| For a long time, Mark Warner wanted to be president. But as Garrett Graff writes this week on Backchannel, the senior senator from Virginia has, for now at least, made peace with his youthful ambitions. In the process, the former telecom entrepreneur—and the fourth richest man in the senate—has become a leading critic of Big Tech and a pivotal player in the investigation of Russian hacking in the 2016 election. Warner is not your average pol. Besides being a multimillionaire with an affinity for representing the interests of the little guy, he's something of a party animal (he met his wife at a fraternity beer bash) and has actually managed to forge bipartisan consensus in these ultra-polarized times. (The Senate Intelligence Committee, of which he is the ranking minority member, issued a comprehensive report on the 2016 election hacking, finding that Russia was indeed behind it. Republicans on the committee agreed.) As Graff writes, "He hopes that his work will help lead the nation forward into the next tech age." If not, there's always the presidential race of 2024. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED |
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