ABINGDON (AP) -- Democrat Mark Warner opened his Senate campaign Sunday pledging not to forget Virginia's forgotten rural areas and taking his harshest shots yet at his potential Republican rival.

He'll be in Norfolk at 11:15 a.m. at Nauticus Monday at The USS Wisconsin on the downtown Norfolk waterfront.

On Wednesday, Warner will campaign at Vanasse Bait & Tackle in Hampton at 11:30 a.m. At 2:00 p.m., he'll attend the 40th Annual Eastern Shore Seafood Festival at Tom's Cove Campground at Chincoteague.  

The first stop on a three-day, 12-city tour that kicks off his campaign in earnest was politically and sentimentally significant for Warner. Abingdon was the first event in his 2001 race for governor, a victory that broke a brief GOP stranglehold on political power in Virginia.

But it is also a region that Warner cultivated heavily when he was governor, pushing economic development projects into the depressed region and highlighting its Appalachian culture.

"Southwestern Virginia is a part of Virginia that often doesn't get a fair shake from Richmond," Warner told about 240 people gathered in a middle school cafeteria for a Sunday afternoon Democratic barbecue.

"I'll work with anyone to make sure everyone gets a fair shot," he said.

Another earmark of the rural strategy Warner used seven years ago to win over people who had usually favored Republicans in the 1990s were also there: a bluegrass band, Wires and Wood, played a toe-tapping ballad to Warner that became a campaign standard for Warner in 2001.

Warner also dusted off other familiar themes from his earlier run. He railed against partisan gridlock in Washington and promised to become a "radical centrist" in a sharply split Congress.

"Washington watched as jobs were shipped overseas," he said to an ovation from a crowd drawn from a region that watched coal mining jobs dwindle in the 1980s and '90s.

He also took a pointed poke at his Republican predecessor as governor, Jim Gilmore, though never spoke Gilmore's name. He criticized Gilmore for a revenue shortfall in the state budget that, by 2004, was estimated at $6 billion.

"Everyone was amazed that the budget shortfall that my predecessor left behind was four times greater than he said it would be," Warner said.

Gilmore has said Warner grossly exaggerated the shortfall the state incurred in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a deepening recession to set the stage for a $1.4 billion state tax increase a Republican General Assembly approved in 2004.

Gilmore is competing with Del. Robert G. Marshall of Prince William, the legislature's foremost foe of abortion rights and gay marriage, for the Republican nomination, which will be decided at the GOP state convention on May 31. Gilmore says he has the delegate votes necessary to clinch the nomination.

Warner's tour, which will continue through Wednesday, will aim to undermine Gilmore within the GOP. In Roanoke, his first stop on Monday, Warner will be joined by Heywood Fralin, a longtime GOP contributor and father of Del. Bill Fralin, R-Roanoke, and David Carson, the Republican chairman of the Roanoke City School Board.

Carson said he had never voted Democratic before he voted for Warner in 2001.

"I've always considered myself a conservative before I consider myself a Republican," Carson said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Sunday.

As an educator, he said he was persuaded to consider a Democrat as a result of President Bush's No Child Left Behind program, an initiative he said was a topdown mandate that has harmed urban schools such as Roanoke's and been anathema to conservatives. Carson said he will say the same thing publicly Monday at Warner's Roanoke rally.

"I found Mark Warner's stand on the issues and his pragmatism refreshing," Carson said.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)