By all accounts, Terry McAuliffe has written a very bad book. But it's the sort of very bad book that's generated some very good -- which is to say, funny -- reviews. Peter Baker delivers some jabs at it here, but the real demolition came from Rick Perlstein in last week's New York Times.
"I was standing there having a casual conversation with King Juan Carlos, my occasional hunting partner, when we were joined by Blair and his charming, outspoken wife, Cherie, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi,'' Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, writes in his memoir, ''What a Party!'' It comes somewhat after ''I sat at the president's table near Clinton, who was between Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. ... Dorothy was at another table sitting between Muhammad Ali and Jack Nicholson''; but before ''Hillary saw Dorothy'' -- McAuliffe's wife -- ''and invited the entire family down to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic to stay at Julio Iglesias's spectacular oceanfront estate.''
But don't get Terry wrong. ''I have always been oblivious to celebrity.''
And that, comparatively, is the positive portion of the review. The more telling bits deal with McAuliffe's slavish devotion to corporate executives and supportive billionaires. As Rick writes:
McAuliffe taught Democrats that to win they had to learn to play with the billionaires. But there were, as the economists say, ''opportunity costs.'' In 400 pages of blow-by-blow, one momentous event passes with barely a whisper: the 2002 elections. Some hoped that President Bush's ties to Enron would make 2002 a Democratic year. Instead, Democrats lost the Senate. As the televised face of the party, McAuliffe got in some hard punches on Enron, but Republicans replied that he himself had made an $18 million profit from a mere $100,000 investment in the controversial communications company Global Crossing...The two Democrats most at ease around rich businessmen also happened to be the party's most effective economic populists: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. They were so at ease, in fact, they did what today's ''business friendly'' Democrats do not: demand, in no uncertain terms and to their faces, that they cease antisocial corporate practices.
I talked a bit yesterday about the effects of peer groups and social networks on ideology yesterday, or at least alluded to it. As a subject, it's a bit large to fully explore in a blog post. But it's undeniably true that spending all your time beseeching fabulously wealthy corporate titans for large sum donations will sensitize you, quite fully, to their concerns. These are not, after all, unappealing, uncharismatic, unintelligent, or unpersuasive guys. So even as you extract money from them, their concerns and outlook seep into you. And soon enough, "class warfare" looks like a terrible idea, and skewed trade deals that open up low-wage (though not high-wage) jobs to competition seem like no-brainers, and on, and on.
If you spend your time with economic elites, you will naturally absorb the perspectives, concerns, and underlying opinions of economic elites. McAuliffe's use to the party has long been that he was better at doing this -- better at hanging with rich people and getting them to like him enough that they donated money -- than anyone else. What no one ever asked is why he was so uniquely adept at that job. And it's worth noting here that McAuliffe hasn't left politics now that his term at the DNC expired: He's chairing Hillary's campaign for president.
