You probably know,” says Terry McAuliffe, thumping the arms of his chair at the Oval Room, a restaurant two blocks north of the White House, “I come here a lot. This used to be George’s table.” He’s sitting in the see-and-be-seen chair, the one everyone has to pass on the way into the main dining room. He doesn’t have to spell out that he’s referring to George Stephanopoulos, former media favorite and adviser to President Clinton. “Yeah,” he says, in case you missed the point. “Old George is kind of out of favor now, and I’m in.”

So this is the first clue to how a man becomes what Vice President A1 Gore has called “the greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe”: it’s not about subtlety. “I’m one of the few fighters in the party,” McAuliffe likes to say. “I think that’s one of the reasons the president loves me. I’m the only one around with any you-know-what.”

Terry McAuliffe can afford to crow. After two decades at the slippery peak of a pursuit most men tire of after two or three election cycles, McAuliffe is the acknowledged master at separating political donors from their money. He is, at 42, a self-made multimillionaire, with a fortune that may reach into nine digits. And, icing on the cake, he has achieved the official role of First Friend to the president, a status sealed during the fall when he posted collateral of $1.35 million in cash to help the Clintons buy their new house in Chappaqua, New York.

The Clintons’ reliance on a private benefactor, especially one as controversial as McAuliffe, raised so many questions that they went on to arrange a different form of financing, without McAuliffe’s help. But the home-financing deal was, in the scheme of things, a drop in the bucket of Bill Clinton’s debt to McAuliffe, the culmination of one of those instructive Washington symbioses: between a man who calls himself “the king of money” and a man whose flirtations with personal and political disaster have made him more financially needy than any other president in memory. “The feeling I had is, the one guy, if he did this, that they couldn’t criticize [by saying] he was going to get something out of it was me,” says McAuliffe. “Because I was so far into everything. I mean, what’s the president going to do, give me another round of golf?”

The “everything” that McAuliffe has been “into” has included: leading the fundraising effort for Clinton’s 1996 campaign, at a time when many other Democrats were writing him off as a one-term president; chairing (and raising money for) his 1997 inaugural; raising nearly $7 million for the president’s legal-defense fund (“I am the fund-raiser for it. I raise all the big checks,” he says); raising money for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign (“I put her whole money team together…. I made 50 calls for her this weekend…. I love old Hillary!”); raising money for the president’s future library, budgeted to cost more than $125 million; and rounding up corporate sponsors for the administration’s planned millennium celebration on the mall.

And, when he has time left over, raising money for the president’s vice president.

It says something about Clinton that McAuliffe is his last best friend as the final year of his presidency begins. Clinton came to Washington, seven years ago, surrounded by longtime policy comrades like Lani Guinier, Robert Reich, and Peter and Marian Wright Edelman. Their politics were embraced by some and loathed by others, but at least they had politics; Clinton has since chewed through or cast off or triangulated away most of those old friends, the friends who belonged to whatever part of him came to Washington wanting more than the eternal survival of Bill Clinton.

The last man standing is the one whose chief commitment has been to saving Clinton’s political skin.

McAuliffe’s career also offers an illuminating map of the byways between money and politics. A Georgetown University-trained lawyer and an entrepreneur who has prospered in more than half a dozen industries, he has done a brilliant job of exploiting his connections while avoiding the traps that lie in wait for the incautiously greedy. People on the other end of some McAuliffe transactions have a funny way of winding up with lawsuits, grievances, or even indictments. But McAuliffe has had a genius for evading harm in the investigations that have dogged his career.

Finally, McAuliffe’s personal history makes him the perfect poster boy for his party at the turn of the millennium. His life—from his Irish Catholic roots in middleclass Syracuse, New York, where he was steeped in Democratic politics as a child, through his climb to the top of Bill Clinton’s Washington—closely tracks the evolution of the party; he was present at every important stage in the growth of the cash heliotropism that has increasingly inclined the Democrats toward the wealthy sources of their sunshine.

“These people—the Rolodex kings—are the party now,” says a mournful Democratic politician. “And they’re all nice people, naturally.”

The First Lady is on the speakerphone from Bratislava. Here in Washington, in the borrowed fourth-floor conference room of the Edison Electric Institute, it is nine in the morning, and it is only 17 days until a birthday salute, at the Capital Hilton, that is budgeted to raise half a million dollars for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s not-yet-announced Senate campaign.

The First Lady delivers some general remarks of thanks to the 22 benefactors seated around the burnished table—a group typical of big-ticket political donors, which is to say that they are mostly white men. But the real purpose of this meeting comes when Terry McAuliffe rises to “warm up” the audience, who have all agreed to hit up friends, acquaintances, and business associates to donate to the coming event.

“This is going to be the main Washington event for the First Lady,” McAuliffe explains to them. “So our plan is for everyone here to bring in 10.” He means $ 10,000, in contributions of no more than the federally allowed $2,000 per person, with a thousand counting toward the primary campaign and a thousand toward the general election. Fund-raisers rarely use the word “thousand.” They speak of “ 10s” and “25s” and—when they get up into the higher reaches of “soft money” fund-raising, in which big donors and companies are asked for large checks that go to the more loosely regulated party committees—of “50s” and “hundreds” and even “250s.”

“Is there anyone here who couldn’t do it?” (He always asks this question during warm-ups, he has told me; “No one’s going to put their hand up in front of all their peers” and say no. Then he pounces: “I say, All right, we’re all committed for 10.’”)

“So we’re all committed for 10,” he says now. “So all you need is two and a half couples. So I want you to make five calls every day…. Stop people on the street. Tackle ’em, and grab their checkbooks! This is IT…. Please, folks, please. Please make your calls every day.”

McAuliffe is physically striking—tall, though thickening at the middle, with a dense mop of chestnut hair, a glowing Irish complexion, and a ready smile. His right eye is blue; his left eye is a dark greenish brown. You notice this in one-on-one conversation, because McAuliffe focuses on you as if both your lives depended on unbroken eye contact.

He uses your name earnestly and often, proffering it between respectful commas. He’s the kind of guy who says “gosh” and “golly” and “goodness gracious!” Who describes his wife, Dorothy, as “a load of fun.” Who constantly uses the phrase “to be honest with you,” especially when he’s about to pitch you a really shameless bit of spin. He conveys, with every restless gesture, that he is Just Terry, the Macker, a sunny Irish Catholic boy, the luckiest mother’s son ever to rise out of the middle class in upstate New rk.

“There are people that are hard to say no to because they’re relentless. And there are people that are hard to say no to because they’re likable. And he’s in the latter camp,” says Steven Rattner, deputy chairman of Lazard Freres and a reliable Democratic donor.

The persona on display to Hillary’s donors is at once the real Terry McAuliffe and a slightly sly parody of the type; part of his allure, people admit, is the way he can both inhabit this charming persona and also seem faintly hip to it. “Occasionally I’ll see him in a restaurant, like the Oval Room,” says Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrityone of the watchdog groups that keep a critical eye on the Terry McAuliffes of the world. “He’s always a little bit like Eddie Haskell. Like, ‘Hello, Charles, and how are you today? And how is Integrity?’ It’s hard not to smile when you see him.”

“I lo-o-o-ove the action. Just bein’ with the president, flyin’ all over the country, ridin’ around with him.”

“You can’t not like the guy,” says a reporter who has tried. “And he’s Machiavellian with the press. He really dishes, and so you don’t want to alienate him.”

McAuliffe wears his useful niceness everywhere he goes. When, for example, he gave a deposition to the Senate committee that in 1997 investigated campaign-finance abuses, he was closely questioned by committee counsel Gus Puryear about his involvement in instigating the “coffees” that shuttled donors through the White House. To Puryear’s astonishment McAuliffe addressed him, throughout the day, by his first name. The word “Gus” appears four dozen times in the deposition transcript. “It’s almost like someone who took a Dale Carnegie course and then walked in to give a deposition,” Puryear says. “It had just never happened to me before.”

At first glance, this Haskell-ism might seem so exaggerated as to be counterproductive. But notice that McAuliffe was never called as a witness during the committee’s televised hearings. Republicans initially had hoped to use him as their opening witness, to establish the overall craving for cash that had led the Democrats into soaking up illegal foreign donations and selling the Lincoln Bedroom. But after his performance in deposition, they grew wary that his cheerful boosterism might make him an impregnable witness, the Oliver North of the Thompson hearings.

Other campaign staffers became the public face of the scandal, while McAuliffe portrayed himself as uninvolved. “People who deal with Terry know that’s the downside,” says someone who has worked with him. “There are never any flies on Terry at the end.”

“Most of fundraising is personality,” says Laura Hartigan, 33, who served as finance director under McAuliffe in the ’96 Clinton-Gore campaign. Watching him stroke the First Lady’s donors, one gets a sharp sense of McAuliffe’s value to his party and his president; of why the president and the vice president both attended his 40th-birthday party; of why House minority leader Richard Gephardt, another beneficiary of McAuliffe’s skills, once bought the McAuliffe family a golden-retriever puppy, house-trained it for two months, and bathed it himself, in his bathtub, before delivering it on Christmas morning.

For one thing, McAuliffe is legendary for his refusal to hear “No.” Once he staked out a business executive’s lawn at six A.M. after the man failed to deliver on the last $5,000 of a $25,000 pledge and then stopped taking McAuliffe’s calls. To get rid of McAuliffe, the embarrassed man wrote a $1,000 check on the spot, got his wife to do the same, and then knocked on three neighbors’ doors to shake them down for $ 1,000 each. Another time—as McAuliffe loves to tell you—he wrestled an alligator, on a dare by a Florida Seminole tribe, in exchange for a $15,000 gift to the Democratic Party.

McAuliffe has a Rolodex about 4,000 strong. (“I do have the best Rolodex in the country,” he boasts.) For years he kept up his network by sending out dime-store valentines each February. It’s safe to guess that these were the only five-cent valentines Pamela Harriman received each year, but his real targets were the secretaries who controlled access to the executives he wanted to dun.

“Where most people fall off the wagon is having the appetite to spend as much time doing it as he does,” says a prominent Democratic fund-raiser. “I can do it for an hour or two a day, at some times_I suspect he averages eight hours a day. I don’t know how anybody can bear it.”

In fact, McAuliffe makes roughly 500 phone calls a week. In big election years, he has spent as many as 300 days on the road. This past November, he hosted a fundraiser at his house for Gore. He scheduled another event, at home, for Hillary Clinton the first week in December. The week after that, the president was slated to headline an event there for House Democrats.

This schedule seems even more staggering when you consider that the McAuliffes have four children under the age of nine, including a baby delivered at the end of October. Dorothy McAuliffe went into the hospital the evening of October 28, and the baby arrived early the next morning. In between, Terry could be found on the ninth floor of the Washington Post building, buoyantly networking at a party for the paper’s gossip columnist, Lloyd Grove.

“I hope you give a good plug to Dorothy,” a friend of the couple’s told me, “just for the shit she puts up with.”

Another friend notes that back in McAuliffe’s bachelor days, after a night of barhopping, “at six A.M., Macker would be in the shower singing ‘God Bless America.’ … He has an energy level that is beyond most people’s comprehension.”

But even more than his toil, McAuliffe’s chief value is the cleansing effervescence he lends to the sea of money washing through his party. There is, today, a subtle tension involved in the very act of gathering to talk about political money. McAuliffe, with his air of wholesome joy, is a genius at cutting this tension.

“Don’t worry, you’ll only get a couple of subpoenas,” he cracks to the First Lady’s check harvesters, reaping nervous laughter. And when he’s asked whether children can attend the event, which will be held at the awkward hour of 11 A.M. on a Saturday, he says sure, but adds a semi-serious reminder: “We don’t want kids writing checks. That’s all we need. Next thing you know, we’ll be doin’ people’s cats and dogs.”

Toward the end of the Oval Room’s busy lunch period, as the restaurant is beginning to clear out, the hostess comes to McAuliffe’s table. “Alecia is on the phone,” she says, meaning McAuliffe’s longtime assistant, Alecia Dyer. “The president is calling.” McAuliffe jumps up, a flush of pleasure suffusing his cheeks. “This really wasn’t a setup,” he says, and hurries to the front of the restaurant. For the next 10 minutes I can hear him up there, roaring his big laugh into Bill Clinton’s ear. HA! HA-HA!

McAuliffe entered Clinton’s circle relatively late, in 1994, when the Democrats had just suffered their staggering midterm loss of the House of Representatives. Drafted to begin raising money for Clinton’s re-election, McAuliffe faced a president who was being written off as a failure, certain to be challenged by others in his party. But McAuliffe raised the entire amount that a primary candidate is allowed to spend, $37.1 million before federal matching funds, in only seven months. More important, his show of muscle tied up all the money that might conceivably have funded a challenger.

“You know, I wouldn’t be in this office if it were not for your son,” Clinton told McAuliffe’s parents when they visited the White House last spring.

By most accounts, the friendship went from being a professional one to being a truly social one around the time the Lewinsky scandal broke—the same time, in other words, that Clinton’s previous No. 1 golfing buddy, Vernon Jordan, was suddenly offlimits because of his role as a witness in the Starr investigation. (It was Jordan’s part in helping Lewinsky get a job in New York that had allowed Kenneth Starr to investigate the affair in the first place.)

McAuliffe replaced Jordan as Clinton’s most frequent golf partner, playing with him as often as once a week at the Army-Navy Club. He became the person Clinton is apt to summon to a movie at the White House on nights when the First Lady is out of town. He’s been on two vacations with the First Family—though, notably, neither was the kind of vacation on which his own family was invited along. Clinton and McAuliffe speak by phone almost daily, either in the afternoon or, more often, late at night, when Clinton talks to unwind. “Terry is one of those safe harbors for him,” says senior adviser to the president Doug Sosnik. “He doesn’t have to worry about what he says to Terry, because he knows Terry’s only agenda is friendship.”

But it’s hard not to see utilitarian underpinnings in that friendship. Its very existence, because it advertises the fund-raiser’s closeness to The Man, makes raising the money the president needs even easier for McAuliffe. “To a large degree, Clinton’s friendships are circumstantial,” says a former administration official. “Terry’s both a very affable, very capable guy and very useful.”

One friend says that McAuliffe genuinely believed the president’s early assurances, in 1998, that he’d never had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “He did lie to Terry directly,” says this friend. When McAuliffe learned the truth, “he was just crushed. It took even old Mack a while to get over it.”

But as always McAuliffe managed to find a way to see this glass as half full. “I think at the end of the day, the president was trying to protect me,” he says now. “Starr knew how much we had talked. We’ve got a very special relationship. He would never want to put me in harm’s way.”

McAuliffe was born to Jack and Millie McAuliffe in 1957 and named for the Notre Dame halfback Terry Brennan. (Brennan, Millie McAuliffe explains, ran a kickoff back 97 yards for a touchdown during the Notre Dame-Army game on November 8, 1947. She remembers this clearly because her husband took her to the game on their wedding day.) The family’s home was on the far west side of Syracuse, a neighborhood of the flourishing middle class. Jack McAuliffe made a good living developing commercial real estate, but one modest enough that Terry had to put himself through college and law school.

It was the last gasp of the cozy, all-encompassing urban Catholic world of the 1960s: parochial school at St. Ann’s elementary and then Bishop Ludden High School, where Terry was president of his class for three years, and of the student body his senior year. (“Most Likely to Succeed,” his yearbook said, noting that he “dislikes nothing.”) Interviews turn up the clear suggestion that Terry, the youngest of four sons, was his mother’s favorite. “He is just the apple of his mother’s eye,” says Dorothy McAuliffe. “When he came in the house, it all kind of lit up a little,” recalls Millie McAuliffe. “He just brightened the landscape.”

Terry came by his politics early in life: his father was active in the Onondaga County Democratic Party, becoming its treasurer when Terry was 13. Terry loved to man the door at party dinners, selling $25 tickets to his father’s friends.

You might say the McAuliffe family offers a capsule history of the postwar Democratic Party. In the father’s day, the party was everything: the arbiter of who might run, the chief source of funding for candidates vetted by the party elders. By the time the son rose to the top of the party hierarchy, politics was mediated almost entirely by television, and therefore by the moneymen who could deal aspirants into the cash needed to stoke ad campaigns.

And as much as Terry seemed to savor politics, he also demonstrated early on that he had a way with money. Scarcely into high school, he started a business sealing driveways and parking lots around Syracuse. In one of the five scrapbooks his mother made to chronicle his career are the founding documents of McAuliffe Driveway Maintenance, including the earnest letter young Terry sent around to drum up business:

“Dear Local Businessman,” it began. “McAuliffe Driveway Maintenance is just the company for which you have been looking. We are the sealing and repair specialists of Central New York. Your parking area reflects YOU. Your beauty is a big business asset and making your parking area beautiful is our business.”

He was 14 at the time.

When winter came he invested some of his profits in a huge snowblower and rose every snowy morning at four to go around the neighborhood clearing driveways. He would be home by eight, he remembers, pockets stuffed with as much as $200 in cash. And when he got home, he would iron the money on Millie’s ironing board in an upstairs bedroom. “You couldn’t take ’em to the bank. They were all crumbled and jammed in my pocket,” he says. One by one, he ironed the bills, just so, even adding spray starch to get them crisp, until he had a nice, flatly satisfying pile.

He would, he decided, be a millionaire by 30.

McAuliffe got his start in fund-raising when a college friend lured him to the Carter campaign in 1979, the same year he graduated from Catholic University (as “Outstanding Senior,” of course). Here was a career where hustle paid off in huge, readily grasped measures of accomplishment. The campaign sent him out to organize events around the country, often with nothing but the name of a single friendly local businessman in his pocket. It was, however, always a potent name, for this was the reelection campaign of an incumbent president: a name such as that of real-estate developer Walter Shorenstein in San Francisco, or the legendary MCA chairman Lew Wasserman in Los Angeles.

By the time of the general-election campaign, he had done so well he was sent over to the Democratic National Committee as the top finance staffer. He was only 23, so he added five years to his age and wore glasses with clear lenses to lend himself a bit of dignity. In 1983 he was hired by Tony Coelho, then a California congressman, to raise money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

This was where he began to have a big impact on the party. Before Coelho, the D.C.C.C. had been a desultory little shop, wanly raising money at a single dinner each year. Together, Coelho and McAuliffe courted business money as never before. Their crucial insight was that corporations’ political-action committees could be sold, as a simple matter of business, on the advantages of supporting the incumbent party (or of, as fund-raisers like to say, “becoming part of the process”). They made the D.C.C.C. a powerful machine to perpetuate the party’s control of the House, then the only part of government the Republicans had not won in Reagan’s revolution. Just as the House Democrats were becoming the most important force in the party, McAuliffe and Coelho were making them more beholden to business than ever before.

In the meantime, McAuliffe had sped through law school, opened a law firm (which is to say a lobbying firm), and joined the board of a local bank, of which he would be made chairman before he turned 30. “When Terry was in, like, his late 20s, he already cut a figure about how rich he’d gotten, very quickly,” says a former colleague. “He had this aura.”

His practice of law was noteworthy for what it said about his shrewdness. He himself never actually lobbied, and he maintained a virginal ignorance about the workings of the legislative process. “In all the times I spoke to him, I don’t think he ever wanted to talk about policy,” recalls CNN’s Brooks Jackson, the dean of the money-and-politics beat, who spent two years watching Coelho and McAuliffe for his influential 1988 book, Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process. “In fact, he very much didn’t want to talk about policy. He was kind of a policy eunuch, in a way.”

By keeping his distance from questions of policy, McAuliffe remained free to vacuum up cash for the D.C.C.C. without creating any unseemly connection between the sources of the cash and the results it bought. That was Coelho’s end of the business, as richly documented in Jackson’s book. And Coelho ultimately paid for the perceived connection between his powerbrokering and his own financial struggles, quitting Congress in 1989 after it was revealed that he had accepted an unusually favorable loan from a California savings-and-loan, and a sweetheart arrangement enabling him to invest in one of Michael Milken’s junk-bond deals.

McAuliffe avoided such problems by keeping his personal gain at arm’s length, merely steering the people he met through politics to his partners—who did the lobbying for his firm. “Terry just knew so many people,” says his former partner lobbyist John Raffaelli. “And people asked him, ‘I got a problem, who do you recommend I use?’ ”

McAuliffe’s conversations are heavily laced with rhetorical paeans to the workingman. But if he has any actual politics of his own, they’re of the middle-of-the-road, pro-business sort. “People who are too left, too right— they just don’t accomplish anything. I’m not a partisan Democrat,” he says, in the eternally pacific voice of the deal-maker. “I have been successful in life because I stay positive.”

“He has no political convictions I’m aware of,” says a Democratic observer. “I think he’d tell you he’s an institutional party man. But what that boils down to is, as long as the Democrats remain in power, he’s in the catbird seat. It means new ventures, new sources of business, new avenues of personal advancement.”

After his stint at the D.C.C.C., McAuliffe raised money for the presidential campaigns of Richard Gephardt (in 1988) and Senator Tom Harkin (in 1992). Both these candidates drew heavily on labor support and the more liberal elements of the party. But when Clinton won in 1992, McAuliffe had no trouble changing to a more centrist horse. He quickly entered the graces of the new administration by chairing the Democratic National Committee’s business council. In under two years he increased from about 150 to 750 the circle of business donors who paid $10,000 annually to belong. Clinton had come into office talking of campaignfinance reform and expanding the party’s small-donor base. But by 1994 he had come to see the wisdom of the McAuliffe method: early that year, he tapped McAuliffe to become finance chairman of the entire D.N.C.

McAuliffe quit his law firm to take the post. But his own fortune continued to grow, from a skein of endeavors that have included, over time, banking, real estate, investment counseling, insurance, credit-card marketing, homebuilding, telecommunications, venture capital, and some canny investing of profits. “He’s involved in so many different things,” says his elder brother John McAuliffe. “I talked to him a couple of years ago about what he did, and he told me all about it, and I walked away saying, ‘I’m still not quite sure what you do, Terry.’”

When McAuliffe posted the $1.35 million to help the Clintons win the contract on their house, he lost a measure of his useful camouflage. Everyone in politics knew McAuliffe was rich, but the house deal revealed him as being a different kind of rich—the kind that can raise a million in cash without batting an eye.

“It exposed me as being very wealthy, which I don’t like,” says McAuliffe. “Listen, my parents had no idea. My brothers had no idea.” He refuses to comment on friends’ reports that peg his fortune at close to, possibly slightly over, $100 million. Even his wife, he says, still doesn’t know how much money the couple has. “She’s got a great life. Listen, her credit cards are always paid and all that. She knows I do very well. But she has no idea. Myself and my accountants are the only people who know.” Hearing him talk, it is odd to remember that Dorothy McAuliffe, 36, is also a Georgetowntrained lawyer who worked for some years in banking law before becoming a full-time mother to their children, Dori, Jack, Mary, and the newborn Sally. A down-to-earth brunette who seems to roll easily with the demands of life with McAuliffe, she clearly knew what she was getting into: the couple met in 1979 when Dorothy was only 16 and her father was the Florida finance chairman for Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign. She and McAuliffe started dating three years later, when she was in college at Catholic University, and eventually married in 1988.

Terry McAuliffe obviously savors money as a scorekeeper, but he’s not into displays of wealth. He still drives the white Jeep convertible, with no air-conditioning, that he’s been driving since 1991. And while the McAuliffes do have a lovely old house in McLean, a posh Virginia suburb, which they bought in the early 90s for almost $1.2 million, their usual summer vacation is to rent a house in the slightly raffish town of Dewey Beach, on the Delaware shore.

One reason for McAuliffe’s horror of showing his wealth is that he seems genuinely to care about maintaining his connections to family and old friends. But another, clearly, has been the usefulness of blending in: the fewer people who knew that he was very rich, the fewer would be asking questions about how he got that way.

The bulk of McAuliffe’s fortune comes from some shrewd investments he has made over the past four or so years in high-technology stocks. (“To be honest with you,” he says amiably, “if you could not have made money in the market in the last four years, you are an idiot”) In addition to playing the market, McAuliffe describes himself as a traditional entrepreneur, seeding new companies with venture capital. “I have probably been an investor and backer and supporter of over 100 companies,” he says.

But the most striking element of McAuliffe’s business life is the way it has paralleled his political work, benefiting at every turn from the contacts he has made through fund-raising. McAuliffe portrays himself as a sort of political philanthropist, graciously taking time off from his businesses to “give some back” by supporting politicians who believe in the common man. But the truth is that everything in his life—right down to his wife—has flowed from the headwaters of his work in politics.

Begin with his father-in-law, Richard Swann, whom he met during his first assignment with the Carter campaign. Swann, whose Orlando-based Pioneer Savings & Loan went bust in 1990, is now in business with McAuliffe in a cluster of real-estate companies and spin-off concerns (title insurance, home financing) based in central Florida.

Another political contact was Carl Lindner, the head of Chiquita and the financial conglomerate American Financial Group, in Cincinnati. Lindner and some associates invested with McAuliffe four years ago in a Florida-based homebuilding business, American Heritage Homes. With McAuliffe as its chairman, it has grown to have the largest sales volume of any homebuilder in central Florida, putting up modest houses (average price, $130,000) in developments with names like Lake Steer Pointe and Deer Pointe at Falcon Trace.

Still another valuable connection was with Martin Davis, a political consultant. Together they successfully persuaded the 13-million-member A.F.L.-C.I.O. to shift its credit-card business to their client, Household International Corp., which hired the pair in early 1996, when McAuliffe was widely known as Clinton’s top fund-raiser. McAuliffe and Davis reportedly split commissions worth several million dollars.

Later that year, through an old political colleague, McAuliffe met a former Drexel Burnham Lambert bond trader named Gary Winnick. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, McAuliffe made his biggest score yet when Winnick invited him to participate in a transatlantic-cable endeavor called Global Crossing. McAuliffe’s initial investment of $100,000 is worth at least $18 million today, he says, and he bought more shares as the price of the stock rocketed.

There is nothing remotely illegal about making such sterling connections through politics. McAuliffe says, “The [criticism] is ‘He met people through politics and has done well.’ Well, I’ll plead guilty to that_ My point always is, if I didn’t do what I do today [in fund-raising], I’d probably be a billionaire.”

Yet McAuliffe’s career has taken him fairly often to the outskirts of legal difficulty. Last May, for example, the U.S. Department of Labor sued the two trustees of a union pension fund that had invested heavily with McAuliffe in some real-estate ventures he designed. The suit alleges that the fund trustees, who invested the pensions of two electricians’ unions, made a series of risky deals that gave the unions’ working men and women a lower-than-reasonable return. McAuliffe, who had put up only $100 of his own money, earned at least $2.4 million on the deals. But he was not the person accountable for the funds. So while his former partners are explaining themselves in U.S. District Court, McAuliffe has borne none of the penalties for the arrangements he made.

His closest shave came in the 1996 Clinton campaign. The most scandalous elements of the president’s fund-raising—the Buddhist-temple affair, the illegal foreign contributions rustled up by D.N.C. fundraiser John Huang, the wholesale dealing in White House perks such as coffees and sleepovers—were technically violations by the Democratic National Committee, not the Clinton-Gore campaign. As McAuliffe is fond of pointing out, the Clinton-Gore campaign itself, for which he chaired the fundraising, was not accused of illegalities. But as Senator Fred Thompson’s investigation demonstrated, the distinction between the Clinton White House and the D.N.C. was a thin fiction. While there is no evidence connecting McAuliffe to any foreign funds, he was certainly aware of the overall strategy by which Clinton was circumventing the law limiting expenditures in presidential campaigns. Briefly, the D.N.C. spent $44 million on “issue ads” funded largely by unregulated soft-money donations to the party, but closely supervised by the White House. To pay for these ads, the party abandoned almost all restraint on its fund-raising practices.

McAuliffe was the author of a famous memo asking the president to meet with top donors, on which Clinton scribbled a note urging his staff to set up more overnights, and other such White House perks, at $50,000 and $100,000 a pop. McAuliffe initiated the White House coffees that the D.N.C. eventually adopted, overturning a long-standing prohibition on raising money on the premises. These weren’t fund-raisers, the administration firmly insisted; they were “donor-maintenance events,” for which no specific amount was solicited to attend that specific event. It was a total coincidence that 92 percent of the people attending these events gave to the party in 1995 or 1996, $26.4 million altogether.

By 1996, McAuliffe had far transcended the kind of nuts-and-bolts work that would have assigned him any line responsibility for the inner workings of the D.N.C. This, too, is part of his method. When unpleasant management tasks arise, says a former McAuliffe staffer, “his big thing, always, was ‘Hey, that’s a staff issue. That’s yours.’” In his depositions with Thompson-committee lawyers, he sought to portray himself both as the all-knowing King of Money and, where it was convenient, as a distant figurehead who was out of the loop.

McAuliffe came nearest to serious trouble over a byzantine scheme between the D.N.C. and the re-election campaign of Ron Carey, who was then president of the Teamsters Union. Three people connected with the Teamsters have pleaded guilty to acts that included agreeing to swap contributions with the D.N.C.: they would give the Democrats a million dollars in Teamsters’ political funds, they proposed in the summer of ’96, if the D.N.C. would in turn steer a $100,000 contribution to Carey’s campaign. The deal was brokered by campaign consultant Martin Davis, McAuliffe’s former partner in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. credit-card deal.

McAuliffe denied knowing anything about the swap scheme, saying that Davis—one of those who pleaded guilty in the case—had simply offered to steer a Teamsters donation to the D.N.C., and that he had referred Davis to colleagues at the D.N.C. He couldn’t even remember (“to be honest with you”) when Davis had approached him.

But two witnesses told Senate investigators that McAuliffe had urged them to try to find a donor for Carey’s campaign, and Davis identified him in his plea as the Clinton operative who had agreed to the swap. During the November trial of a Teamsters official, former D.N.C. finance director Richard Sullivan testified that McAuliffe had explicitly urged him to find a donor for the Carey campaign in order to get a Teamsters donation in return.

Yet federal prosecutors apparently decided not to pursue anyone on the D.N.C. end of the scheme; in part because its half of the bargain was never fulfilled, there was no legal violation as obvious as the one on the Teamsters’ end, where the actors were proposing to use Teamsters’ funds illegally to strengthen Carey’s control of the union. McAuliffe was extensively questioned about the case, but says, “I was never a target, never a subject” of the investigation. He seems likely to suffer nothing worse than a slap on the wrist that was delivered in the Thompson committee’s report.

Of all the stories McAuliffe tells about amazing life, one is, hands down, the most extraordinary:

It is an August night in Skaneateles, New York. The president and First Lady have just won the contract on their new house in New York, after a frantic effort to find a rich friend willing to post collateral for the mortgage. They have been turned down by old friends like Erskine Bowles and Thomas “Mack” McLarty, but finally bailed out by the kindness of their good friend Terry McAuliffe. Now, near dinnertime, Clinton and McAuliffe are riding in the presidential motorcade, talking about what to eat.

The president turns to the benefactor who has just coughed up more than a million dollars in cash: “He says, Terry, why don’t you Figure out how we can get a couple of pies to bring back to the house? A couple of pizzas?’

“I say, ‘What do you want on it, Mr. President?”’

In a close personal friendship with the president, in other words, the president is going to get the better end of the deal.

In addition to the bushels of money McAuliffe has already raised for the Clintons, it would be astonishing if the president didn’t turn to McAuliffe, once he leaves office, for a piece of the action. If you were leaving office at the age of 54 and wanted to earn some serious money for the first time in your life, you couldn’t ask for a better tutor than Terry McAuliffe.

But for McAuliffe success has carried its own punishment. He has taken on every task the Clintons have asked of him, and most of his friends say he is overextended. “He’s got way too many things going,” says John Raffaelli, McAuliffe’s friend and former partner. “I think Clinton has totally seduced the sonofabitch.”

“If he has one big problem, it’s that he can’t say no to the Democratic Party or the Clintons,” observes another friend. “He gets wrapped up in everything the Clintons do.”

His friends agree that he would like at some point to move away from his identity as the party’s cash machine and be seen as a more substantive figure. He planned to make this move after Clinton’s re-election; it was generally understood that he was in line to be secretary of commerce in the second term. But when the fund-raising scandals broke, it was instantly apparent that he couldn’t make it past the Senate.

He was, friends say, deeply disappointed. “The paradox is that he wants more than anything else to parlay the money into some other form of respectability. And in the end it always comes back to the money. He can’t get away from it,” says one McAuliffe-watcher.

And commerce secretaries are a dime a dozen compared with men of McAuliffe’s gifts and loyalty.

Does he ever chafe at how much more useful he is to the president in his current role? One former Clinton staffer says bluntly that “Clinton has sold out all his friends, in the end_It would be interesting to find out how Terry sees it. Because that’s the best way to have a relationship with Clinton—to see what’s in it for you, without any illusions.”

Clearly, one thing that’s in it for McAuliffe is the pure, alpha-male satisfaction of knowing how badly the president needs him. And, clearly, it’s not bad for business. But beyond that, cynics should probably tread with care. For there’s no getting around the fact that McAuliffe is thrilled to the cleats of his golf shoes simply to be hanging out with the president. “I lo-o-o-o-ve the action,” he says. “I love it. Just bein’ with the president, and flyin’ all over the country, and ridin’ around with him. I’m just in the action.” Lingering in the restaurant following the president’s phone call, he confides, “He said, ‘Terry, I love you. You’re a great American.’ That’s what he just said to me.”

Terry McAuliffe is, more than anything, a greatly magnified embodiment of everyone who gives money to politicians. Many people donate for the darkest reasons we imagine, with at least the hope of buying policy or access. Others donate because they really believe in the promise of the party or person they’re supporting. But lots of people—even, in many cases, those same people, dark or fervent—give for more human reasons.

They do it because they want face time; they do it for a photograph; they do it because they want to be part of the crowd that hangs with the president, or the vice president, or the congressman or the speaker or the mayor. They do it because someone they know, or feel vaguely obligated to, asks them to do it. They do it because it feels great to know there is someone in Washington whose job it is to remember their birthday. Sometimes they do it because that is what men of their social circle or business set or peer group do. They do it because—whether they’re good for $1,000 in exchange for a signed photograph of themselves with the vice president, or $50,000 for a night in the Lincoln bedroom— it makes them feel important.

This is the strange kernel of sociability at the core of our system. Almost everyone in Washington would secretly admit that money is a moral lesion on the heart of American politics, and that it is one of the reasons most citizens have such a brittle connection to their government. Yet no one in Washington holds his buddies responsible, because everyone’s just playing by the rules. And it’s hard to change the rules when, after all, they’re just part of the scenery, and the scenery is peopled by such nice guys.

The folks who raise and give the money—an already unprecedented crop for the coming election—aren’t the fat oligarchs of popular imagining, chuckling over bags of cash. They are pleasant men like Terry McAuliffe, going about the frictionless business of their lives.

To be honest with you, that’s either the good news or the bad news.