Dean Christakos« I Have to Agree with this one | Main | Stuff You Can't Make Up »
May 19, 2007
Two years after he's gone, I now know all about Terry McAuliffe
So, on my post about jury duty, I mentioned in passing that it gave me a chance to catch up on reading. The book I finally got around to finishing was the autobiography of Terry McAuliffe, former head of Democratic National Committee, What a Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals. Now, there aren't many people who know much about Terry McAuliffe. In many circles, he wasn't a popular guy. He was loathed by many activist Democrats because he presided over an era from 2001-2005 in which the Democrats were out-witted and outplayed by the GOP while the Democrats seemed to sit there and take it. He was also loathed by a lot of Rush Limbaugh listeners because Rush told them to loathe him and was referred to a "Terry McAwful," so, clearly, he had to be the enemy. For the most part though, he wasn't a high profile character outside of fundraising circles and pundit shows.
I have to say that this book was a triumph of marketing prowess. When the book came out, there was a lot of press about how it had the inside scoop of McAuliffe's criticism of John Kerry's presidential campaign. Mostly, of course, the book is an autobiography of McAuliffee himself where he talks about his life and work in political fundraising from the late 1970s up through his close work with Bill Clinton to his appointment as chairman of the DNC in 2001 until he stepped down in 2005 when Howard Dean took over. However, the part about foibles of the John Kerry campaign appear in the first chapter. A good guess would be that when the book was released, various reporters were going to pick up the book, read the first chapter, skim the rest of it, if they read it at all, and then write their stories. Suddenly, the press about the book had a big story to trumpet-- "McAuliffe criticized Kerry's campaign!" because that was really the only part of the book they read. Hey, it convinced me to buy the book. As I said, brilliant marketing strategy.
Anyway, I learned three things from McAuliffe's book: #1: Every good thing the Democrats did was McAuliffe's idea. #2: Every mistake the Democrats made occurred because they didn't listen to McAuliffe's idea on the issue. #3: McAuliffe tries to make himself appear charming by his total ignorance of pop culture (variations of stuff like, "So, nice to meet you, Paul Simon. Oh, you're a singer. Are you the Senator's son?" over and over again) but in fact he comes across as annoyingly clueless.
However, the most important thing is that he never discusses any failures of the party during his tenure except to blame it on the mistakes of Kerry, campaign consultants, or anyone else. What I really wanted to read about was his perspective on the 2002 midterm elections. He was the presiding chair of the DNC that year, and those elections reflected a collapse of the Democrats' tactics while they were being outplayed by the Republicans who were effectively turning attention away from Afghanistan and to Iraq for their electoral advantage. McAuliffe starts talking about the Democrats' perspective on supporting authorizing (not requiring) the president to use force in Iraq back in early fall of '02. And then the section on that era ends. The whole 2002 midterms are skipped. His role in them is ignored, except a throwaway line later on in the book about how that the strategy for the midterms was mostly the responsibility of the DSCC and DCCC. Similar to his "every time the Democrats screwed up, it was because they didn't listen to me," theme in his book, this time when the Democrats screwed up, he just skipped over the entire thing, not offering any insight into his role or his perspective. I suppose that's a problem with an autobiography. No one wants to write about the times one screwed up by oneself.
Posted by Dean at May 19, 2007 11:50 AM
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Comments
"A good guess would be that when the book was released, various reporters were going to pick up the book, read the first chapter, skim the rest of it, if they read it at all, and then write their stories."
This is more or less brilliant. I wonder how often we could do this, and how distorted the public view of books and policy reports is as a result. I know that I certainly wrote a lot of papers in school on the first chapter of an assigned book.
Posted by: RW at May 20, 2007 6:28 PM