editorial wasn’t so much the argument for Deeds. What bothered me was the use of one word that changed everything. A May 3 feature in The Post had included the bizarre assertion that I’d referred to myself as a “huckster” in my own autobiography. Not true. The reporter who wrote that article could have spent five minutes checking the facts with a simple Amazon search, and realized that no, that word does not occur once in the more than one hundred thousand words of my first book.
But the Post editorial repeated the “huckster” claim. Not until May 27, less than two weeks before the Democratic primary, did we get a correction printed. The reference in my book was to my Uncle Billy Byrne admiringly calling me a “young hustler” when I started my paving business at age fourteen. He loved my gumption in going out and getting an old milk truck that belonged to him running, and driving it home, even though I was too young to have a driver’s license at the time, and painting MCAULIFFE DRIVEWAY MAINTENANCE on the side. What can I say? I was a born entrepreneur.
After that Post editorial, my lead in the polls evaporated, and Deeds went on to win the nomination, with me coming in a distant second—then he lost the general election to the Republican, Bob McDonnell, 58.6% to 41.2%. Some people who didn’t know me thought I might “fade back into national politics” after that, as Larry Sabato put it, but I’m not one to fade, and I wanted to make a difference in Virginia. I took some time to ask what we could have done better in the ’09 campaign, and then I got to work on four more years of driving all over Virginia to meet more people to hear their stories and get more perspectives. I was going to run for governor again—and win—in 2013.
I hated losing that 2009 primary, but looking back now I can say that losing was one of the best things that ever happened to me. By then I’d already toured every corner and crossroads of the state, but over the next four years I went to every nook and cranny of Virginia and talked to people about what they needed out of their state government and where they hoped the future would take them—and take Virginia. I had time to soak it all up. I’d always loved history, and if you love U.S. history, it starts with Virginia history. Those four years gave me a deep and living connection to that history—and I saw it pointing to the future.
When you’re out listening to people one on one, there’s nowhere to hide. It’s just you, unfiltered, and you’d better like listening to people. Simple, right? But I think it’s a point worth mentioning and remembering. Two of the national politicians I got to know well when I was getting started in politics in the early 1980s were Bill Clinton and Dick Gephardt, and both of them loved that part of it, getting out there and soaking up a real sense of what’s important to an individual voter.
I laugh to myself sometimes when I read references to Bill Clinton and how much he loved talking to celebrities. In fairness, he loves to talk to everybody. I’ve seen the man walk through a hotel kitchen and stop and talk to a busboy or dishwasher for half an hour, really listening. He’d have half their life story in no time and he’d find some point of connection. That was a knack of his, a natural gift he had for connecting with people, really understanding where people came from and what they cared about.
I was always that kind of person, going back to when I was knocking on doors as a fourteen-year-old in Syracuse asking people if they wanted my crew to come in and work on their driveway. But the more you talk to people face-to-face, the better a listener you become. I’d ordered a bunch of reporter’s notebooks and wherever I went in Virginia, I always had one of those handy. I filled up notebook after notebook with ideas and impressions from people in every corner of the commonwealth. I’ve still got them, dozens of notebooks filled up from the first page to the last.
Those four extra years helped to reinforce my vision of Virginia’s future, which was that this was a state ready to make great progress, with a surge in new jobs to give