"The talk was all of bipartisan cooperation, and the rhetoric was sweet from all sides to the point of stickiness and intoxication.

But not even the police using screening wands to search guests at Gov. Mark R. Warner’s inaugural could find and disarm the political long knives barely concealed under the tongues of participants.

Official Richmond is learning the words of bipartisanship, but is far from exhibiting its ways.

Saturday’s ceremonies took place in the parallel universe of speech divorced from action. Few of those in the know and in the seats of power expressed any frank optimism or short odds for cooperative behavior to last beyond the next few weeks — if that long.

When the budget amendments and longer-term bills for reform start flying, they may crash in flames in buildings that house a political elite tired of recently departed governor Jim Gilmore but unwilling or unable to shed his rule-or-ruin ways.

Public pleasantries

Warner and House Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr., R-Amherst, talk like friends yet eye each other like wary Afghan warlords patched together into a new government possibly more prone to dysfunction than dissipating partisanship.

They shook hands Saturday. They smiled. They watched and saluted a fine parade together. They took the first step of a 1,000-mile journey toward cooperation that must overcome distrust and penchants for partisan punches.

After all, Warner is a former chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party. His once-healthy party, cocky when it ruled the roost for 100 years, has shriveled so far in the past 10 years that it controls 34 percent of the House of Delegates, 23 percent of the state’s seats in Congress and a relatively healthy 45 percent of the staid Virginia Senate.

Actually, if you count occasionally fence-crossing centrist Republican senators and throw in newly sworn-in Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine as a tie-breaker, Democrats might find majorities in the Virginia Senate — on some days on some things, but not on others.

Finding middle ground

If you believe Warner, “It isn’t all about the Ds and the Rs.”

But what incentives do Wilkins and his conservative band of Republicans who firmly control the House have to make nice and cooperate with a new governor who until Saturday had never served one day in elective office?

They have fought their way to power by being partisan. They have swept and spat their Democratic foes into the salty seas of history. Those that remain inhabit pockets of partisan D-dom as unrepresentative of the rest of Virginia as the historic cities of Charlottesville and Alexandria.

The House GOP leaders may know no other way, as they are nearly as new to real governance as Warner.

In short, Warner lacks a record and Wilkins has never ruled unattached from Gilmore, who seemed at times last year to play the speaker like an accordion.

The neophyte Ds on the Capitol in the governor’s office on the third floor and neophyte-to-rule R rulers of the House on the second floor may not yet know how both — and everybody else — can gain from meeting in the middle.

Quite symbolically, the speaker has an office near the middle. It isn’t used for bipartisanship.

Two Republicans close to Warner said Saturday that Wilkins’ true partisanship was on display at a recent closed GOP caucus.

The gist of the speaker’s message to his Republican House troops was roughly this: “If Warner has a good idea, steal it and make it ours. And if Warner has a bad idea, wrap it around his neck and sink him and his party with it.”

If that’s Wilkins’ idea of bipartisan cooperation, the beast doesn’t exist, except in the sweet and sticky rhetoric of not wanting to look like the heavy.

Former delegate Anne G. “Panny” Rhodes, a Richmond Republican who endorsed Warner and is quite unloved by Gilmore and Wilkins, has heard the cooperative talk of Wilkins in public and the take-no-prisoners partisanship of the closed-door caucus.

“I am disappointed in that kind of an attitude, and I hope that the good of the citizens of Virginia will come to the fore,” Rhodes said. “In my book, you work with everybody. You don’t repeat mistakes of the past.”

Virginia faces a major budget challenge, she said, and “is only going to be well-served if everybody works together. It cannot be done with partisan bickering.”

Sen. R. Edward Houck, D-Spotsylvania, has heard the talk of the closed GOP caucus and the peaceful words of cooperation issued by both Warner and Wilkins.

“I sense on the Senate side, we are still united. We are together, Democrats and Republicans” on working toward budget cooperation with Warner, Houck said, “so primarily the real question is the House of Delegates. I won’t predict the odds because I really don’t know, but I want to hold hope that they rise above the partisanship and really unite with the governor.”

The House Committee on Bipartisanship, all of whose members would have to be appointed by Wilkins, has never met or existed.

It’s not clear if Wilkins will even name such a committee, or if its members once named could ever pass through a metal detector set to ring for political brass knuckles, pistols, daggers, dirks, shad deboning devices or the tiny instruments for slowly removing toenails.

Virginia’s ruling politicians may disarm their rhetoric. They just are not ready or trusting enough yet to give up their sharp, or their dull, political tools.

The first test of whether they mean to play ball together will come in a few weeks when they start reacting to each other’s budget amendments, said University of Virginia political analyst Larry J. Sabato.

Warner has started to meet the GOP halfway, he said. “He not only offered an olive branch, he cut the whole tree down and handed it to Wilkins.” " (Bob Gibson, Political Notebook, The Daily Progress, January 13, 2002).