Dear God help us! This guy is a buffoon. He's a game show host gone loony.
McAuliffe starts Va. charm offensive
By: Glenn Thrush
November 16, 2008 07:37 AM EST
He's got the charm, cash and connections, but now the consummate Democratic pitchman is facing his toughest sales job in Virginia.
Terry McAuliffe swept through Hillary Rodham Clinton’s downbeat Arlington headquarters in May like a rich daddy returning from a business trip, spiriting off young staffers to Cafe Milano in Georgetown for a veal-and-vino cheerleading dinner.
McAuliffe, the campaign’s national chairman, was reportedly frustrated with his limited influence on the candidate’s strategy. But that didn’t stop him from embracing his role as chief morale officer.
“He’d come in and take out whole departments — finance, fundraising, you name it. We’re talking four or five groups of 25 people each,” one ex-Clinton aide said of the former Democratic National Committee chairman, known as “The Macker” to friends.
“It must have cost him $20,000 or $30,000. … It’s the kind of thing people don’t forget. It inspires loyalty.”
Now that the Clinton campaign is over, the Macker treatment — which involves the liberal application of enthusiasm, donor-squeezing and Gold Cards — is finally being used to further the electoral ambitions of The Macker himself.
The brassy 51-year-old Syracuse, N.Y., native is preparing to run for governor of Virginia in 2009, a bid that will start with a Hillary-esque 60-day listening tour of the Old Dominion.
Potential opponents dismiss him as a cynical Daddy Warbucks who has long plotted to buy himself a governorship — claiming he even mulled runs in his native New York and Florida, where his wife’s family lives.
McAuliffe’s pals dismiss such criticism and say his unique blend of charm and cash will prove irresistible.
“Terry could sell shit to the zoo,” explains longtime pal Paul Begala. “He’s the best salesman in the world.”
Former Hillary Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson deemed McAuliffe "the single most optimistic person I have met in my life.”
McAuliffe’s central strategy is classic Terry-buys-the-drinks: He’s planning an ambitious fundraising campaign on behalf of Virginia’s Democratic establishment, which has been emboldened by Barack Obama’s victory and two consecutive Democratic governors (governors in the state are limited to one four-year term), but frustrated by a six-seat GOP majority in the House of Delegates, the lower of the state's two legislative houses.
“I’m going to help nine or 10 Democrats in delegate races,” said McAuliffe, who has lived in the affluent D.C. suburb of McLean for two decades.
“We’ll have a huge operation. It’s as important to me as winning the governor’s race. It will be the biggest coordinated campaign in the history of the state.”
McAuliffe, who has amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune through investments, estimates he’ll raise more than the $25 million Gov. Tim Kaine collected last time, though that number could go much higher. He won’t say how much he’ll collect for the legislative fund, which will benefit from Virginia’s loose campaign finance laws.
“I don’t have a
number yet, but I’ll make a commitment and I’ll stick to it,” he said with a hint of menace. “I’ve never not met my number.”
That promise, coupled with the knowledge that he raised a record-breaking $578 million as Democratic National Committee chairman, has many Virginia locals speculating on just how high he’ll go.
Said one slightly shellshocked anti-McAuliffe Democrat: “The rumor — it can’t be true — is that he’ll raise $75 million” for the combined gubernatorial and legislative efforts.
Other national party chairmen have scored statehouses. Former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour is now the governor of Mississippi, and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell preceded McAuliffe at the DNC helm.
Jim Gilmore served simultaneously as RNC boss and Virginia governor in 2001.
McAuliffe, though, faces an uphill climb in the primary, confronting a pair of tough, popular opponents who have spent their careers building reputations inside the state: Fairfax County Del. Brian Moran, brother of Rep. Jim Moran, and state Sen. Creigh Deeds, a downstate moderate who narrowly lost a statewide race for attorney general in 2005.
The winner will face the man who beat Deeds, Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell, who is unopposed in the primary.
A Washington Post poll taken late last month showed Moran ahead with 17 percent, McAuliffe at 12 percent and Deeds with 11 percent. Six out of ten voters are undecided.
“I think he has a tough challenge,” George Mason public policy professor Mark Rozell, a longtime observer of Virginia politics, said of McAuliffe. "He’ll have to be careful to avoid the perception that he’s just a hotshot parachuting in with a lot of cash.”
McAuliffe's rivals can’t label him a carpetbagger — he’s lived in the state longer than many in Northern Virginia, home to most of the state’s Democratic primary voters. He’s more of an overnight-bagger, they say, an itinerant who has spent more time on the road pursuing his own ambitions than tending to the commonwealth.
McAuliffe gave his enemies serious ammunition in 2005, when his spokesman was asked about a report that he was mulling a run against then-Gov. Jeb Bush. The flack shot down the report, citing Florida’s seven-year residency requirements — not McAuliffe’s undying love for Virginia.
“He's incredibly flattered, but he will not be a candidate for '06,” DNC spokesman Tony Welch told the Miami Herald at the time. “He's intrigued by the idea, but the residency requirement is what it is.”
An aide to one foe says they will be more than happy to “educate” voters about McAuliffe’s $100,000 investment in the defunct telecom company Global Crossing, which netted him a $18 million profit. Republicans hit McAuliffe hard on the issue during the Enron scandal, and it's likely to resurface again in a gubernatorial campaign.
And McAuliffe’s opponents are already painting him as a rowdy Democratic partisan in a state that has elected reassuring, purple-tinged Democratic governors like Sen.-elect Mark Warner and the state’s current chief executive, Tim Kaine, an abortion opponent.
“Terry McAuliffe doesn't fit Virginia's New Democratic tradition,” said Moran spokesman Jesse Ferguson. “Virginians will wonder if he’s running for the right reasons.”
He’s also taking a beating from local columnists.
“Is Virginia ready for a governor whose appearances on the cable TV shoutfests included one in which he wore a Hawaiian shirt while swinging a bottle of Bacardi and yukking it up with the hosts?” Post writer Marc Fisher asked in a caustic column last week. “Or, to put it another way, could a state in a grim budget situation use a chief executive who once wrestled a 280-pound alligator to land a $15,000 donation from a Florida Indian tribe?”
McAuliffe, who was Bill Clinton’s golf and card-table companion during the scandals of the 1990s, shrugs it all off.
“I don’t waste my time on negative energy, I don’t trash Democrats,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of things I can do with my life, I’ve got five young children. I know I’m going to get beaten up for doing this.”
His personality aside, McAuliffe intends to run as a fairly conventional Democratic campaign on the issues. He says he wouldn’t raise taxes or cut education and health care to cope with the state’s $2.7 billion deficit — and puts the new emphasis on recruiting new businesses to the state.
“We’ve already cut this thing down to the bone … so you have to grow the economy by bringing new jobs to Virginia,” he says. “I have real international contacts. I know most of those CEOs.”
Clinton insiders say McAuliffe first began seriously discussing a Virginia run in the early spring, but there are indications he was laying the groundwork years ago. In one of his last decisions as DNC chairman in 2005, he allocated $5 million for Kaine’s race — the largest such donation the committee ever made to a gubernatorial campaign.
He's continued the party-building largesse in recent months, pledging $100,000 to help the state Democrats pay for a new headquarters in Richmond and recently collecting about $200,000 for local candidates in the Washington suburbs.
Whether all this toil will work for McAuliffe is an open question. Equally uncertain is the effect of McAuliffe’s deep ties to the Clintons, whose legacy in Virginia is complicated.
Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton by 28 points in the Virginia Democratic primary in February, part of a Potomac Primary rout that helped doom her candidacy. Moran and Deeds will both position themselves as Obama standard-bearers, their aides say, but neither endorsed the president-elect in the primary, leery of offending either candidate.
After Clinton’s withdrawal in June, McAuliffe barnstormed for Obama (and himself), crisscrossing Virginia in the final weeks of the campaign. By the end, his speeches were being recorded by Deeds trackers, according to press accounts.
“McAuliffe’s Clinton connection is baggage, considering how badly she was beaten in the primary,” says George Mason’s Mark Rozell. “He’ll have to distance himself from them.”
McAuliffe says that the Clinton connection remains an asset and that the former president urged him to run and will probably campaign for him. Nonetheless, there are intriguing signs he’s taking baby steps away their dynastic embrace.
“Everybody is fixated with the Clintons,” he says. “But this campaign is not about Bill Clinton, it’s about me and my relationship with the voters in Virginia.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15660.html
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