“Terry McAuliffe literally did nothing for Virginia or Virginians,” Ken Cuccinelli said last night, “before deciding to run for governor. Nothing. Some people run to do something, and some people run to be something.”
Which is Cuccinelli’s motivation?
I’m going to sound partisan or ideological to a lot of you for bringing this up. I look at it as me being philosophical. But Cuccinelli is about as close to being a career politician as you can get. He has been serving in state government since 2002, and a full-time employee of the state since 2010.
He loves quoting Ronald Reagan. Well, Ken, Ronald Reagan would say that you’re part of the problem, because you’re from the government, and you’re here to help.
For all of McAuliffe’s flaws, and they are legion, one thing you can say about the guy is that he doesn’t suck off the government teat the way Ken Cuccinelli has. He’s wanted to, famously seeking appointment into the Clinton Cabinet in the second term of the Clinton administration, then when that didn’t materialize pushing for an ambassadorship as reward for his hard work raising boatloads of cash for the Clinton re-election campaign.
All around his work in campaign politics, McAuliffe has been a businessman, which of course has been a bone of contention raised by Cuccinelli, who loves to point out on the campaign trail that McAuliffe tried and ultimately failed to build a successful electric-car business.
As a business owner myself, my take on that is different than the cloistered Cuccinelli’s. See, Ken, outside of your bubble in government, where the money to file endless lawsuits against ObamaCare and professors studying climate change and the like flows freely, success be damned, in the real world, those of us trying to make a buck starting a new business have something called risk to consider. And no, risk isn’t losing a case and then filing appeal after appeal, then calling a press conference after the Supreme Court denies your final last-ditch effort at a headline to declare victory and move on.
Risk in business means you lose, you might lose your house.
So McAuliffe “literally did nothing” for Virginia until deciding to run for governor. I guess I’m doing nothing for Virginia, then, either. All I do is wake up every morning and go to bed every night, and spent 95 percent of my waking minutes in between, thinking of ways to grow my business and keep the money flowing in for two full-time and three part-time employees.
There’s apparently nothing patriotic in our supposedly capitalistic American society about doing business to Kenny. What I should be doing, instead, is devising pie-in-the-sky political platforms and dreaming up new ways to spend public dollars to advance my personal agenda. Then, and only then, I might qualify as a good Virginian.
Yeah, I’m being sarcastic, maybe overly so. I’m just tired of hearing from these self-styled anti-government zealots who make a living working in government telling me on the one hand that government is the problem and then on the other that electing them to spend our money to pursue their interests is somehow different and better than electing the other guy to spend our money to pursue their interests.
Go out and get a real job already. Then preach to me about how patriotic you are.
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