Campaign 2000: Terry McAuliffe: The Kingmaker

Terry McAuliffe has reinvented the rules of fund raising and shattered all records, and he has become rich along the way. Is he the poster boy for reform?

  • Share
  • Read Later

(4 of 5)

Two weeks out, they had promises of $25 million but far less in hand. It was collection time, a chance for McAuliffe to demonstrate his trademark blend of cajoling and ribbing and his use of fund-raising argot--an old hand never needs to say the last three digits of the big dollar amounts. "You all pumped up for the event?" he asked Niranjan Shah, an engineering-firm executive in Chicago. "You got your 100 done?" Pause. "No, you're right. You don't have a choice." O'Keefe found sport in the next call as he dialed Cincinnati lawyer Stan Chesley. "Ten bucks you can't close this guy," he dared McAuliffe. McAuliffe liked the bet, nodded and picked up the line. "Stan, have you got 50 out there for me? That's all I'm asking." McAuliffe's face lit up. "I love you. You'll get it in before May 24. I thank you for your $50,000 check. You'll be in all the action. You'll go arm to arm with me in every event." The understudy threw several dollar bills across the table. "I love spanking you young guys," McAuliffe said. "Twenty-one years I've been doing this, and they try to smoke the Mack."

McAuliffe learned the art of banter across the dining-room table of the modest home he grew up in in southwest Syracuse, N.Y. Terence Richard McAuliffe, the baby of the family, took an early interest in politics. Father Jack, treasurer of the Onondaga County Democratic Party, took the boy to fund raisers at age five and gave him tickets to sell a few years later. One of his dad's mottoes sank in. "You gotta show up" to gain the trust of people, he would tell young Terry. Jack, who earned a living in real estate, was the original networker, using his patronage and wide contacts to find jobs for people. Mother Millie pressed the work ethic with Terry, who by 14 had started his first company, sealing driveways with tar. He made his first $1 million 11 years later by investing those profits. Along the way, he graduated from Catholic University in Washington and in 1979 got his first job in politics working to re-elect President Carter. When the campaign's Florida finance chair, Richard Swann, asked Washington for help on a fund raiser, he got a 22-year-old kid named McAuliffe. Breaking a record for the event, McAuliffe was sent to California, where he worked closely with a pair of fund-raising legends: Hollywood's Lew Wasserman and San Francisco real estate magnate Walter Shorenstein. By the general election, McAuliffe was the top fund-raising member of the staff at the D.N.C., wearing fake horn-rimmed glasses to look older. Something else came out of McAuliffe's Florida initiation: a marriage to Swann's daughter Dorothy, with whom he has four children.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5