One of the most devastating pieces on Terry McAuliffe of this campaign cycle comes from…the New York Times. You will need to read it all, but here are a few choice words from Charles Wang, McAuliffe’s former partner in GreenTech:
…there are days when Mr. Wang says he wishes he had never gone into business with a politically connected partner. “I learned a lot of things,” he said. “Politicians or people with political backgrounds are dangerous to business.”
Do tell.
The former executive said GreenTech’s timeline for building an electric car in less than five years, extremely ambitious by auto industry standards, was influenced by Mr. McAuliffe’s desire to add “job creator” to his résumé. “Did Terry want to wait 10 years?” said the executive. “No. Because he wanted to run for governor again.”
Quite.
The piece appears to be Wang’s effort, as well as GreenTech’s, to put daylight between themselves and McAuliffe. Wang believes the SEC investigation currently underway will find no wrong-doing and that, eventually, the company will produce the cars he has always wanted to build. Time will tell.
But this is hardly the sort of piece the McAuliffe campaign wants to see, particularly in a newspaper with nationwide reach and influence. It brings back the old horrors many Democrats have long harbored about him: that he is “a soulless political animal with no redeeming human characteristics,” or worse, that he is “sleazy, oily, ambitious, and incompetent.”
Now we have his former business partner throwing him under the bus and the company he once touted at every turn giving him the full Heisman. Not a good day for Fast Terry.