| Lucky for T-Mac, he picked up a few things from his friend Bill Clinton who was a master at turning weakness into strength. You can't run away from them so you might as well do an about face and just start acting like you've been going the other direction all along. Like if you are perceived as the ultimate Washington insider but you are running for Governor of Virginia, why not just turn around and present yourself as a Richmond outsider? Or if you are perceived as a big money, corporate lobbyist deal maker, why not turn the tables and call for a ban on lobbyist gifts?
McAuliffe proposes a ban on lobbyists' gifts
Back in the early 1990's Terry McAuliffe introduced the Democratic Party to the corrupting influence of easy money from corporate lobbyists which had already infected the Republican Party and ultimately got us screwed on NAFTA, GATT and health care reform. By cutting deals, McAuliffe created a massive fund raising wall with himself as the gate keeper. To line up a run for Hillary Clinton in 2008, he closed the gate on Al Gore and blocked him from running in 2004 and doomed us all to 4 more years of George Bush and the current financial disaster we are now in. When Howard Dean showed us how to crash McAuliffe's gate with millions of small donors, a ton of attack ads showed up in Iowa to sabotage Dean's campaign. Read more about it here:
The Political Business of Terry McAuliffe
Clinton's Top Fund-Raiser Made Lots for Himself, Too
Time for Terry McBucks To Go
Just last year Barack Obama crashed the gate of lobbyist money McAuliffe had built and put us on a new path of grassroots and small donor support to counter act the corrupting influence of easy money. Now that T-Mac has already cashed in on the access he once had, he is now calling for a ban on gifts from lobbyists, which is the height of hypocrisy. But hey, maybe no one will notice and his Jedi mind trick will work?
T-Mac has so many opportunities to use his weakness/strength trick because he has so many big weaknesses. He's already using this zen method to portray himself as someone with good business skills even though most of his businesses have failed.
But the list of weaknesses is so long, we are sure to see many great examples of how to apply this technique. I think McAuliffe's biggest weakness is the fact that he has no standing or record in Virginia but then he also has a 29% unfavorable rating among Democrats, which seems insurmountable on it's own. It's hard to choose.
And then of course there's all the baggage of his shady dealings where he arranged access to President Clinton in exchange for angel investments that have made him personally wealthy. He also had a losing tenure as head of the DNC and as campaign chairman, he bankrupted Hillary Clinton's campaign last year with a zeal of extravagance and exaggeration that verged on psychotic.
Terrymania!
McAuliffe is a walking disaster. What better person to illustrate how to use this modern political trick of turning weakness into strength than someone who has just about the most weaknesses you could possibly bring to the table? But T-Mac and his army of campaign staffers better get on this quickly because according to the latest polls, the people aren't falling for it.
PPP Poll: Moran, Wagner Take Leads
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Cross posted at Raising Moran |
