WurfWhile

Virginia governor and presidential aspirant Mark Warner has taken two stands recently with future campaign implications. Today he commuted the sentence of Robin Lovitt to life without parole, saying that murder trial evidence was improperly destroyed, depriving the defense of modern DNA testing to establish innocence. This was Warner’s first commutation of a death sentence since becoming governor. Yesterday Warner said that their should be no target date for troop withdrawal in Iraq, instead troop withdrawals should coincide with benchmarks of improvement.

Politically Warner had good reason not to have his name associated with the 1,000th execution in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty legal in 1976. Warner has advocated DNA testing in his “tough but fair” approach to crime, which allowed him a handy way to avoid the milestone. Warner’s calculation in the case of Iraq is less clear (read comments too). In acting tough, he may have made it tough to make his case to Democratic primary voters (myself included). Yesterday Warner said “This Democrat doesn’t think we need to re-fight how we got into (the Iraq war).” Today a blog commenter, Sarah, disagreed, saying it meant that “[a]ccountability is not that important according to you, Mark.” My take is slightly different. We may not need to “re-fight how we got into” Iraq - but if you’re now going to stay there with benchmarks to get out, we might want to first consider just what it is we’re doing there in the first place. You have to “account” for how you got there and where you are before you know where you’re going - and why. Any honest accounting at this point would seem to argue for a pretty quick withdrawal. It’s long past time where we can do much good. Warner didn’t vote for the Iraq War - so his position bears a different type of scrutiny. It’s calculated and, to my mind, tragically miscalibrated.