Stephen Farnsworth Quotations

Although their ideologies are very different, the strategy Howard Dean employed could be the strategy Mark Warner employs. Basically camp out in Iowa and New Hampshire and go door to door, church supper to church supper, to make himself a household name in those states.

The presidential-nomination system favors the unemployed or the underemployed over the fully employed.

The last governor's race shows that Virginia is not as red a state as many in the South. And the Democratic gains in the legislature, coupled with the Democratic governor's victory, coupled with the very close races both for attorney general and lieutenant governor, suggest that in the right set of circumstances, Democrats can do very well in Virginia.

The Democratic Party has long thought that its success is dependent on some support in the South.

I think the future is going to look a lot like the past. Virginia muddles through with relatively short legislative sessions, and if lawmakers introduce too many bills for the legislature to consider, the ones that aren't going to pass anyway are thrown overboard.

Allen, although a favorite, may have a more serious challenger, in part because of the issues going on. The questions surrounding Iraq, the questions surrounding abortion, the hostility that many Democrats toward President Bush, could all generate high Democratic turnout.

There's no question that special interests get their money's worth - either in Washington or Richmond. For ordinary citizens, that means that somebody else is at the front of the line when the government is lawmaking.

The full-disclosure system has an advantage in that people have a sense of what their lawmakers are getting. But the wide-ranging ability of lawmakers to receive gifts from private interests is not something that goes in the direction of good government.

The truth is that it is profitable for private interests to give things to lawmakers. And if it weren't, they wouldn't give them. If it were not profitable for them to put some of their resources in the pockets of lawmakers, they wouldn't do it.

Virginia prides itself on having a part-time legislature, and so I don't think it's particularly likely that this is going to change.