Having invested millions of his own money with the Carlyle Group, the firm once helmed by his GOP opponent, McAuliffe’s attacks come across as hypocritical.
Having invested millions of his own money with the Carlyle Group, the private-equity firm once helmed by his GOP opponent, McAuliffe’s attacks come across as hypocritical.
W hen Mitt Romney ran for president in 2012, he was savaged during the Republican primary as a “vulture capitalist.” That attack, first launched by Newt Gingrich, was deftly deployed by Barack Obama during the general election, and the hits on Romney and Bain Capital probably played a significant role in explaining what Sean Trende called “the case of the missing white voters.”
So when Glenn Youngkin, former CEO of the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm, won the Virginia GOP gubernatorial nomination, Democrats seemed as if they’d have a good opportunity to run the same playbook against Youngkin in 2021 that they ran against Romney in 2012.
But McAuliffe’s attacks on Youngkin as a vulture capitalist throughout the campaign have fallen flat — and didn’t warrant a single mention from McAuliffe during his Tuesday night rally in Virginia with President Biden. The race is now a toss-up less than a week to go until Election Day.
There are several reasons why Carlyle hasn’t hurt Youngkin much.
First, many of the attacks are false — see, for example, this Washington Post Fact-Checker column: “McAuliffe ad falsely claims Youngkin ‘took over’ predatory dental clinics.”
Second, the working-class GOP-leaning voters who might be skeptical of a private-equity CEO are motivated by other issues — including what former Virginia congressman Tom Davis called “all this woke stuff” in Virginia’s public schools. It helps that that issue also plays well among suburban moderates.
Third, much of the swing vote is in upscale northern Virginia, and those voters are less likely to be alienated by a businessman who made his money in private equity.
But the most important reason why McAuliffe’s attacks on Carlyle have fallen flat is because it’s hard to think of a Democrat who would have less credibility than McAuliffe in deploying those attacks — given his own financial stake with the company.
The fact that McAuliffe was uniquely ill-suited to attack Youngkin over Carlyle’s business dealings was made abundantly clear during the first Virginia gubernatorial debate. At that debate, McAuliffe said that “Glenn Youngkin was at the Carlyle Group before they threw him out. What did he do? They bought mobile homes; they raised the rents. People had to make a decision: Do I pay my rent or do I buy my food?”
“They bought nursing homes; they neglected seniors,” McAuliffe continued. “People died, including five in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I have a record of creating high-paying jobs. Your record at Carlyle is outsourcing jobs to foreign countries.”
“Terry McAuliffe is very comfortable telling lies,” Youngkin replied. “The reality is he felt so good about the Carlyle Group that he invested millions of dollars of his money that Bill Clinton let him scrape off of the money he was raising for the Clinton Foundation. Terry, thank you for the big endorsement.”
“If you can trust me with your money,” Youngkin added, “the rest of Virginia can trust me, too.”
“It wasn’t you I trusted because I lost it,” McAuliffe replied. On the verge of laughter, McAuliffe added: “It wasn’t any good investment — let me tell you that.”
So McAuliffe started out by claiming that Youngkin was involved in killing seniors, throwing poor people out of mobile homes, and outsourcing jobs — but the exchange ended with McAuliffe complaining that Youngkin hadn’t done any of that in a manner that was profitable to him. (According to Axios, the claim that he lost money “doesn’t add up” either.)
McAuliffe’s problem isn’t merely that he, as the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is the quintessential D.C. “swamp creature” — his investment of millions of dollars of his own money with Carlyle made any attack on the private-equity firm appear to be obviously insincere and hypocritical. And if not for that glaring hypocrisy, McAuliffe’s attacks — no matter how dishonest — might have put this race away.