Clinton’s campaign launch in Iowa last week was “spectacular,” McAuliffe said on the program, because “she got in the van” and talked to real people — just as he did, he said, when he won the governor’s mansion in 2013.
The buttoned-up interview was a far cry from the freewheeling cable news appearances McAuliffe made for Clinton in 2008, when he was co-chairman of her campaign and her most faithful advocate. His spokesman in the governor's office, Brian Coy, said the two appearances this week are not a signal that McAuliffe will be hitting the road regularly for high-profile surrogate work.
“He has lived that life,” Coy said. While McAuliffe will “certainly be helpful” in electing Clinton in Virginia, he said, “his full-time occupation is creating jobs here.”
As if to prove the point, McAuliffe seemed to pivot his remarks during the Sunday interview back to Virginia whenever he could.
McAuliffe suggested that Clinton could win Virginia, a key swing state, by following the same playbook he used: a mix of liberal social policies and business-oriented proposals. Asked about Republican attacks on Clinton, McAuliffe said the economy in Virginia was “booming” in part because “we have brought people together in a bipartisan way.”
He added: “And that’s what Hillary can do for this country.”
Such statements are unlikely to appease Republicans, who in 2009 seized on then-Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s role as President Obama’s Democratic National Committee chairman — criticizing him for taking on a partisan job and committing to an extensive travel schedule at the expense, they said, of his job leading state government.
State GOP leaders didn’t waste any time Sunday offering a similar critique of McAuliffe.
“We knew when he was running in 2013 that his main focus was being Hillary Clinton’s cheerleader,” said Virginia Republican Party Chairman John Whitbeck. If McAuliffe is out helping Clinton, he said, the evidence of an “absentee governor” will quickly become apparent.
