Beyond Charlottesville - Terry McAuliffe Page 0,2

a lot of people assumed that anyone having as much fun as I was couldn’t also be serious, very serious, about doing the work of making a difference for people and governing a state of eight and a half million people.

I used to kid Marc Fisher, the Washington Post columnist, about his November 2008 column assuring readers that, as the headline put it, GUBERNATORIAL IS ONE THING TERRY MCAULIFFE ISN’T. Again, he was mostly writing about my image, but it’s funny what he chose to mention. “McAuliffe wants to be governor of Virginia, a job that has more to do with repairing roads and managing prisons than it does with sweet-talking Hollywood moguls and spinning the loudmouths on CNN, MSNBC and Fox,” Fisher wrote. “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?”

I didn’t get that one. How does wrestling an alligator thirty years before disqualify you from serving the people of the commonwealth? There are probably worse ways to prepare for the challenge of working with the Virginia General Assembly. I’m kidding.

My main challenger for the Democratic nomination, or so I assumed, was Brian Moran, not the more conservative Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds. Like me, Brian came from an Irish family with an interest in politics, and his brother, Jim Moran, was a longtime congressman representing Northern Virginia. Like me, Brian was originally from the Northeast, and, like me, he loves to talk. A couple of years earlier he’d had me come and speak at his annual pancake breakfast fund-raiser. He joked that if the morning coffee didn’t wake everyone up, listening to me sure did.

“Both of us would speak at a high decibel level and get people pumped up, almost like a football coach,” Brian says now. “My dad was a football coach. You wanted to inspire people and get them fired up, and Terry did that on steroids.”

We weren’t both going to win the nomination for governor. Brian had been in Virginia politics for years, having served in the House of Delegates since 1996 and as Democratic caucus chairman, and he saw me as a latecomer to the race. He and I were both going after Northern Virginians especially; that was going to be our prime territory, and he was pretty tough on me that year.

“There is no reason to perceive him as a Virginia Democrat,” Brian told one reporter that year. “Before the last six months, he’s had little, if any, involvement not only in Virginia politics but in Virginia governance.”

I expected Brian to throw a few elbows my way—that’s politics, and none of it ever bothered me, but Brian went a bit overboard. His campaign advisers had him all jacked up to go after me as much as he could. We had Virginia’s annual state fund-raising dinner in February 2009, headlined by President Bill Clinton, who came as a favor to me, featuring all three candidates. Brian spent all his time taking shots at me. As The Washington Post put it, “Moran took repeated swipes.… Some Democrats called it inappropriate to criticize a fellow Democrat at a party event.”

I’d made a pledge not to attack either of my primary opponents, and I stuck to that. Brian hit me hard on the stump and in our debates, but his early lead in a couple of polls faded and I was ahead in five straight polls from April to May with Creigh Deeds a distant third. The New York Times Magazine sent out a veteran political reporter, Adam Nagourney, to report on how I was doing as a candidate, and we had some fun challenging Adam to try to keep up with me. (He couldn’t.)

I had “outtalked, out-handshook, outspent, outhustled, outshouted and just plain outcampaigned them across Richmond,” Nagourney wrote. “McAuliffe, tipping back bottles of beer, stayed so late talking to party members at the Virginia Young Democrats reception—he made sure I noted he was there an hour longer than Moran or Deeds—that it seemed just a matter of time until the cleanup crew swept him out with a broom.”

Then on May 22 came a political earthquake. The Washington Post weighed in with its editorial making an endorsement, and for some reason decided to throw its weight behind Creigh Deeds. Keep in mind, at that point every poll for the last couple of months had me up by at least nine percentage points. My problem with the Post