Terry McAuliffe, Party Animal

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The Virginia governor’s race is well underway with Republican Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli running against über Democratic fundraiser and former party chairman Terry McAuliffe. The Cook Political Report has called this campaign “the marquee race on the ballot nationally in November” and predicted “much will be read into the results as the 2014 cycle moves into high gear.”

While McAuliffe has been a highly visible figure in Democratic politics, having started out as a fundraiser in his early 20s for Jimmy Carter, he has never held public office. In order to get a better sense of the man, I violated my long-standing principle against reading books by politicians other than Winston Churchill, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and, maybe, Jack Kemp and picked up McAuliffe’s autobiography, What A Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators, and Other Wild Animals (2007) written with Steve Kettmann. It may be more accurately described as self-hagiography with some interesting perspectives on the inner workings of money and politics. A book of ideas it is not.

Terry McAuliffe is of a branch of that irrepressible tribe of Irish-Catholics for whom the New Deal and the Democratic Party are paramount. While claiming to be a loyal Catholic, he is of the school which views all value, all meaning, and all that is good and true as emanating from the party of Jefferson and Jackson. I recall a Catholic pastor in St. Louis County telling me during a 1974 congressional campaign on which I was working that there was only one mortal sin left: Voting Republican. That comment gives you a sense of McAuliffe’s perspective on the world. As his recent parroting of the pro-abortion line in his campaign demonstrates, all things are subordinated to the well-being of the political party of his father, a World War II veteran who worked as a party official in Syracuse.