Terry McAuliffe and the Other Green Party
Terry McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is starting a company that makes little electric cars. On a sweltering Friday in early July, GreenTech Automotive unveiled its signature vehicle — the MyCar — at a plant opening in the North Mississippi town of Horn Lake. McAuliffe was puttering backstage before the event with his pals Bill Clinton and Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and archetypal Republican lobbyist.
The holding area was crowded and somewhat frenzied. People designated as V.I.P.’s kept streaming through, many in from China, where GreenTech is building an 18-million-square-foot facility. They arrived, dozens of them, via a Harrah’s shuttle bus with a big “Fun in Store for Those Who Ride” painted on the side. As Clinton prepared to go onstage, I asked him if he would ever consider buying a car from McAuliffe, who he once marveled could “talk an owl out of a tree.” “Absolutely, I would buy a new car from Terry,” he told me. “But a used car? I am not so sure about a used car.” He laughed and wheeled around and repeated the line to Barbour (“Listen to what I just told him … “), while slapping his fleshy back.
McAuliffe, 55, is eager to be known, foremost, as a businessman and an entrepreneur, and not so much as a political moneyman. That will take some doing. He is “the greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe,” Al Gore once said, in keeping with the hyperbole often heaped on McAuliffe, known widely as the Macker, by the politicians who love/need him. McAuliffe, who is in fact quite hard to dislike and is himself a peerless exaggerator, has collected legions of friends over the years. “There are 18,000 names in my Rolodex,” he boasted to me earlier that morning over coffee. When I pressed him, he revised the number upward, to 18, 632. The acknowledgments section of his memoir, “What a Party!” runs six single-spaced pages and includes the names of every member of the Democratic National Committee during his time as the party chairman. In a five-minute span of conversation, McAuliffe distilled for me the extent of his psychological complexity: 1) He pinches himself all the time because he’s so lucky. 2) He likes to think out of the box. 3) He swings for the fences every day. 4) At the end of the day, it is what it is.
If McAuliffe’s trademark is fund-raising, his principal identity is as a Professional Best Friend to Bill Clinton. The subtitle of “What a Party!” might as well be “Let Me Tell You Another Story About Me and Bill Clinton.” (One involved South Korean Intelligence agents thinking McAuliffe and Clinton were more than just friends.) If he is not dropping the name of the 42nd president, the Macker is telling you that he just got off the phone with Bill Clinton, or that, what do you know, President Clinton is actually on the phone right now, and can you please excuse him for just a second (“Hello, Mr. President”). And if Mr. President is not on the phone, there is a good chance he is, as today, close by.