On Tuesday, Tim Kaine meets with his economic advisers. The governor will likely get more grim news, the kind that could augur deep spending cuts.
Someone who won't be there but has a lot riding on the session and its $1 billion-plus repercussions is a diminutive former corporate lawyer whose flat Midwestern accent endures despite years in Virginia Beach: Jody Wagner.
Wagner is running for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor next year. She quit as Kaine's secretary of finance in early August, before things fiscal got really funky.
And while some grumble that she wrongly abandoned her post at a time of peril, given the likely profile of the primary electorate -- liberals, younger suburbanites, women, African-Americans and unionists -- Wagner would seem the early favorite for the No. 2 spot on her party's ticket.
Wagner is harvesting the endorsements of elective officials and top party activists all along the urban-suburban crescent. She has hired Kaine's advertising-spin-and-polling team from 2005.
But dispatching Jon Bowerbank, her burly, bearded businessman rival from Russell County in Southwest Virginia, may be a no-brainer compared with the challenge ahead.
Wagner, a narrowly defeated congressional candidate in 2000 who joined state government as treasurer under Gov. Mark Warner, would face incumbent Republican Bill Bolling.
Toppling an established statewide figure with anti-tax bona fides is a task made more difficult by Wagner's potential millstone: a budget that, Democrats used to boast, they saved from the supposed excesses of Gilmore-nomics.
As Virginia's top numbers-cruncher for more than two years -- years marked by muff-ups and miscalculations -- Wagner, to Republicans, is a poster child for a budget gone bad.
She was routinely roughed up by the ruffian Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee. It was sport for them, the prerogative of a shrill majority party that delights in drawing black-and-white distinctions.
But even Senate Republicans, usually more decorous than those in the House, got in on the fun after slipping back to the minority last year. After all, it was the only way for them to seem relevant.
There are legitimate reasons for taking a hammer to Wagner, and Bolling -- a potential firewall for a GOP doing a better job of losing than winning -- may be able to wield it in 2009.
The Kaine administration's fiscal sins, perceived and actual, are numerous.
Among them: pushing for higher transportation taxes even as the economy began its decline, and missing revenue projections by a mile -- or two or three.
Also, taking baby steps to balance the $77 billion budget more than a year ago, when perhaps more aggressive measures were justified.
And delaying drastic spending cuts until after the election -- an election in which Kaine's name might have been on the ballot as vice president.
All this assumes, of course, that the economy remains a dominant issue into the 2009 political cycle. Bolling, jovial and silver-tongued, and his restive Republicans should hope that things get worse, diverting the electorate's attention from what they are seen as having neglected.
Transportation improvements, anyone?
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 6496814 or jschapiro@timesdispatch.com. Watch his video column Thursdays on inRich.com. Listen to his analysis Fridays at 8:33 a.m. on WCVE radio (88.9 FM).
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