The Democratic chattering class is nervous and upset about what they perceive to be the coming McAuliffe electoral cataclysm.
Jonathan Chait penned a particularly bitchy piece for New York Magazine on the McAuliffe-Cuccinelli race. He races to the bottom with stunning speed, comparing the contest to that between Hitler and Stalin. As clever as that may sound in certain circles, his take on McAuliffe is quite brutal:
Just how McAuliffe managed to clear the field is harder to explain. McAuliffe is a House of Cards character, only less articulate. Unlike most soulless hacks, he did not obtain his position through years of greasy pole climbing — he’s a novice in electoral politics whose only real power base is Beltway insiders. McAuliffe is the Democrat Democrats have been dying to vote against, except they can’t, because he’s running against a falling-off-the-right-edge-of-the-map Republican. (It’s a testament to McAuliffe’s visceral loathsomeness that he’s starting off with a ten-point deficit against Crazy Ken Cuccinelli, in a state Barack Obama won twice.)
This jag served as the base of a Michell Cottle piece in the Daily Beast that, while it manages to stay out of the relativistic fever swamp, nevertheless treats McAuliffe as the political equivalent of a neutron bomb for Democrats:
With all due respect to the Macker’s many charms, he is not what you’d call an intuitive choice for governor. He has never held elective office. Despite being a longtime Virginia resident, he was unknown on the state political scene until his first, failed run at the nomination last cycle. And … how to put this delicately … his decades as a high-level, no-holds-barred money-grubber for the national party have given him a vaguely unsavory aroma. “He’s just sort of this shady fundraising guy most famous for the Lincoln Bedroom,” observes a veteran Virginia Democratic strategist of McAuliffe’s rep.
Trickier still, McAuliffe is one of those guys who blathers on—typically with the aim of reminding you how important and successful he is—with no sense of how he sounds to normal people. This month the chattering class has delighted in rehashing passages from McAuliffe’s 2008 autobiography, What a Party!, in which the Macker boasts at length about what an asshole he was on the occasions of his children’s births. (In one instance he skipped out on the delivery to attend a party for then–Washington Post gossip columnist and current Daily Beast editor-at-large Lloyd Grove; in another, he stopped en route to the hospital to work a fundraiser while his wife labored on in the car; in a third, he picked a political fight with his wife’s anesthesiologist.)
How nice.
Still, things could be worse for McAuliffe, right?
“There are a lot of Democrats in the state that are getting incredibly nervous about how Terry McAuliffe is allowing himself to be turned into Mitt Romney.”
Then they have only themselves to blame.
Democrats could have found someone else to run against McAuliffe (I suggested they convince Jim Webb to do it). But ultimately, the Democrats’ problem in Virginia is…they really don’t have anyone else to run for statewide office. The bench isn’t just thin, it’s empty. And it may stay that way for quite some time:
The Dems’ farm-team prospects are further damaged by the makeup of the state legislature, where Republicans dominate the House of Delegates—and likely will continue to do so thanks to redistricting, says the operative. [Larry] Sabato agrees: “It’s a done deal until, maybe, 2021.”
The operative word there is “maybe.” Republicans in Virginia have the uncanny ability to toss such advantages over the side. Recall that just a few years ago, the GOP was on the ropes in Virginia, bleeding House seats, losing control of the Senate and watching Tim Kaine and Mark Warner win top statewide offices. There is an argument to be made that only the confluence of off-year elections where Barack Obama was not on the ticket and gerrymandering saved the GOP from disaster.
Then again, the party’s greatest asset during both its travails and its successes has been Virginia’s Democrats. Their steady march to the left over the years has hollowed the state party out to such a degree that when opportunity knocks, as they believe it has this year in the candidacy of Ken Cuccinelli, no one is there to answer.
Save for hustlers like Terry McAuliffe.
This in no way means Republicans should begin making hotel reservations for a Cuccinelli inauguration. There is too much time between now and election day and anything that can happen probably will.
But they can still take some small joy from the spectacle of national Democrats crying into their Manhattans over the woeful McAuliffe campaign. I know I will.
