If Democrat Terry McAuliffe's weak performance in Virginia's primary for governor proves anything, it's that it is a risk for the chairmen of the parties' national committees to get too carried away with their own importance.
McAuliffe had spent most of his adult life as a major support player in national Democratic politics, a mover, shaker and big-time campaign money-raker. He was best known for his longtime alliance with President Bill Clinton -- at whose behest McAuliffe was installed in 2001 as Democratic National Committee chairman, a position he held for four years - and Hillary Rodham Clinton, now secretary of State, whose campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination was chaired by McAuliffe.
McAuliffe's positions, and his extroverted personality, earned him frequent invitations to appear on television news shows.
But all this, according to nearly complete returns Tuesday night, mattered to fewer than 85,000 Virginians -- or a bit more than 26 percent out of more than 300,000 who participated in the low-turnout, three-candidate primary for governor won by state Sen. Creigh Deeds.
And that was among those who did bother to vote. Overall, McAuliffe motivated fewer than 2 percent of the nearly 5 million registrants in Virginia, all of whom were eligible to vote in the primary because the state does not register by party.
It's not that party chairman never make it as candidates on their own. Mississippi Republican Haley Barbour, who chaired the RNC during its successful 1994 congressional campaign, is in his second term as governor of Mississippi.
But there is a big difference. Barbour is a native of Yazoo City, Miss., and in his younger days was one of the founders of his home state's modern Republican Party, which emerged from historical obscurity and now commands the upper hand in statewide politics. McAuliffe, though he is now a longtime resident of northern Virginia's affluent suburbs of Washington, D.C., is a native of Syracuse, N.Y., and most Virginians seemed to view him as a slick outsider.
Party chairmen with relatively high profiles - such as McAuliffe a few years ago and Michael Steele, the political lightning rod currently heading the Republican National Committee - certainly are big men on the political campus. But for the most part, they are ciphers to all but those few Americans who live and breathe politics.
Since we write about the subject for a living here, we wish there were a lot more of them, but there aren't.
![[RSS]](http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/templates/images/rss_icon.gif){kind=icon}
![[ARCHIVES]](http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/templates/images/archives_icon.png){kind=icon}
Comments
Here's one that's Laughing Out of My Chair.
Posted by: NObama
| June 10, 2009 1:48 PM
Post A Comment