The Washington Post delivers a gem regarding Terry McAuliffe and the payday lenders he once wanted to run out of Virginia on a rail. Today, McAuliffe is happy to cash their checks. To his gubernatorial campaign:
In March, McAuliffe received a combined $15,000 in donations from William M. Webster IV and Lindsay Webster. William Webster is co-founder of payday lending giant Advance America, which in 2010 paid $18.8 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by consumers who said it had charged illegally high interest rates, according to news accounts at the time.
This is a big flip-flop from his 2009 gubernatorial run:
McAuliffe vowed to shut down payday lenders in 2009, when he made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for governor.
“As Governor, Terry will establish a total ban on payday lending that siphons off the hard-earned wages of too many working Virginians,” his 2009 campaign Web site said. He ran a radio ad in that campaign that decried lenders for charging rates as high as 391 percent. He promised to stop them from “preying on Virginia’s most vulnerable families.”
“For Terry McAuliffe, the solution is simple,” the ad said. “He is the only candidate for governor who proposed doing the right thing — ban all predatory lending in Virginia.”
Surely, this is cause for some embarrassment to McAuliffe’s campaign. On the contrary, it’s part of the wider pattern of Terry simply cashing checks from his old cronies:
McAuliffe’s current campaign Web site does not appear to have any reference to payday lenders, but campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin said his position on the issue has not changed.
“Halloran and Webster are both old personal friends who worked with Terry more than twenty years ago, there has been no change in policy from Terry,” Schwerin said via e-mail.
Of course not. McAuliffe’s policy now, as it has always been, is to get the check:
Same ‘ol Terry. Now go ahead and sign the petition.
