Bill Clinton campaigns with McAuliffe in Norfolk

By: BOB LEWIS THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | Times-Dispatch
Published: May 14, 2009

NORFOLK, Va. -- With former President Bill Clinton in tow, Democrat Terry McAuliffe pitched his business experience as a stronger asset in this fall's governor's race than his two rivals' legislative background.

In the third campaign swing across Virginia with the former president known for a record peacetime economic expansion, McAuliffe focused on experience in a strategy to define the rest of the field as part of a legislature that too often impeded progress.

He faces a June 9 Democratic primary with state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds and former House Democratic Caucus leader Brian J. Moran.

The winner faces uncontested Republican Robert F. McDonnell, a former legislator and attorney general, in a November election that will be widely watched as the first voter referendum on President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.

"I'm the only one standing on that stage who hasn't been a part of this partisan bickering that we've had down in Richmond," McAuliffe told about 250 people this morning during a rally at the Nauticus museum with the massive battleship USS Wisconsin in the background.

"My argument is if you're looking for something different, I've got the best opportunity to beat Bob McDonnell," he said.

With a pledge to "create more jobs than all of the other 49 governors if elected," McAuliffe is burnishing his background as an entrepreneur and investor with experience in creating jobs.

The issue of jobs in the most troubled economy since the Great Depression allows McAuliffe to pivot easily into the Democrats' central attack on the GOP.

Virginia Democrats are hammering away at a Republican-led vote in the House of Delegates on April 8 to reject $125 million in federal stimulus money to expand benefits for the state's growing rolls of the unemployed.

McDonnell and other Republicans along with the business lobby were resolute in opposing the $125 million Kaine had recommended because it would require changes in state unemployment insurance laws and require employers to eventually pay about $4.50 more per year for each worker on their payrolls.

The money, however, may not be gone. Virginia still has time to reclaim the money if the 2010 General Assembly changes the state's unemployment benefits laws.