New Republic
by Eve Fairbanks
February 04, 2009
‘I love chicken waste!” Terry McAuliffe shouts to a crowd of several hundred elegant northern Virginians at Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory art gallery. McAuliffe—the former Democratic moneyman dubbed by Al Gore “the greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe”—is running for governor of Virginia, and tonight is the official rollout of his primary campaign. As he rhapsodizes about Virginia’s 1,000 poultry farms, his pale eyebrows hop around furiously on his sharp, ostrich-like brow ridge. McAuliffe’s listeners—many of whom are decked out in the kind of pricey wearable art that’s offered for sale in the gallery—seem nonplussed. But McAuliffe presses on. As governor, he explains, he would transform the nearly half-a-million tons of chicken poop the state produces every year into an alternative energy source. “Ew,” murmurs one elderly man. But, if McAuliffe recognizes any shade of absurdity in all this, he never lets it show. “Fifty thousand tons of chicken waste equals forty megawatts of power, which could power forty thousand homes!”
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