If there has been a perception that Democrats are somehow anti-faith -- you go back to this notion of the image that has been made of a "national Democrat," which is, you know, intellectual, anti-faith, anti-small town, anti-traditional values. But that doesn't mean that you go from that image to saying that everyone has to start with a quote from the Bible and that we have to lace that through everything we do.

And if Democrats are perceived as anti-faith in some way, then pushing too hard on that front just makes them look phony. Kerry didn't do it well, and Dean doesn't either. So much seems to revolve around personal authenticity -- you were able to sponsor a NASCAR truck as part of your campaign for governor, but if Kerry had done that he would have been the subject of a million more late-night jokes.

I don't know how to say this politely. But in all the things I did in the campaign -- well, I like NASCAR, I like bluegrass. But I didn't try to say, "That's who I am." I didn't suddenly start putting on, you know, cowboy boots and carrying a guitar or wearing camo all the time to show I'm a supporter of sportsmen. I am who I am.

So what are your plans?

Let's make some news this morning!

Break it all right here in Salon.

You know, I want to be part of this debate. If Democrats do not commit to being a national party, competitive everywhere in this country, we do not only our party but our country a disservice. Because even if we elect a president on a 16- or 17-state strategy, we skip two-thirds of this country, and I'm not sure we truly set the agenda.

I've got eight months left in this job. I've got the chairmanship of the National Governors Association. And then I'll have some choices to make. The one option I have that maybe some don't is having had a life before politics in business and the ability to do a lot of things from the private, philanthropic side. That's still an option, too. I wish I had four more years in this job right now, because there are a lot of things we've started in Virginia that won't be fully finished in the four years.

And if you were to run in 2008, are you confident that you can have the kind of discussion you want to have about issues like national security, immigration, Social Security and the like without being diverted by 2008's version of the Swift Boat ads and who flip-flopped about what?

What we've got to have -- you're going to need positions. You're going to need well-thought-out positions. But you're also going to need two or three ideas that capture the imagination. In 2004, out of both those campaigns, you didn't hear many of those ideas.

I'm thinking of Clinton in 1992, with the notion of national service. He mostly never implemented it, but it captured people's imagination. There was Bush's idea in 2000 of a compassionate conservatism, and to a degree the faith-based stuff. I'm not saying I agreed with it, but it captured people's imagination: Is there a different way to help people who are less fortunate in our society?

When I talk to folks, I go through some of the things we're doing in Virginia, whether it's changing the incentive system for teachers, whether it's making sure a student can gain a semester's worth of college credit in high school, whether it's guaranteeing a kid who's not going to college an industry certification along with a high school diploma if they meet certain criteria. I'm not sure that any of those are big enough ideas, but they're the kinds of things that people go away saying, "There's an idea there." Democrats ought to be about percolating a lot of these ideas, about capturing some of these ideas.

Does putting out those kinds of specific ideas help you get through the noise?

If the Democrats are not simply about protecting existing government programs, no matter how good those programs may be, but instead are about a new idea about how your kid's going to get a better education, or about how your mom or dad is going to be taken care of on a long-term care basis, or about how your family is going to be able to give a son a minimum healthcare benefit package that doesn't break their bank or the employer's bank, or just a notion of how we're going to put rural values back in, where you don't have to move away to find that job, so you can do it in rural America, in a small midsize city -- in a way, the idea's important, but equally important is that you're talking about the future. You're talking about an aspiration. You're talking about giving people hope.

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