The Virginia Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, held at Richmond’s sprawl of a convention center on a mild Saturday night in February, was particularly festive this year. The Democratic Party is enjoying a resurgence in Virginia, propelled first by the November victory of Barack Obama — the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Lyndon Johnson — and now by a lively battle for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. There are three men who want the nomination, but on this weekend, you could be forgiven for thinking that there was only one, and that his name was Terry McAuliffe.
There were McAuliffe signs everywhere, an exhausting blur of blue and yellow starting at the airport and rolling for nine miles to the entrance of the Greater Richmond Convention Center. There, bustling McAuliffe campaign workers, rolling around on electric carts, hoisted a McAuliffe for Governor banner over the street. A marching band stepped in place, before accompanying McAuliffe and his supporters as they paraded around the center, grandly announcing his arrival. Inside, volunteers scattered the hall with 2,500 McAuliffe fortune cookies, which crumbled open to reveal fortunes like high speed rail is in your future. The fortune-cookie count came courtesy of the McAuliffe campaign, which also reported that the campaign had purchased 39 dinner tables, printed 1,000 McAuliffe for Governor signs, issued 300 glow sticks to wave at the dinner and was paying for two after-dinner parties, with open bars. It was a display of political money and muscle that was quite unlike anything anyone had ever seen at the annual dinner. “When I decide to do something,” McAuliffe said as he marched along with his band, “I do it.”
And there was the candidate himself, an endless stream of energy and bonhomie. “Mr. Chairman — how are you, brother?!” he said, fist-bumping C. Richard Cranwell, the 66-year-old leader of the Virginia Democratic Party. McAuliffe bantered with the young video-camera-wielding operative — “How you doing, Mike!” — that one of his rivals, Brian J. Moran, sent to follow him around. McAuliffe was as inescapable as his campaign paraphernalia, whizzing up escalators and down hotel walkways, popping up at receptions, hotel bars and meeting rooms. After leaving one late reception, McAuliffe passed a cab waiting for a fare in front of the Marriott Hotel, booming with reggae music, and stopped short. “Yeah!” he yelled, skipping into a dance on the sidewalk — arms waving in the air, his aides grimacing at the sight of him doing what they have explicitly pleaded with him not to do in public.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/magazine/10Mcauliffe-t.html?th&emc=th
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