Terry McAuliffe Is A Fraud And A Con Man

Terry McAuliffe is proving himself a con man and a fraud, by attempting to profit financially and politically gain from the pain, trauma and fear caused by an event in his power to prevent. He chose to allow this due to the exact same cheap political ambition that drives him to attempt to profit from his failure. 

This week he announced plans to release a book entitled "Beyond Charlottesville."  Charlottesville, its physically, psychologically and emotionally damaged residents, and those who chose to stand with them in opposition to a rally for genocidal ideologues, are all inconveniently located as a barrier in the path to the presidency for McAuliffe. His book is being proposed to be a "hard, real-time, behind the scenes look" into what went wrong, taking everyone to task, including himself. 

There's an odd perfection to the encapsulation of all that is wrong with McAuliffe founding his presidential run on his failure surrounding Unite The Right, in the final paragraph of the pre-sale summary for the book: 

Beyond Charlottesville will be the definitive account of an infamous chapter in our history, seared indelibly into memory, sure to be cited for years as a crucial reference point in the long struggle to fight racism, extremism and hate.

It is a perfect encapsulation of why McAuliffe failed, the profound nature of that failure, in combination with the attempt to profit from that failure. It's an example of what makes him a fraud and con man. It exposes the nature of the con Terry McAuliffe is attempting to run, both on readers of the book and anyone who would consider backing him in a campaign for any elected office. McAuliffe isn't capable of providing a definitive account. He's demonstrated his refusal to see or acknowledge any perspective which doesn't support his ambitions. Unite The Right was allowed to happen, and was as violent and destructive as it ended up being for that reason. The book is a con, to cover the previous con, so he perpetuate fraud. 

Terry McAuliffe made the political calculation that letting Unite The Right occur was less politically toxic than it was to prevent it. This is Virginia politics. It's the same calculation that says "contextualizing" the monuments to white supremacy erected throughout the state is preferred to removing them. It was, after all, the politics of a monument which the far right saw as its opportunity to exploit in order to coalesce. 

This political calculus is done while plainly understanding that there won't be any compromise found through "community engagement" in which a plurality of white Virginians are going to accept an honest portrayal of these monuments, the men they glorify or the war they obscure. The reality is that the regressive politics of a significant portion of white Virginias population will prevent a historically accurate portrayal of the history, at all costs, including defending Nazis marching through the streets of a small city. 

We can't forget that it was the result of a democratic process that brought them here. The cowardice of Virginia state leadership, when Charlottesville's City Council had succeeded in demonstrating courageous leadership. This isn't secondary to the story of Unite The Right. It's central to everything surrounding Unite The Right. The success of the democratic process results in a small city deciding to act on its conscience, and the failure of the democratic process which puts a string of personally ambitious, but morally vacuous leaders like McAuliffe in place to protect it. McAuliffe can not tell this story and still run for president and frankly, he is too dull, too morally vacant and too ambitious to understand this. He has done nothing but solve the equation of political expedience in Virginia politics, at every turn. 

The solution to this political equation for Virginian centrist leadership has been to refuse to acknowledge or plainly address that there will never be an accurate representation of history surrounding the monuments, as long as the decisions about that representation includes people who will defend a mob of Nazis in order to discourage attempts to prevent an accurate representation. It is the "I'm not a racist (but I'm not an anti-racist)" middle of the road. This solution also relies on the different communities in Virginia who are the targets of far right violence being left with only the choice between the party and candidates which elevate groups who openly advocate for their harm or the party and candidates who don't openly advocate for their harm, but don't openly advocate for their equity in safety, holistic well being and protection either. 

Terry McAuliffe understood this when he made the calculation not to use every option available to prevent Unite The Right, in spite of ample warning and evidence that it was going to be a day white supremacist violence the nation had not seen in decades. McAuliffe understands the importance of being able to control the historical narrative, which is why this book is being released now. Like Mark Herring deciding to announce he too once donned black face, McAuliffe knows that the events surrounding Unite The Right will rightly be one of his biggest weaknesses. What he may not know, but his strategy team probably does, is that keeping the discussion solely on Unite The Right means it never gets to questions of what kind of leadership ends up in the position of having to defend the failure during and following Unite The Right instead of preventing the entire thing in the first place. 

Terry McAuliffe and his "definitive account" will also be unable to address another part of the failure to prepare for Unite The Right. The rally itself, the violence it brought on August 11 and August 12 of 2017, none of it was a surprise to anyone willing to take interest enough to look at the available evidence for more than 5 minutes. Activists, organizers and interested onlookers from every corner of anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing in the country, up to an including representatives of major religious institutions, had been attempting to gain the attention of local, state, and national media and leadership. It was a months long campaign. Organizations otherwise generally respected for their expertise in the fields of anti-racism and anti-extremism were attempting to bring attention to coming of Unite The Right. Terry McAuliffe isn't going to tell readers or the public that he couldn't be bothered to listen, and that was why the response to Unite The Right was such a colossal failure. 

The Democratic Party that brought McAuliffe to Virginia, did nothing in attempting to present any kind of response, beyond boiler plate statements. No organizing opposition. No fund raising for victims. Nada. It is doubtless individual Democrats did these things, the Party though, was conspicuously absent. 

The evidence that there would be violence was plain. The combination of the groups who had in the previous year been engaged in hate driven violence that were openly organizing their members to attend, with intelligence gathered by activists and anti-racist organizations demonstrating the expressed intent of people who were planning to attend to commit violence and the breadth of cooperation across far right groups and ideologies, made it impossible to not know that it was going to be incredibly violent, and that the chances that violence was going to result in death would be high. All one needed was to take enough interest to look at the publicly available evidence.

The real shock of Unite The Right should have been that those Nazis weren't met with an imbalance of numbers so great that they were cowed into retreat. McAuliffe, in the day prior to Unite The Right, issued a statement, telling Virginians to stay home. He didn't tell them to stand together and support each other. McAuliffe will make the case that he told everyone to stay home because of the fear of violence. That's not supported by the fact that VA State Police spent the majority of the day standing around, observing that violence, and then McAuliffe himself claimed they were "unprepared" for the level of violence and the weaponry present. Indeed, we're only left to wonder. 

"The only thing necessary for evil to thrive is that good men do nothing," so often quoted and even more often ignored. In the weeks following, the next far right rally had been planned in Boston. Organizers cancelled when some 100,000 marked social media events as "planning to attend." Estimates were 20,000 hit the streets to show they weren't having Nazi rallies in their town. All they had to do was not stay home, and the Nazis decided not to even show up. 

McAuliffe told Virginians to stay home, in keeping with the political calculus it takes to be "moderate" and "centrist" in Virginia. Corey Stewart is a Neo-Confederate, who in the process of a running toward a narrow loss for the nomination for GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2017, helped to boost the profile and name recognition of one of the organizers of Unite The Right by appearing at a photo op about "preserving heritage." In 2018, after Unite The Right, Virginia's Republican Party nominated Stewart as their candidate for US Senate, despite the widely circulated story and photos of Stewart appearing with an organizer of Unite The Right and Stewarts support of his cause. 

These are the people McAuliffe made the political calculation to not too thoroughly alienate by calling for Virginians to stay home. Instead of reaching out to every Democratic Party organization (the party that brought him to Virginia in order to further his political ambition) or surrogate in the state, and pushing them to organize to support the people of Charlottesville, their self governance and their safety, 

McAuliffe told everyone to stay away from Charlottesville. He either did so in fear of inflaming the racist fears of so many white Virginians or he did so because of the likelihood of violence. He either has to be taken at his word that he did not know of the likelihood of the level of violence, in which case he is an utter incompetent or he knew, and chose not to insure the VA State Police had a plan of action in place to do everything possible to prevent it. Incompetence is an inescapable conclusion here. Cowardice is a matter of how charitable one feels toward the former governor. Given the rest of his record, it's giving McAuliffe a level of charity that would be saintly if it weren't so often conferred on white men in power who "fail to recognize the threat of the white supremacist movement." 

On August 13, 2017, McAuliffe called for a prayer vigil to be held in the evening. The prayer vigil was a photo op, another example of McAuliffe trying to get ahead of the story. None of the groups who had organized for the defense of Charlottesville, again, even those who were ordained ministers of mainstream churches and faiths weren't directly invited. It was attended by usual suspects from the ranks of Virginia Democratic Party apparatus. Richmond, where the governor held this vigil, had a few hundred people in attendance at Unite The Right to oppose Nazis threatening their sister city (they are 45 minutes apart). The governor reached out to none of the small organizations or groups which organized to send people. Many of them are not politically convenient, and therefore, aren't good for photo ops. This is why their warnings were ignored as well. 

The reason to recount all of this is that it demonstrates the reality of how we, collectively, end up in the position where a large majority of the country is suddenly shocked by the emergence of a violent far right movement, and how we it can be seen as plausible that law enforcement was "caught unprepared" by the ascendance of violent far right groups into the most dangerous threat of mass casualty attacks. It also clearly lays out just how far McAuliffe is willing to take this fraud, and how much success he's had in keeping it going, at the expense of Virginians. It's his modus operandi.

McAuliffe was brought into the Virginia governorship on the ladder of Democratic Party politics, in an election cycle which was his to lose. The VA GOP ran Ken Cuccinelli in that same cycle. Cuccinelli was, at the time, a comically bad candidate. A rabid anti-choice activist, and generally scary, empty eyed zealot, Cuccinelli wasn't defeated by McAuliffe. Ken Cuccinelli still gives the impression he genuinely believes The Handmaid's Tale is a "how to guide." The VA GOP was pushing through TRAP laws in the General Assembly, Cuccinelli was publicly salivating at further restrictions on women's health care, and the women of Virginia responded accordingly. He is a genuine zealot and extremist, roundly beaten by the women of Virginia and the other people who genuinely supported them in that fight. McAuliffe, just happened to have made his way up the Democratic Party ladder to benefit. 

The women of Virginia, and the Cuccinelli opposition ran an inspiring, innovative, inventive, brilliant campaign. Women whose previous political involvement was centered around other issues, brought the organizations and groups they were involved with into a coalition to oppose Cuccinelli that was deep and broad based. McAuliffe and his campaign were none of those things, but he was the beneficiary of that labor. McAuliffe was breathing, had the campaign funding that comes with the backing of the DNC and had managed to not be more offensive than Cuccinelli. In 2019, Virginia grass roots politics is upheld, and essentially run by many of the women who were deeply involved in that campaign to run Cuccinelli out of Virginia politics. 

All of this was essentially forgotten by McAuliffe the instant he took up residence in the governors mansion. He repeatedly touted his bonafides in protecting "women's right to choose" when he'd been all but silent in what was essentially a three year long campaign by the women of Virginia to protect their rights and to put an end to Cuccinelli's political career. McAuliffe been among the chorus of standard responses when pro-women's rights protesters had been arrested on the steps of Virginia's capital. His response to what was then the largest mobilization at the Capital in decades was the usual, "I believe in your cause, but not your tactics" stance. The tactics in question were standing on the steps of Virginia's capital, in the presence of the Capitol Police Force, decked out in their finest riot gear, armed with semi-automatic weapons, tear gas and the like. McAuliffe's was the rhetorically safe stance calculated to not portray himself as "too extreme." 

It's another example of McAuliffe attempting to profit politically from the efforts of people whom he had been willing to ignore in order to serve his ambition to further his political career. He triangulated his position so as to never have to honestly address what even by the mainstream standards of US politics were extremist positions. The default result is that those extremist positions are portrayed as if they are being advance in good faith arguments, "by people who have different opinions." While technically correct, it ignores completely that the difference in opinion is whether women are autonomous beings. It accepts that women not being autonomous is a "good faith" position within the parameters of acceptable political debate, therefore something which can be regulated and legislated. Not inconsequentially, many of those positions are part of the new push to find a way to outlaw everything that makes abortion possible, because they can't just make abortion illegal. 

This is not leadership. It's not even governance, by any responsible definition. It is bargaining for political and professional advancement with other people's bodies. It is the same playbook he followed as Unite The Right approaches, and now again, as he has his eyes on a run for the Democratic nomination for president, he's again attempting to take credit for efforts he didn't support, and profit both financially and politically from the bargain he made at the expense of other peoples bodies and well being. 

These examples don't even take into account the unmitigated disaster that was the McAuliffe administration's attempt to deal with the publicity fall out or create a responsible investigation into just how any government and it's agencies could fail so spectacularly. It is a saga of incompetence on par with the press conference recently given by current Governor, Ralph Northam in his explanation that he didn't don blackface in the instance he was being accused of it, he'd actually worn blackface on a different occasion so his moonwalk would look more authentic. The two aren't being compared often right now because McAuliffe managed to unfold his incompetence over a period of weeks and months, instead of dropping in public in a 45 minute press conference as Northam did. 

Nothing about McAuliffe's response to Unite The Right or his leadership should be rewarded through book sales. It should be actively discouraged where running for elected office is concerned. McAuliffe should not be allowed to perpetrate the charade that is no doubt coming in both his book tour and in his attempt to secure the nomination for Democratic presidential candidate. He will be allowed to perpetrate it though. He'll get the book tour. He'll get the rallies. He'll get the interviews from the media. He'll be profiting from trading other peoples bodies for his political and financial gain, and the chances he gets called on it are slim to none.