Terry McAuliffe has been part of Democratic Party campaigns since the early 1980s, raising over $1 billion while schmoozing the stars, advising candidates, serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, planning strategy, and attacking Republicans on talk shows. His memoir is what you’d expect from someone with a reputation for playing political hardball, telling stories, and drinking like a fish: aggressive, full of insights about the American political system, and, at times, hilarious.
McAuliffe is happy to spill the political fund-raising beans, gleefully telling tales out of school of the millionaires he’s charmed, the movie stars he’s played tennis with, and the powerful people he’s come to know and love (or hate). There’s no doubt about it, McAuliffe is seriously full of himself. Reading What A Party!, you’d think he had invented Bill Clinton, and that his derring-do has driven the Democratic Party for years. Hillary, Dubya, John Kerry, Zell Miller, Al Gore, Dick Cheney — they’re all here, and they’re all supporting characters in the wonderful life of Terry McAuliffe.
The pace of the book is frenetic. Terry’s on a plane on his way to a fund-raiser, then he’s talking to a sloppily dressed billionaire, after which he’s taking a walk with Ben Affleck, then he’s arranging loans or passing out money to candidates. Next, he’s playing cards and strategizing with Bill and Hillary, then he’s slamming the GOP on Meet The Press, and all the while he’s joking and telling more stories.
Many of McAuliffe’s stories are genuinely entertaining and well-told, and the behind-the-scenes looks at the top levels of U.S. electoral politics are often fascinating. There’s a problem with McAuliffe’s version of his relentless fund-raising, however. Namely, he never talks about what donors were promised, or at least expected, for their money, critical omissions that are conspicuous by their absence. Nor does he seem aware that many Democrats cringe at the thought of wheeling and dealing with captains of industry whose interests so often run contrary to the party’s traditional base in the middle class.
For all his interesting stories in What A Party!, McAuliffe comes across, in the end, as an intelligent, but overly self-important, big mouth.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to public notice as the first Somali-born member of the Netherlands’ Parliament. She infuriated many in the country when she chided the Dutch for being too tolerant of Islamic immigrants’ attitudes toward women, and attacked Islamic culture as “brutal, bigoted and fixated on controlling women.” Later, she collaborated with controversial director Theo Van Gogh on a film about domestic violence against Muslim women. The director was assassinated by an Islamic radical who left a knife in Van Gogh’s chest, “pinning” a note that threatened Ali’s life.
Ali’s early life didn’t point to a future reputation as spokesperson for Muslim women’s freedom. In her autobiography, Infidel, Ali tells of being born into a family of longtime desert nomads, being circumcised at age five against her father’s wishes, and enduring indoctrination by imams. She was on her way to a traditional, submissive life, but somehow her cultural and religious programming didn’t completely take, and she found a way to escape.
In an unimaginably gutsy show of courage, she stole away from her family while on the way to a forced marriage in Canada, and lied her way into political asylum in Holland. Soon she removed her headscarf, and was thrilled when God didn’t strike her dead. Blue jeans, bicycle-riding, enrollment in a Dutch university, and all kinds of other sacrileges followed, and soon Ali found herself speaking out against the mistreatment of Muslim women in Holland, arguing that fundamentalist Islam is incompatible with modernity and democracy. Before long, she was elected to Parliament, where she urged the Dutch government to stop helping immigrants establish separate cultural and religious institutions since these often resulted in the subjugation of Muslim women.
Her arguments were like an explosion in Dutch society and led to national soul-searching and debates about the role of tolerance vs. the safeguarding of Western ideas of freedom. The Dutch debates rage to this day, but Ali, subjected to constant death threats, has now relocated to the United States, where she accepted a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The AEI may eventually regret the move, as Ali has repeatedly shown her deeply authoritarian independence of mind, and is unlikely to conform to anyone’s ideological straitjacket, whether of the right or left. As she makes clear in her lyrically written autobiography, she has “moved from the world of faith to the world of reason,” and probably won’t be going back anytime soon.
This article appears in Mar 7-13, 2007.
