Progressive Media Resources Group

KoKo

(84,711 posts) Mon Nov 2, 2015, 09:58 PM Nov 2015

Terry McAuliffe..Al Gore & "Stolen Election 2000"....and Who Profited? It Goes On...

Tie in "Gore 2000" and who was "Gored" in that Stolen Election and what BECAME of them in POLITICS AFTER is a very interesting story if you follow the Clintons vs. Gore since Terry McAuliffe LIVES as Gov. of VA...Rewarded and What Comes Next:

From the Link:

More than anyone, Coelho laid the foundations for the Democratic Party’s open courting of big business. And Terry McAuliffe, working from the master’s Rolodex, served as Coelho’s chief apprentice, sprinting from one Beltway lobby shop to the next offering prime access to Democratic powerbrokers for political cash, hard and soft money, the new coin of the realm.

The young fundraiser learned an early lesson. No enterprise was off-limits, no matter how tarnished the reputation of the company: weapons-makers, oil companies, chemical manufacturers, banks, sweatshop tycoons. Indeed, McAuliffe made his mark by targeting corporations with festering problems, ranging from liability suits to environmental and worker safety restraints to bothersome federal regulators. The more desperate these enterprises were for political intervention, the more money McAuliffe knew he could seduce into DNC coffers. What about environmental groups? Big labor? The traditional core of the Democratic Party? Not only didn’t their objections (assuming they voiced any) matter, they actually made McAuliffe’s pitch more appealing to the corporadoes. After all, the Republicans didn’t have any sway over these organizations. Triangulation, the backstabbing political playbook of Clintontime, originated as a fundraising gimmick. A very lucrative one.

In the early 90s, really big money began to pour into the DNC. McAuliffe recruited robust donations from Arco and Chevron, Entergy and Enron, Phillip Morris and Monsanto, Boeing and Lockheed, Citibank and Weyerhaeuser. Many of these corporations had all but abandoned the Democrats during the Reagan era. McAuliffe lured them back with promises of favorable treatment by a new generation of anti-regulatory Democrats attuned to the special needs of multinational corporations. This was the mulch bed from which the Clinton presidency took root.

By 1994, Clinton himself had aligned himself to McAuliffe’s magic touch. He tapped him as the chief fundraiser for the 1996 reelection campaign. In this capacity, McAuliffe masterminded some of the more risqué political fundraising operations since the Kennedy era. There were the fundraisers at Buddhist temples in California. There were the notorious coffee klatches, where for a six-figure contribution to the DNC, corporate executives were brought to the White House for some face-time with Bill and Hillary, Al and Tipper, and a retinue of cabinet secretaries, with pen in hand ready to address any nagging problem. McAuliffe also devised the plan to rent out the Lincoln Bedroom to top contributors for slumber parties with the president.

Over the course of the next six years, McAuliffe was personally responsible for raising, largely from corporate sources, more than $300 million for the DNC.

The scene: the MCI Center in Washington, D.C. The date: May 14, 2000. The Event: “BBQ and Blue Jeans Gala.” It’s Terry McAuliffe’s biggest party yet. A star-studded gathering of DC lobbyists, corporate executives and Hollywood liberals, all in dressed in blue jeans, eating BBQ and listening to the blues and country music. It was also the single biggest fundraiser in history. More than $25 million was raised for the DNC in a single night.

Toward the end of the evening, Al Gore lumbered his way onto the stage and seized the microphone. He directed the spotlight turned on McAuliffe, the real star of the evening. “Terry”, Gore said, “You are the greatest fundraiser in the history of the universe.” The crowd thundered with applause for the man who had just lightened their wallets of several thousands of dollars.

Gore would soon come to rue those fervent words. While most Democrats blamed Katherine Harris or the Supreme Court for the loss of the White House to George W. Bush, McAuliffe pointed the finger at Gore. The fundraiser believed that Gore ran an inept campaign, misspending the precious millions he had worked so diligently to raise. McAuliffe detested the way that Gore distanced himself from the Clintons and refused to allow the president to campaign for him even in key southern states. Even worse from McAuliffe’s perspective, Gore had subtly dissed Clinton on the campaign trail, suggesting that he himself was a man of firmer moral sinew than the embattled president.

When Gore lost, the party fell back into the control of the Clintons and their chief emissary, Terry McAuliffe. The fundraiser swiftly took his revenge out on Gore. In late January, as the moving vans where pulling away from the White House, McAuliffe planned a major send off for the Clintons at Andrews Air Base. All the top Democrats were there; many were invited to give tributes to the first couple in front of the national TV cameras. Al Gore, naturally, expected to give the keynote farewell address. But McAuliffe refused to allow Gore even near a microphone. Gore wasn’t permitted to speak a single word. “McAuliffe didn’t want Gore to speak”, a top aide at the DNC told the Washington Post. “McAuliffe didn’t even want Gore there. The send off was about good memories, success stories. And the VP wasn’t either.”

McAuliffe’s implacable loyalty to Clinton was soon rewarded. Later in 2001, Bill Clinton engineered the ouster of Joe Andrew as head of the DNC and installed McAuliffe, who only months earlier had offered to purchase the Clintons a house in Chappaqua, New York for $1.3 million, as the chief of the party. As the head of the DNC, McAuliffe was now in a position to protect the Clintons’ legacy, reward loyalists, punish party dissidents and select the next presidential nominee.

When Gore began to flirt with the notion of challenging Bush in 2004, McAuliffe went to work to kill off his campaign before it even started. He went straight to Gore’s top political sponsors and advised them to withhold funds from the Gore campaign chest. He was tremendously persuasive, convincing even some of Gore’s most loyal backers, such as financier James Tisch, to deny money to their old friend.

The sabotage of the nascent Gore 2004 campaign was just a run-up for demolition job McAuliffe directed against the unauthorized campaign of Vermont governor Howard Dean. The Dean threat had almost nothing to do with any perceived ideological heresy from the Vermonter. After all Dean was a run-of-the-mill neoliberal who pretty much aped the centrist economic policies of Clinton. The real threat posed by Dean came from his determination to raise millions in campaign contributions outside of the precincts of the DNC. McAuliffe’s control over the party stemmed from his role as the prime dispenser of campaign cash, the elixir necessary to keep political recipients loyal to the party leadership and its policies. Dean showed another way was possible and he had to be put down.

But after the Dean juggernaut was scuttled, McAuliffe reached out a helping hand to the defeated candidate. As usual, the hand proffered money. The Dean campaign was in debt, the legions of Deaniacs seething with rage over the demolition of their hero. McAuliffe offered to help pay off Dean’s debts and set up his new institute, Democracy for America. In return, Dean worked to calm his troops, imploring them not to abandon the party for the independent campaign of Ralph Nader.

Terry McAuliffe didn’t just use his business contacts to fatten the accounts of the Democratic National Committee; he also deftly exploited them to inflate his own fortune, which now nudges toward nine figures. A similar fruitful intimacy with corporate cronies led to Tony Coelho’s stunning fall from grace, but McAuliffe never looked back. His trajectory has been decidedly prosperous and, to this point, utterly immune to the slumping fortunes of the economy outside the confines of the Beltway. These days McAuliffe says he wants to resurrect the Misery Index, but he’s not acquainted with any of the numbers.

In 1996, McAuliffe met a young corporate tycoon named Gary Winnick, who had once referred to himself as the richest man in Los Angeles. Winnick ran Global Crossing, a fiber-optics company chartered in the tax-friendly haven of Bermuda. At the time McAuliffe met Winnick, Global Crossing was a privately held company, poised to cash in on the deregulation of the telecom industry and the new opportunities in China. In 1997, Winnick offered McAuliffe the opportunity to purchase $100,000 worth of Global Crossing stock.

Continued at.........

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/23/the-man-who-bought-the-clintons-the-political-business-of-terry-mcauliffe/