Senator Warner was back on the road yesterday and met with business and community leaders in Culpeper and Fredericksburg to provide an update from Washington.

During the town hall-style meetings, Senator Warner discussed his efforts to address concerns over deficit spending while continuing to work to fix our economy.

While he shared the frustrations of many with the gridlock and partisanship that seems to paralyze Washington, he said there are still reasons to be optimistic, saying “I’m not ready to throw in the towel that the Senate has become dysfunctional.”

He acknowledged the frustrations by many for what they see as an ineffective stimulus program, but said our economy would be in even worse shape had we not started down the path toward recovery.

The Culpeper Star-Exponent covered the event:

“It’s been a wild first 13 months,” he said of his time in Congress since being elected in 2008. “I ran as a bipartisan radical centrist,” Warner said, chuckling, adding, “It’s still needed. A lot of things about Congress have proven to be quite frustrating." ...

“The folks outside said, ‘You voted for that horrible stimulus,’” Warner said, acknowledging it was “one of the worst marketed pieces of legislation in modern history. But it’s important to think where we were a year ago and where we are today.”

A year ago, he said, the country was losing 700,000 jobs per month, the Dow was at 6,500 and the gross domestic product had decreased 6.5 percent. A year later, Warner said, unemployment is flat, the Dow is at 10,000 and the GDP has experienced 5 percent growth. ...

While it didn’t create “a ton of new jobs,” Warner said, it did “prevent catastrophic cuts at the state level.”

One-third of the $860 billion stimulus went to the states, he said, $220 billion was in tax cuts and the rest, much of it still unspent, was allocated for “policy goals” like high-speed rail, health care IT and developing a smart energy grid.