By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 13, 2006

Here's the funny thing: The day Mark Warner announced he wasn't going to run for president after all, he went to Iowa.

"Iowa." Politicians regard it with the same glassy-eyed hopefulness with which the conquistadors must have imagined El Dorado. Except yesterday, by the time Warner left Virginia to attend a previously scheduled fundraiser for Democratic state candidates, all the air had pfffed out of his balloon, and -- well, Warner's spokeswoman, Ellen Qualls, says it best:

"We just shoved the governor onto a plane to fly off ignominiously to Iowa."

Qualls is holed up in a suite at Richmond's Jefferson Hotel after a news conference. She says there's a bloody mary next to her but she's not going to drink it till she returns all the phone calls she's gotten about the big news. It may take a while.

Put aside the disappointed Warner staffers for a moment. Itinerant political foot soldiers are nothing new; that's the way of Washington. What about the stunned supporters and their wilting expectations? But he raised so much money! He had such good buzz! What about the guy who's spent the past two years operating a Web site to draft Warner to run? What about Jon Berkon at Harvard Law, who's been organizing pro-Warner meet-ups, and whose mom called him this morning? ("She was like, 'I have some bad news.' ")

What about George Appleby?

"I've been in these campaign wakes before and I don't like them," says Appleby, a litigator in Des Moines who decided about a year ago that Warner was his candidate. "I was around when Gary Hart got out . . . and it's an enduringly painful memory."

In fact, Appleby was around when a lot of Democratic candidates went down. He supported Morris Udall in '76, Ted Kennedy in '80, and then, after Hart, the following losers: Bruce Babbitt, Bob Kerrey and Bill Bradley. He has, as he says, an "unerring" instinct "for picking the good guy who's going to lose." Except when he picks the guy who's going to quit. Appleby's friends tease him that he carries a curse.

"I'm the bellwether," Appleby says. "Where I go, the country goes elsewhere."

Why, just yesterday, Eddie Ratliff, the fellow who runs the Draft Mark Warner for President PAC, which isn't connected to the campaign, put in a tentative order for 5,000 more Warner buttons. Then, Ratliff was up all night researching the legal ramifications of opening a campaign office in Iowa. This morning, he saw CNN.

He canceled the campaign buttons.

What will he do now?

"Maybe go catfishing," Ratliff says.

Outside places like Des Moines and Washington, this story won't play so big. So a man holds a news conference to declare that he's not going to do something that most of America didn't know he was thinking of doing in the first place -- so what? (Warner? Who is he? He that silver-haired senator from Virginia?) The presidential campaign calendar is speeded up so much now that a non-candidate can amass a staff and millions of dollars, seem like a viable challenge to the front-runner, and back out, all before most of the country has heard of him.

Qualls says Warner's announcement was sudden, in part, because several of Warner's friends called him recently to say they were planning on quitting their jobs to work for his campaign. If he told them not to, she says, they'd start to wonder why and news of his indecision might leak. He had to make the call quickly. He thought about it and decided, according to his statement, that he wanted to (as the cliche goes) spend more time with his family.

For now, Qualls still has a job. Warner's Forward Together PAC still has money to disburse to other Democratic candidates around the country and Warner has appearances to make.

For the ex-almost-candidate, "it's kind of a 'if you'll have me, I'll still come,' " Qualls says.

And after Election Day next month? What happens to Qualls?

Unknown.

By now, her bloody mary must be starting to sweat.

Appleby says he plans to attend Warner's fundraiser in the evening. Will Warner still have that sheen, that mix of hope and ambition that surrounds presidential aspirants?

"Some of the electricity will be gone, probably," Appleby says. "Maybe I'll ask him whom he likes." For president, that is.