Whereas with the Republican Party, until recently, their hard-core, conservative activist base has asked their candidates to pay lip service [to its agenda] but really hasn't asked for results. Well, now that's changing. Whether it's the Schiavo case or those who moved the Senate to the brink on the nuclear option, I think you're seeing it. You're starting to see it on the stem-cell debate. Now there is this move on the Republican side: We're not only going to ask you to have these positions, we're going to ask for action. That suddenly means that perhaps the most vulnerable entity in politics today is not the liberal Democrat but the moderate Republican.

You've said in the past that Democrats can't move forward if every political conversation begins with abortion, God and guns. But the Republicans aren't going to let any conversation begin any other way. How do you break through that?

Well, on guns, I'm a supporter of existing gun laws. I believe in enforcing the existing ones rather than adding a whole lot of new ones. I remember the Washington Post, when I ran [for governor], ran a front-page story, "Warner Goes After Gun Owners, Courts NRA Members." You know, I had an awful lot of my friends in northern Virginia pretty upset with me. But I had, suddenly, a whole lot of folks in three quarters of the rest of the state who were willing to listen to my ideas about education or economic development or about where the future of the communities lies because they said, "We're going to give you a chance."

Is gun control an issue on which Democrats ought to be making moves toward the right?

If you look at [Montana Gov.] Brian Schweitzer, Mike Easley in North Carolina, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Phil Bredesen in Tennessee, Kathleen Blanco in Louisiana, Kathleen Sebelius in Kansas -- these were candidates who have been reasonable on gun control but who have said, "We strongly support Second Amendment rights." I think there are some in some parts of America, Democrats, who see guns only as an issue that revolves around crime, when in most of America it revolves around culture and home.

And it's easier, politically, for a Democrat to give up on gun control as opposed to, say, abortion rights.

I'm pro-choice, but I've been willing to support parental notification. Many folks in the Democratic Party are concerned that the debate around abortion has moved from a woman's ability to make a decision based on her own religious belief about what to do, about what kind of choice she wants to make -- where I think the overwhelming majority of Americans would still say, you know, we ought to be as much as we can about preventing abortion and we ought to be as much as we can about ensuring that women have adequate healthcare, but that ultimately a woman ought to have that choice. But the debate has moved instead to, in this rare case of late-term abortions, should we have that procedure permitted when it's "life of the mother" or "life and health of the mother"?

And my sense, when I heard President Bush and Senator Kerry debate it, is that that was the distinction they were arguing over! So that debate has shifted, and at some point there may be a shift back. I think the vast majority of Americans do not want to see an overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

This has been [the religious right's goal] for years, but in many ways many of the Republican candidates have paid lip service to that. The right hasn't really asked for action. Now they're saying, "We've got a majority in the House; we've got 55 votes in the Senate; we've got the presidency, and it's not the first year or the first two years; we control every lever of power in the federal government; we have the majority of the governorships; we have the majority of the state legislatures. When are we going to see action?"

And Bill Frist gets all but a really small handful of Bush's judicial nominees confirmed, and he's considered a sellout and a traitor to the cause.

And that orthodoxy is every bit as foreign to where most Americans are as the stereotype of the Hollywood/New York liberal Democrat that also seems out of the mainstream.

How did you position yourself to appeal to rural voters?

The reason I won, going back to the future-versus-past argument -- part of the promise of the global economy, or what we used to call the "new economy," but it's not p.c. anymore, is that you don't need to leave whole communities behind. You can build it anywhere. You don't need to be in the Silicon Valley or northern Virginia or Route 128 in Boston. But that promise has been largely unrealized.

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