"He's finally done the right thing," Griffith said. "It would have been nice to see it happen years ago. The bottom line is we fought the battle. I think this ends it."
That would be good news for Warner, who would like nothing better than to leave office a year from now with his reputation for straight talk intact. He'll need that if he decides to run for the U.S. Senate or the presidency.
If you look carefully, most of Warner's actions as governor have been designed to bolster the case that he's the guy to talk honestly about the state's financial mess.
He took on the Transportation Department's bloated bureaucracy. He slashed budgets. He revised the way the state buys computers.
Then he led a tax fight last session that had as its chief selling point a chart showing expenses outpacing revenue through the end of the decade.
"The lines don't cross," he told anyone who would listen.
The accusations by Republicans about his less-than-straightforward office budget threatened to undermine his consistent theme of honest accounting.
But Warner appears to have realized that and acted quickly to snuff out a potentially damaging story.
In doing so, he's probably rescued his gubernatorial shtick.
