Will money cure blues?

Having maintained precedent, Terry McAuliffe seeks today to batter it and in November to swing a shattering blow. The Democratic operative and first-time candidate entered the gubernatorial race toting a reputation that advances and repulses. With McAuliffe as national party committee chairman, Democrats raised money and lost House and Senate seats prolifically. He has piled up cash for himself this time, but can he win now and later?

State Sen. Creigh Deeds has the answers one might expect from a candidate, especially one surging at the tape. McAuliffe has led polls by 6 to 10 percentage points through much of the campaign, but Deeds has nibbled at the gap to the point that the Bath County Democrat now runs shoulder to shoulder at the finish line with the high-falutin insider. The prospect looms that the $7 million McAuliffe has raised for himself, more than twice the amount raised by either Deeds or Del. Brian Moran, D-Alexandria, will be lost in the air.

McAuliffe dismisses this, saying that Deeds’ positions as a backer of gun rights and a proponent of increased fuel taxes to pay for transportation projects makes him unelectable in a contest with Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob McDonnell. Deeds has been paired with McDonnell before, losing by 360 votes in the attorney general’s race in the closest statewide election in Virginia history. McAuliffe might envy that margin.

Beyond this, McAuliffe’s expertise on the subject of electability is suspect. Democrats lost 10 seats in the House and six in the Senate from 2001 to 2005, when McAuliffe was party chairman. In 2002, he threw the party’s financial weight behind an effort to topple Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and another to retain Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan. Democrats lost both races.

Other candidates claimed the Democratic National Committee shortchanged them. Democrats under McAuliffe were the modern New York Yankees, a team that spends lavishly but vanishes in autumn. His record was so poor that even Howard Dean improved upon it, to the point that now Democrats hold both houses and the presidency.

In Virginia, more than policy might be shaped by today’s result. A McAuliffe victory would ensure that this state’s gubernatorial showdown will be the most watched in the country. Republicans meticulously have groomed McDonnell for this run, the success of which is considered a first step toward turning back the blue tides that have swept the country and the South in recent years, culminating with Barack Obama’s presidential win last fall.

A pairing with McAuliffe will trigger massive GOP spending. The Republican Governors Association already has contributed $2.7 million and the Republican National Committee, $1.5 million, to McDonnell. More money would flow to both candidates as McAuliffe turns back to his vast reservoir of potential donors cultivated during some two decades of fundraising for major national contenders.

More than two-thirds of McAuliffe’s money has gushed in from outside Virginia’s borders. That brings to mind an early criticism of McAuliffe, that he’s not a man of Virginia. “Terry McAuliffe doesn’t know Norton from Norfolk,” McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin told The Washington Post in January. “If he runs, remind me to send him a Virginia state map.”

Out-of-state influence hovers by degrees unprecedented. The development might end with McAuliffe as it began with him or it may blossom into a trend. That lurks in the backdrop of the primary. Voters decide to what extent the issue remains there or fades, either as a conceded fact of modern state politics or as a forgotten wrinkle in another campaign in which the party’s ultimate insider raised money to the ceiling but failed again to hoist victory’s banner.