Terry McAuliffe is unhappy - with Democrats

PETERSBURG, Va. – Don’t be fooled by the expansive grin, outstretched arms and the booming baritone with which Terry McAuliffe greets throngs of churchgoers here: The governor of Virginia is frustrated.

Not with his job in Richmond — McAuliffe says he has loved every second of it. The only problem with being governor, he laments, is that sometimes he has to sleep. If powerful Republicans have stymied McAuliffe’s legislative agenda, he takes it in stride. On his overarching goal — economic development — the governor pronounces his administration “as wildly successful as anything I could want to do.”

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It’s McAuliffe’s own party that has him down.

He begins carefully — “I don’t mean to be overly critical …” — but then he gets rolling. In a 2014 campaign fought against a backdrop of dropping unemployment and record highs for the Dow, he says there’s no excuse for Democrats to cede the argument on jobs to Republicans. “They didn’t talk about it!” he exclaims. “They didn’t have a strategy.”

“Why come out and vote for the Democratic Party? There was no message to say: Here’s what we’ve done. I wish the party or whoever had done a national media campaign and say, here’s what you get when you elect Democrats,” McAuliffe says. “But there was no — what was the message out of ’14? I’m asking you rhetorically — do you know? No. What was it?”

McAuliffe, a close friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton, calls it an urgent, hair-on-fire priority for Democrats to learn how to tie together an assertive, socially liberal message with close-to-home concerns about opportunity and economic competitiveness. In 2008, he was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, but says he won’t take a formal role with her 2016 campaign, if she runs, because of his commitments as governor. But he says he talks “all the time” with Bill Clinton and would be an enthusiastic “friend of the family” if and when Hillary Clinton launches her campaign.

“The biggest issue in this upcoming election, it’s still going to be the economy. It’s going to be this income inequality, the issue of the middle class dropping down,” McAuliffe predicts, with a shot of nostalgia for the 1990s: “I always like to say, Bill Clinton created more millionaires and billionaires than any president, but you know what, more people moved out of poverty. Middle-class income — all-time high.”

A former Democratic Party chairman, McAuliffe has been thrust into an unexpected role in recent weeks: Less than a year after his swearing-in as governor, he is one of his party’s most senior elected officials outside Washington. This onetime problem-child candidate, battered by opposition researchers for his background as a Beltway operator and his use of political contacts to fuel a lucrative business career, is now one of his party’s last remaining swing-state governors. After a 2014 debacle that nearly took down Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, McAuliffe has become perhaps the most electorally successful Democrat of President Barack Obama’s second term.

As such, McAuliffe says, he plans to speak out more aggressively about the future of the Democratic Party. He has burned up the phones over the last week to tell his fellow Democratic governors — 16 so far — that the party’s message is in dire need of a reboot. Proud of the political formula he has honed in Virginia, the governor plans to visit New Hampshire to deliver a speech urging Democrats to recommit themselves to winning the economic debate.

On a recent Sunday, that approach was on full display: McAuliffe swept into the small city of Petersburg, visiting eight African-American churches in the span of a few hours (stopping at one church twice, visiting both early and mid-morning services). The governor declared each church to be the finest “in all the globe.” At every stop, he thanked his audience for their support in his 2013 election. He touted his work making it easier for felons to get their voting rights back and scrapping certain testing requirements for schools. Most insistently, McAuliffe advertised his record on economic development: $5 billion in investment deals negotiated so far, handily outstripping his predecessors. “Not that I’m counting,” McAuliffe repeatedly joked.

Petersburg has a special place in McAuliffe’s in-state narrative, furnishing a prime example of how his let’s-make-a-deal approach to the governor’s job has paid dividends. The distressed community here suffered a grievous economic blow in 2013 when the Boehringer Ingelheim Chemicals company announced it would close a plant there and eliminate 240 jobs. This year, McAuliffe persuaded the Chinese company UniTao to buy the facility and reopen it, hiring an estimated 376 employees. (“There’s not many business folks I can’t pick up the phone, on the globe … and say here’s why you need to come to Virginia,” he explains in the car. “We’ve used it extensively.”)

What makes McAuliffe’s political story interesting is not merely that he has a good rap on economic development. It’s that he has an economy-tailored sales pitch — on everything. From gay rights to abortion, to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and even the unfolding sexual assault crisis at the University of Virginia, for McAuliffe it’s all tied into the economic bottom line.

Extending marriage and adoption rights to gay couples, McAuliffe says, made Virginia “open and welcoming” to big businesses, as well as to families. At a tourism convention in Northern Virginia last week, he bragged to vendors about his record of keeping women’s health centers open. With his eye on taking back the Virginia state Senate in 2015, McAuliffe plans to go after Republicans who have rejected federal health care funds for harming their constituents — and making their communities unfriendly to economic growth.

“Lee County lost their hospital. I’m good at sales. I enjoy it. I can’t bring any businesses there,” McAuliffe says. “Do you think any company from the globe is going to put their man...