"THE PARADOX of Mark Warner's political ascent in Virginia is that after suffering repeated defeats in his first two years as governor, he engineered the largest tax hike in the state's modern history and still managed to leave office on a crest of positive publicity and off-the-charts popularity.

Mr. Warner's trajectory continues to vex the commonwealth's Republican leaders, confounding their bedrock assumption that the Old Dominion's electorate is as opposed as they are to higher taxes and to investing in basic infrastructure. It has made Mr. Warner, whose four years as governor reversed the Democratic Party's long freefall in Virginia, the strong favorite to win this fall's race for the U.S. Senate seat held by retiring Sen. John W. Warner (R).

Democrats have lionized Mark Warner as a politician of preternatural gifts. Many Republicans regard him as an opportunist who, having ditched his campaign promise not to raise taxes, hoodwinked moderate GOP lawmakers into supporting a wholly unnecessary revenue package. In fact, the ingredients of his success are more mundane: pragmatism, energy and clear-eyed strategic thinking.

We have previously assessed the record of Republican James S. Gilmore III, Mr. Warner's predecessor as governor, who is now his opponent in the Senate race. This is our appraisal of Mr. Warner's term in office.

IT BEGAN shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and in the midst of a full-blown budget crisis. During the four previous years, Mr. Gilmore had embarked on a spending spree while simultaneously enacting reckless tax cuts that emptied Virginia's coffers. This left Mr. Warner with little room for new initiatives and no choice but to slash the growth of spending on state programs and services.

An entrepreneur who made a fortune in the cellphone business, Mr. Warner had never before held elective office. In his first two years as governor, he made rookie mistakes. His initiatives to toughen the state's seat belt law, to persuade Northern Virginians to support a sales tax increase for transportation and to scrap the one-term limit for governors all failed. Republicans who controlled the legislature branded him naive.

Chastened, Mr. Warner acknowledged his errors and vowed to learn from them. He neither hunkered down in the governor's mansion nor personalized his rivalry with Republican leaders. Instead, he set himself an even more ambitious goal: to raise over $1 billion in taxes biannually for the state's badly underfunded schools, colleges and services. He faced a generally conservative electorate, a Republican-controlled legislature, and more than 40 lawmakers who had signed anti-tax pledges in the previous year; his plan was widely dismissed as a political Hail Mary pass. No governor had managed to enact a far-reaching tax increase since 1986, when Gerald Baliles, a Democrat, enjoyed the luxury of working with a Democratic-controlled legislature.

Undeterred, Mr. Warner mounted a savvy, single-minded and tactically deft campaign for a tax package that he regarded as both necessary and fiscally sound. He focused particularly on courting moderate Republicans, arguing that Virginia's parlous financial condition and scant revenue -- the legacy of Mr. Gilmore's administration -- had endangered its AAA bond rating, which allowed the state to borrow money cheaply for major projects. When the legislature finally adopted an ambitious tax package that differed significantly from his, Mr. Warner was wise enough to embrace it and declare victory. Most Virginians cheered, not just for a prudent tax package but also for a governor who could navigate partisan shoals and make a deal.

REPUBLICANS NOW howl that the tax hike was unnecessary. They overlook the inconvenient fact that the GOP leadership itself, in the person of House Speaker William J. Howell, had come to accept the need for tax increases. The argument was about the dimensions of the tax hikes. In his current Senate campaign, Mr. Gilmore, who insists that the increase was profligate, points out that two years after it passed, the state was running a budget surplus of more than $1 billion.

However, that surplus, largely the byproduct of a housing market gone temporarily wild, was short-lived. Like virtually every other state, Virginia's revenue growth has fallen sharply lately, forcing the state to put the brakes on most hiring, trips and equipment purchases. It is thanks largely to the taxes enacted under Mr. Warner that Virginia, while struggling, is relatively well positioned to face the current economic slump.

The Republican portrayal of Mr. Warner as a tax-loving liberal is fiction. At the outset of his governorship, Virginia was among the most lightly taxed states in the nation; four years later, it remained a relatively low-tax state. Thanks to Mr. Warner's initiatives, Virginia also retained its AAA bond rating, establishing itself, according to a variety of sources, as one of the country's best-governed, most business-friendly states. The state transportation department, which before Mr. Warner's time had been badly mismanaged, was transformed into an agency with a hugely improved record of building roads on schedule and on budget.

Mr. Warner is no political genius, nor was his governorship the unmitigated success Democrats imagine. By raising taxes and spinning it to his advantage, he made a virtue of fiscal necessity. The revenue he gained might have been better used for building new infrastructure, particularly roads and rails, than for funding recurring programs. At times he could be thin-skinned, cautious to a fault and calculating. The Harvard Law School graduate from Northern Virginia marketed himself effectively as a devotee of NASCAR and bluegrass, though in doing so he raised questions about his authenticity.

But what Mr. Warner displayed in Richmond -- a knack for compromise on major legislation with members of the opposing party -- should not be underestimated. It is a trait in short supply in statehouses across the nation, to say nothing of Capitol Hill." (Editorial, The Washington Post, July 28, 2008)