IF YOU’RE A POLITICAL JUNKIE, you probably have a favorite Terry McAuliffe moment–an appearance by the Democratic National Committee chairman that you think best captures his unique blend of earnestness and mendacity. There are so many to choose from. Like the night of October 6, 2003, about 24 hours before California voters recalled Democratic governor Gray Davis and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger. A guest on Greta Van Susteren’s show, McAuliffe said, with a straight face, that the recall was good news for Democrats: “The signal coming out of California would be, with the economic conditions there, [that] George Bush should be very nervous.” Right. Or maybe you prefer McAuliffe’s interview with CNN host Larry King on election night 2002, in which he insisted, while his party was being pummeled at the polls, that “it’s going to be a very good night for Democrats.” Which prompted even arch-partisan James Carville to respond, later in the evening and somewhat morbidly, “Tell you the truth, I was looking for some good spin here, but thus far I can’t find any.”
Or there’s McAuliffe’s chat with NBC host Tim Russert shortly before Election Day 2002. “I think we’re going to win the House back,” he declared (the Democrats lost six House seats). And “I think in the Senate, we pick up one to three seats” (the Democrats lost two). What’s more, “I’m very excited about what’s going on in Florida”–and, no, “of course” he wouldn’t take back his statement to the New York Times that “Jeb Bush is gone” (Jeb won by 13 points).
In 2001, after Democrats Mark Warner and James McGreevey won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, the Bush administration wasted no time in sacking Jim Gilmore, then chairman of the Republican National Committee. After the Democrats’ losses in 2002, and again this fall, the Democrats I spoke with last week thought that McAuliffe would be sacked too. Not yet.
Which is something of a surprise, because McAuliffe’s record as party chairman is almost perfectly unblemished by success. On February 3, 2001, the day he took over, there were 50 Democratic senators, and soon Republican Jim Jeffords’s defection to “independent” status would give the party control of the Senate. Today there are 48 Democratic senators. In 2000, prior to McAuliffe’s leadership, House Democrats received 48 percent of the congressional vote nationally. Two years later, they received only 46 percent. And, most disturbing for his party, under McAuliffe the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Democrats has declined from 33 to 31 percent, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.
McAuliffe’s response to this spate of bad news? “People are angry in California. They’re angry all over the country,” he recently said.
He’s right. And if you talk to Democrats in particular, you learn that they’re especially angry at Terry McAuliffe. One party insider puts it this way: “The Democratic party under Terry McAuliffe has been dysfunctional and delusional.”
A Democratic campaign strategist, for example, tells of a DNC memo put out just days before the 2003 election that instead of providing talking points asked various “talkers”–in other words, talking heads–what the Democratic message should be. Says the strategist, “Democrats need a steady message and a steady messenger. And we don’t have one in Terry.”
So why does McAuliffe still have a job? “Lack of an alternative,” says Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia. Others have a different theory. “He’s pretty well connected,” says Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, as well as the coauthor, with John B. Judis, of “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” One Democratic operative says it bluntly: “The Clintons put him there.”
The chairman of the party in power, of course, serves at the pleasure of the president. Which means that “when a party is out of power, its chairman isn’t answerable to any elected official,” says Alan Brinkley, the Columbia historian. McAuliffe, who is 46, was elected by the DNC to a four-year term in 2001 with the considerable support of the Clintons, and is expected to stay for the remainder of his term.
Then, too, he isn’t responsible for all the Democratic losses on his watch. But he has done little to help the Democrats recover. And, in an odd way, McAuliffe has done more to shepherd the party away from Clinton-era centrism than any other Democrat.
“The Democrats disliked Ronald Reagan,” McAuliffe recently told reporters at one of the Christian Science Monitor’s Sperling breakfasts, “but I can tell you the visceral dislike that they have for George Bush and his policies is something I have never seen before.” He should know. McAuliffe is responsible for mainstreaming the anti-Bush vitriol you find among the Democratic base. From his first speech as DNC chairman, he has treated George W. Bush as an illegitimate president. In February 2001, he told Democrats he wanted the job because “I’m a little outraged about the last election.” Why the outrage? “If Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker, and the Supreme Court hadn’t tampered with the results, Al Gore would be president.”
McAuliffe’s strategy, as he once told Tim Russert, is “to use the anger and resentment that will come out of that 2000 election, put it in a positive way to energize the Democratic base.” A lot has happened since the 2000 election, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to McAuliffe, who still makes Florida a staple of his speeches. Indeed, he has often made partisan anger a substitute for policy arguments. In an interview with the New York Times last August, McAuliffe said, “It’s George Bush,” not health care or the war in Iraq, that “will serve as the biggest unifying force of our party” in the 2004 elections. Asked by the Associated Press for his advice to the Democratic candidates for president, McAuliffe says simply, “Stay focused on Bush.” The candidates have followed his lead.
The danger with McAuliffe’s embrace of Bush hatred has always been its potential to backfire, alienating Democrats from American moderates and other swing voters in a general election. And it could also result in a Democratic presidential candidate–Howard Dean, say–who, while best personifying the animosity felt by the Democratic base, will be unable to appeal to the electorate at large.
Insiders say there’s no love lost between McAuliffe and Dean. (Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi “used to call the DNC to scream at them over there every other day,” says one. “Now he’s doing it daily.”) But McAuliffe, perhaps without realizing it, provided a crucial boost to Dean’s candidacy. Since becoming chairman of the DNC, he has pushed for an accelerated nomination process. The logic, McAuliffe says, is to have a nominee “by mid-March–March 10, probably–and then we’ll have eight months to go one-on-one with President George Bush.”
Mid-march is when the Democratic delegate-selection process used to begin. The Washington Post’s David Broder recently wrote a column arguing that the new primary schedule could turn into a disaster for Democrats. “McAuliffe’s scheme to shorten the contest may not reduce the bloodletting,” Broder wrote. “It may simply intensify it.”
“When you front-load like this,” warns Larry Sabato, “you virtually guarantee that someone who wins the first two contests will secure the nomination.”
McAuliffe’s defenders point to his fundraising prowess as reason enough to let him stay on as party chairman. It’s true that McAuliffe was a great fundraiser–for Bill Clinton. But since taking over the DNC, he has presided over an unprecedented degradation in the party’s finances. Just look at the numbers. In 1999, at this point in the previous presidential cycle, the DNC had raised about $51.5 million in both hard and soft money.
But as of September 30, 2003, the DNC had raised only $31 million for the current presidential cycle, a little over half of what they raised previously. (The RNC has raised a whopping $78 million so far this year.) Last week, the Boston Globe reported that the DNC has been unable to secure funding for next year’s party convention, raising only a paltry $3 million. By contrast, Republicans have already raised more than $60 million for their convention next year.
The Democrats’ poor finances aren’t entirely McAuliffe’s fault. The party lost a huge source of funds when McCain-Feingold banned soft money. But so far McAuliffe has been unable to recover. Steven Weiss, who handles communications at the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington, D.C., research center that tracks political fundraising, frames McAuliffe’s problem this way: “The Democrats knew they couldn’t rely on soft money forever. They just couldn’t eat their spinach.”
The next test for McAuliffe will be the Louisiana gubernatorial runoff election on November 14. If Republican Bobby Jindal (ahead in the polls as this goes to press) beats Democrat Kathleen Blanco, it will mean four gubernatorial losses for Democrats in 2003, including California. As a senior Democratic strategist recently told The Hotline, “If Democrats lose Louisiana, Terry McAuliffe should step down.”
McAuliffe says he isn’t going anywhere. Earlier this year, he gave an interview to the Syracuse Post-Standard, his hometown newspaper. The Post-Standard reporter asked him about the widespread predictions that he would step down after the 2002 election defeats. McAuliffe scoffed, saying those predictions “came from Republicans who don’t want me in the job.”
“And you know what?” McAuliffe continued, “They shouldn’t want me in the job.” That’s debatable. What’s certain is that the Democrats shouldn’t.
Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
