Let's Talk About McAuliffe's Investments in Carlyle, Shall We?
Terry McAuliffe is certainly keen to blast Glenn Youngkin on Carlyle Group, even if McAuliffe was a six-to-seven-figure investor in same.
If there’s a word that comes to mind when one thinks of Terry McAuliffe, one might use the word flamboyant, or hustler, or even brass.
For starters, Virginia Democrats tend to be masters at message discipline. Democrats attack; the media absorbs; Republicans react. Meanwhile, we sit around catching grenades while we ought to be throwing them right back at the Democrats and forcing them to explain — because after all, if you’re explaining you are losing.
McAuliffe has a lot of explaining to do.
Guess who holds the other end of that filthy purse string, Mr. Adams?
McAuliffe has a history of investing in private equity funds, including from the Carlyle Group.
Oops.
Financial disclosure forms show that McAuliffe personally invested in co-investment vehicles tied to Carlyle Group's third and fourth buyout funds, plus an energy fund. His wife also invested alongside Carlyle Partners IV.
The spin back from the McAuliffe campaign is that at a minimum, McAuliffe holds no more than $5,000 in funds at present.
Yet that doesn’t quite square with reality.
The Associated Press lowers the boom:
“…records reveal that McAuliffe invested at least $690,000 in Carlyle funds between December 2007 and the end of 2016. The actual figure is likely much higher because the disclosures require candidates to acknowledge only a broad range of investment with no upper limit in some cases.”
McAuliffe’s handlers have been doing everything in their power to make sure that detail is curiously omitted in most assessments of this story — insisting that the true amount is closer to a few thousand dollars.
Yet prior to 2013, The Carlyle Group required a minimum investment of between $5 million and $20 million.
So how many millions of dollars did McAuliffe invest in Carlyle at one time?
McAuliffe doesn’t want to say.
Youngkin press spokesperson Macaulay Porter remains decidedly non-plussed about McAuliffe’s oddly placed attack against — well, McAuliffe himself:
Terry McAuliffe is a dishonest, stale politician who talks out of both sides of his mouth. McAuliffe’s bogus attacks ring hollow because he is still an investor in The Carlyle Group and has invested millions of dollars in private equity companies. All McAuliffe can do is talk because he had a chance to do these things as governor, and he failed.
Dan Primack with Axios is a bit more cutting in his assessment:
Is this hypocrisy? Sure. Just like if we'd learned that Barack Obama had invested in Bain Capital funds, during his run against Mitt Romney. And it's exacerbated by the McAuliffe campaign declining to explain how its candidate got access to Carlyle funds, which aren't the sorts of things you can invest in via a Robinhood account.
The wider question as to whether Glenn Youngkin was pulling up to mobile home parks, laughing like a 19th century villain, adjusting his monocle and twirling his moustache before deliberately raising rent on poor families for kicks on a Tuesday to add another layer of gold to the money bin remains to be seen.
In fact, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it never happened.
Far more likely is that places where rent is kept artificially low while punting on basic infrastructure get rescued by investment firms who spruce the place up, provide the true cost, and actually increase the standards of living a notch or two.
Full disclosure? I was raised in a double wide trailer in Caroline County — so I might know a thing or two about what it’s like to live in those things. More to the point, what it is like to get out of those things. Even more direct than that, how very little McAuliffe’s policies (or Democratic paternalism) actually does for working class Virginians.
Virginians don’t require the sympathy of our cubicle-dwelling superiors; we require real opportunities to exist and survive outside the welfare state.
I doubt Terry McAuliffe has any clue how grating this leftist paternalism truly is on the working poor in Virginia. If he actually cared, McAuliffe would have done something — anything — about it years ago while governor.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.