I cannot understand why it’s news when somebody announces they’re thinking about running for office and when they’re going to announce whether or not they’ll run for office and then when they announce. It’s just goofy. Anyhow, Terry McAuliffe has made it official that he’s running for governor, not that there was any question about it. He’s got an event here in C’ville on Wednesday. At 3 PM. The middle of the afternoon. Apparently he’s angling for the unemployed / independently wealthy / retired votes. He’s calling it a “town hall,” but it’s held in a restaurant.
I don’t know why I’m fishing for reasons to dislike the man; he provides so many reasons all by himself. You can find a handful in Rick Perlstein’s 2007 review of Terry McAuliffe’s autobiography, which sounds just dreadful. I don’t generally come out strongly against Democrats in primaries, but prefer to be strongly for others. But McAuliffe is just so odious that I just can’t help myself.
While I can’t be sure, if you go to his website he has events timed throughout the day all through the state. For example, it starts in Norfolk, and a few hours later starts in Richmond, before getting to Charlottesville. My guess is that he is going to be at every event.
While I’m sure 3pm is less than stellar for potential attendees, I’m not quite sure how else he would make such a plan work.
My information is that it is at 3:30. At Zocalo. If you saw the news tonight, you will know that today they began tearing up the brick in the Central Place. You won’t be able to get to Zocalo, and the jackhammers and the masonry saws should make it an interesting experience.
I didn’t watch the news so thank you for the tip cvillelaw, I think I won’t take my walking pneumonia self into the middle of brick dust :) I was thinking of going out of curiousity.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us.
I attended McAuliffe’s “I’m a candidate but not quite a candidate” get-to-know-me talk at UVa-Darden in November.
He handed out & signed copies of his autobiography, “What a Party!” Waldo, I’m glad you posted that review–that probably saved me some time over reading the book. ;-)
My impression of McAuliffe, based solely upon meeting him relatively briefly at Darden, was “slick huckster.” It’ll be interesting to see how many affectations (e.g. loves of guns and NASCAR and a mountain twang) he’ll put on over the next year….
His Hampton Roads event was at 7:45am. No idea who was there. There is nothing on the websites of the newspaper or the TV stations.
One more thing: thanks for the link to the review! He handed out signed copies to the VA delegation in Denver and I haven’t had time to read the book. I ran across a lot of material when I was researching him for my post, but I missed this one.
The thing is I didn’t take him seriously until Brian Moran’s crew started totally wetting themselves over this guy. Now I have to actually give him a serious look and see if maybe he’s not actually as horrible as others would have me believe.
Sam,
Just look at the state of the DNC apparatus when McAuliffe finally left the chairmanship. We were in a shambles. This guy ridiculed the idea of being a 50 state party. All he did was run around dropping names and hustling lobbyists and corporations for campaign cash. Everything that the Democratic Party has accomplished nationally in the last 4 years has been through the direct repudiation of everything that Terry McAuliffe did and stood for.
Howard Dean invested in actual staff and offices and a meaningful presence in all 50 states. He took the focus away from a handful of high-profile races and made the DNC about running a political party again, rather than just being a money machine. Barack Obama built on that and in his campaign he rejected money from many of the same sources that McAuliffe chased.
Everything that is good about the Democratic Party right now is the opposite of Terry McAuliffe. Now that we’ve all really accomplished something by rejecting his kind of politics, he wants to walk back in and pluck the fruit off of the tree that we watered and pruned and fertilized.
He doesn’t deserve it. We have real Virginia leaders who have been there in the trenches with us for years turning Virginia blue.
Of course, the reason I couldn’t find anything about the Macker’s visit to Norfolk was because it was today and not yesterday :(