15 Quotes by Stephen Farnsworth

There is a significant interest in letting elected officials represent their constituents as they see fit. And so I don't think that any effort that would limit how many bills a lawmaker could introduce or that sort of thing would necessarily get very far.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

In many ways, this could be a replay of 1996 - a businessman with substantial party support going up against a popular incumbent, who does well enough in losing that he will be able to run for the Senate in 2008 or the governor's mansion in 2009.

In many ways, it looks like the Democratic Party is trying to run the same play that propelled Mark Warner to prominence previously.