Mr. Warner, a former Virginia governor, avoids partisan posturing in favor of consistent focus on critical problems. He did so as a member of the bipartisan Gang of Six, in 2011, which proposed a grand bargain of deep spending cuts and tax increases to close a yawning national debt. He has done so as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which produced a meticulously documented, nearly 1,000-page bipartisan report that detailed the extent of Russian manipulation on behalf of President Trump’s campaign in the 2016 elections. And he did so as a tech-savvy former telecommunications investor and executive, warning of social media’s vulnerabilities and responsibilities in the face of foreign meddling, and of China’s growing threat to national security and democracy arising from its influence across technology fields. More recently, he has been a driving force behind bipartisan legislation aimed at empowering the Department of Veterans Affairs to more effectively reach and assist at-risk veterans whose suicide rate — estimated at 17 each day — has remained alarmingly high.
His Republican challenger this year, Daniel Gade, is an Army veteran with more than 20 years of service who, as a tank company commander in Iraq, lost a leg in combat. He has since taught at West Point, his alma mater, and, more recently, American University.
Running in a state that has elected no Republican to statewide office since 2009, Mr. Gade — a resident of Alexandria, as is Mr. Warner — has taken more centrist positions on several issues than most GOP officeholders. He opposes the Trump administration’s crusade to deport most undocumented immigrants, including “dreamers” and recipients of Temporary Protected Status, and would maintain a robust program of refugee admissions. Notably, he calls Mr. Trump’s self-dealing in office “unseemly” and, more broadly, as he told us, “no one should expect me to be a party-line vote on anything.”
Yet while he insists that deficit spending is “immoral,” as he says in a video on his website, and that he would buck GOP orthodoxy to restore a balanced budget, Mr. Gade, who supports tax cuts generally, said he would have probably voted for the massive Trump tax cut of 2017. That measure, which mainly benefited corporations and the wealthy, is projected to add nearly $2 trillion over a decade to the very deficit spending he abhors, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Mr. Gade is a decent man who has run a civil campaign. That’s to his credit, but it is no reason to unseat Mr. Warner, who is a credit to Virginia.
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