail to the Squaw....?