Mark Warner to Announce He Won't Run for President?

Well, that would be kinda nice for us. He was the only candidate with the Southern/moderate creds to turn possibly turn some Southern states and the backing of the powerful left blogosphere. Which makes me think he wasn't really all that moderate, but they could very well have gotten away with convincing enough people that he was.

Remember he threw that big, 70K party for the Kos Kidz at Yearly Kos? Even before that, I had heard a couple of the Left blogosphere's big-wigs were consulting for him.

A friend of mine guesses Warner will go for a Va. Senate seat in '08 instead of bumping up against Hillary's ambitions.

Here's the first AP write-through:

Democrat Mark R. Warner, the former governor of Virginia, has decided not to run for president in 2008, Democratic sources said Thursday.

Warner scheduled a late morning news conference in Richmond to make the announcement, according to two Democratic sources who refused to be identified because they did not want to upstage Warner's announcement.

Since Warner left the governor's office in January, he has busily toured key states in the Democratic nomination process, particularly New Hampshire and Iowa. His political action committee, Alexandria-based Forward Together, has raised money for Warner's exploratory effort and for other Democratic candidates in this year's midterm elections.

The reason for Warner's announcement was not immediately known.

Nah, bring on the Clinton/Gingrich match-up and set it all on fi-ah! I'm kidding, but I'm not sure Warner, backed by the Kos-types, would have brought the kind of defusing power he might otherwise have brought. Would they have been content to let him be a centrist as long as he was winning? They don't seem like those kind of folks, but then, I was surprised they even let him into Yearly Kos. It seemed uncharacteristically smart, politically speaking, to embrace him. Guess we'll never know.