Warner criticizes Team Obama

Two years after delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, a onetime rising star in the party raised an eyebrow Tuesday at the administration of President Barack Obama.

Sen. Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor and cellphone pioneer, said he wished “there were more folks in the administration who had met a payroll and worked in business.”

That echoed a frequent Republican criticism of Obama, whose meteoric political ascent carried him from Illinois state lawmaker to junior senator to the White House before he’d finished a full term in Washington.

For two hours Tuesday, Warner met employees here in the research and development and content areas of language software company Rosetta Stone, delivering thoughtful and sometimes sobering answers to their questions.

He said he did not realize until he took office in January 2009 “how much of a ditch” the country had dug.

The blame, he said, extends from the highest halls of power to Main Street.

“The American people have to look in the mirror. We were all too over-leveraged,” the junior senator said.

Warner said he believes the much-criticized federal stimulus avoided a worse financial catastrophe for the country, but the future must include more credit for small businesses and more exports for U.S. products.

“They want to buy our stuff if we make good stuff,” Warner said of foreign countries.

Despite the decline of U.S. industry, Warner said the country must refocus its efforts on a manufacturing-based economy.

The United States can learn from Germany, a country that pays higher wages than the United States and has upgraded worker training, he said.

During his less than two years in Washington, Warner said he has learned that bottlenecks are just as clogged inside the Beltway as on it.

For decades, Warner was accustomed to making decisions as a business innovator and then governor of Virginia, where he grappled with budget shortfalls and marshaled bipartisan legislative support for a state sales tax increase to more fully fund K-12 education.

He said he has found the “process part” of being a U.S. senator frustrating as well as the lack of bipartisan work in the upper chamber.

“I’m really disappointed there is not more center ground,” he said.

Still, Warner said he relished reaching across the aisle and working with Republican senators such as Tennessee’s Bob Corker on financial reform and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham on energy.

Warner said he is convinced much as he was when he ran for the Senate that the solutions to America’s problems are named neither Democrat or Republican nor left versus right but in working together in the political center. He said he thinks the media focus on the political infighting can be misleading.

“All you hear about now is the bickering. There are a lot of good people in both parties,” he said.

Warner seemed to savor his rare venture beyond the Capitol, heaping praise on Rosetta Stone, a nearly 20-year-old company that has grown to a worldwide base of 1,900 workers, many of them in Harrisonburg.

The company’s executive offices are in Northern Virginia, and it has offices in London and Tokyo.

Rosetta Stone CEO Tom Adams introduced Warner to his employees as the Virginia governor “who did more for K-12 education than any other governor.”

Warner cited the growth of Rosetta Stone as an example of where America needs to go.
“This is a success story that needs to be celebrated,” he said.

He noted that the company uses technology to provide its products and is located neither in the Silicon Valley nor Northern Virginia but in the pristine Shenandoah Valley.

Despite the tough economic times, Warner said, he still has faith in the United States.

“The greatest thing about the country is that we are up to meeting the challenge,” he said.

Warner plans to wrap up his two-day swing through the Valley today with a town hall meeting at James Madison University followed by a late-morning roundtable with small business owners from Staunton and Waynesboro at Cranberry’s Grocery and Eatery in Staunton.