Senator Warner Will Not Seek Re-election
By ROBIN TONER and DAVID STOUT
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, one of the Republican Party’s most influential figures on military issues and an increasingly critical voice on the course of the war in Iraq, announced today that he will not run for re-election next year.
Mr. Warner said he had had “a magnificent and very rewarding career,” but that he had decided it was time to step aside rather than seek a sixth term.
Mr. Warner’s retirement creates a major new vulnerability for his party in the struggle for control of the Senate, leaving an open seat in a conservative state that has increasingly trended Democratic the last few years. Democrats are already favored to hold, if not enlarge, their slender majority in the Senate, if only because of the large number of Republican seats that are up in 2008: 22, compared with just 12 for the Democrats.
The 80-year-old Mr. Warner, who was first elected to the Senate in 1978, kept his decision closely held Thursday, and aides insisted that speculation about a retirement was just that — speculation. But the senator, who has been weighing his plans for months, talked openly on the NBC News television program “Meet the Press” last weekend about the prospect of continuing in so demanding a job into his late 80s.
“The Senate requires you to go full bore, six or seven days a week, tremendous energy, go to Iraq, jump in and out of helicopters, get on the cargo planes, no sleep,” he said. “And I’ve got to assess, at this age, whether it is fair to Virginia to ask for a contract for another six years.”
(Continued here.)
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, one of the Republican Party’s most influential figures on military issues and an increasingly critical voice on the course of the war in Iraq, announced today that he will not run for re-election next year.
Mr. Warner said he had had “a magnificent and very rewarding career,” but that he had decided it was time to step aside rather than seek a sixth term.
Mr. Warner’s retirement creates a major new vulnerability for his party in the struggle for control of the Senate, leaving an open seat in a conservative state that has increasingly trended Democratic the last few years. Democrats are already favored to hold, if not enlarge, their slender majority in the Senate, if only because of the large number of Republican seats that are up in 2008: 22, compared with just 12 for the Democrats.
The 80-year-old Mr. Warner, who was first elected to the Senate in 1978, kept his decision closely held Thursday, and aides insisted that speculation about a retirement was just that — speculation. But the senator, who has been weighing his plans for months, talked openly on the NBC News television program “Meet the Press” last weekend about the prospect of continuing in so demanding a job into his late 80s.
“The Senate requires you to go full bore, six or seven days a week, tremendous energy, go to Iraq, jump in and out of helicopters, get on the cargo planes, no sleep,” he said. “And I’ve got to assess, at this age, whether it is fair to Virginia to ask for a contract for another six years.”
(Continued here.)
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