Beyond Charlottesville - Terry McAuliffe Page 0,1

I might have a hard time convincing Virginians I was truly one of them. Larry J. Sabato, the University of Virginia political guru, told me in 2009 when I went down to see him in Charlottesville that he thought I’d picked the wrong state. For years there had been chatter that I might run for governor, and people kept guessing different states.

“I thought you lived in New York,” Larry told me.

New York? I hadn’t lived in New York since the 1970s when I left for college. Florida? I was proud I’d taken over a bankrupt company and built it into one of the largest home-building companies in the state, constructing more than six thousand homes, but for me Florida was where I went on vacation or to visit my father-in-law, Richard Swann. The fact was, Virginia was my home, where I paid taxes and sent my children to school. I wanted to lead my home state.

“My lasting impression of Terry was that he had enormous energy, maybe a ridiculous amount of energy,” Larry said later. “And that he was tough. Real politics isn’t political science. It’s what you instinctively know about people and how they vote.… He could throw a good punch and take one, too. A lot of politicians have glass jaws. Not Terry.”

I knew when I first decided to run for governor of Virginia it wasn’t going to be easy. There were a few obstacles to overcome, starting with the fact that I’d never run for public office before, unless you count chairman of the Democratic National Committee. It was a gutsy move to run, no question. But my whole life from when I was a kid growing up in Syracuse, New York, starting my own driveway-paving company when I was fourteen, had been all about working hard, paying close attention to what people actually want and need, and having fun doing it. So when I ran for governor of the commonwealth in 2009 I was running to win and running to make a difference. You can’t do that finishing second.

Dorothy and I first settled down in Virginia back in 1992, soon after our first child, Dori, was born. We wanted a house with a backyard where the kids could run around and play with the dogs. We’d both attended college and law school in Washington, DC, and had been in the area for years already. We chose McLean, Virginia, as the place we wanted to put down roots, and we raised our family of five children there. As Dorothy liked to say, by 2009 she’d shopped at the same Safeway grocery store for seventeen years.

Did that make us Virginians? It depended on who you asked. Northern Virginia, where we lived, was full of people who had come from somewhere else. Other parts of the state were a different story. Some folks figured you had to be fourth- or fifth-generation to be considered a true Virginian and I was OK with that. As I used to say on the campaign trail, I didn’t have any choice of where I was born. My mother made that decision for me. But when I had to make my own decision, I chose Virginia.

I was obviously aware it would raise some eyebrows when I announced in January 2009 that I was running for governor of Virginia. I got it. People knew me for my work in national politics. They’d seen me on TV as DNC chairman, talking issues—or politics—with various Republican counterparts. What they didn’t know, at least not at first, was why I was running for governor and how sure I was that I could transform the state, bring it into the twenty-first century, and build a dynamic new economy.

It’s funny about politics. People are always going to pigeonhole you. They always try to figure out an election that’s coming up by studying what happened in the election before. I’m not sure how helpful any of that is. I’ve always tried to go out and fight for what I believe, focusing on getting results, and at the same time, trying to show that politics doesn’t have to be boring. You can be serious and committed and still try to stir things up and make even a routine event fun and interesting, especially if you love what you’re doing when you’re giving speeches or meeting voters or even debating your opponents.

I’m known for my perpetual optimism. Until I published my first book in 2007, the New York Times bestseller What a Party!,