Remember at last year’s Republican Convention when Texas Congressman Ted Cruz was all but christened as a future President by lazy pundits simply because he was in the GOP and had an Hispanic name? None of these well-paid shoutbots actually stopped to notice that Cruz was a paranoid wackjob un-electable in a national contest even in the sovereign country of Upper Nixonia. 

Mark Warner, former Virginia Governor, was once that guy for the other party. A Southern liberal technocrat made left-leaning politicos salivate before they became aware that shifting demographics were jumbling the electoral map. In 2006, the very talented political reporter Matt Bai wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine about Warner as the apparent anti-Hillary. You heard rumors by 2008 about why Warner ultimately passed on a campaign, but who knows why he didn’t run? We should all pause the next time someone is “nominated” because they fit into certain categories. Barack Obama, who most certainly did not fit into any of them, is mentioned almost as an afterthought in Bai’s piece. The opening of the article, which is now largely remembered for the altered colors of the eccentric cover art:

“If you harbor serious thoughts of running for the presidency, the first thing you do — long before you commission any polls or make any ads, years before you charter planes to take you back and forth between Iowa and New Hampshire — is to sit down with guys like Chris Korge. A real-estate developer in Coral Gables, outside Miami, Korge is one of the Democratic Party’s most proficient “bundlers.” That is, in the last two presidential elections, he bundled together more than $7 million in campaign checks for Al Gore and John Kerry from his friends and contacts.

For Korge, the 2008 presidential campaign began a few days after Kerry lost, when, he says, one prospective candidate — he won’t say who — called to enlist his help. Having raised money for both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, which earned him an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, Korge already knew he would support Hillary Clinton if she ran; he considers her the most impressive politician he has ever met, including her husband. But that didn’t stop her potential rivals — John Edwards, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh, Wesley Clark — from dropping by, nor did it stop Korge, a guy who rightly prides himself on knowing just about everybody in Democratic politics, from taking the meetings. ‘In the last six months, I’ve pretty much seen or talked with all of them, or they’ve tried to meet with me,’ Korge told me during a conversation in late January.

A few weeks before we spoke, Korge had lunch at the Capital Grille in Miami with Mark Warner, who was then in his final weeks as Virginia’s governor. Though little known nationally, Warner has emerged in recent months as the bright new star in the constellation of would-be candidates, a source of curiosity among Democrats searching for a charismatic outsider to lead the party. Pundits credit Warner’s popularity in Republican-dominated Virginia — his 80 percent approval rating when he left office made him one of the most adored governors in the state’s history — with enabling his Democratic lieutenant governor, Tim Kaine, to win the election to succeed him last November. Suddenly, Warner is being mentioned near the top of every list of candidates vying for the nomination in 2008.”