Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe took an interesting tack in a debate Friday in Virginia. Asked about a major road construction project in Northern Virginia, the Bi-County Parkway, he decided it’s not for an aspiring governor to go around having opinions about such things. He was pressed admirably by moderator Derek McGinty, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate’s anchor:

To be fair, voting present gets some people to the White House, so maybe that’s the strategy for Virginia’s Beltway-centric Clintonista, whose company GreenTech is mired in no fewer than two investigations by federal entities at the moment.

McAuliffe—the man who ditched his family on the nights of the births of two of his children for Washington fundraising parties and shindigs— also laughably went after the moderator for his Beltway creds.

Jim Geraghty:

McGinty said he didn’t live in Virgina, “but have to drive there frequently.” McAuliffe urged him to move to Virginia, and McGinty responded, “I’ll move there when I know about the Bi-County Parkway.”

McAuliffe roared with laughter. “Fair enough. That’s good.”

The notion that Terry McAuliffe could give anybody else grief about ties to D.C. is pretty rich — after all, he’s the former finance chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as former finance chairman for the Dick Gephardt for President 1988 campaign, as former national finance chairman and then national co-chairman of the Clinton-Gore campaign, and as former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Oh, and his work on the board of Federal City National Bank in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s.

As he puts it, he merely “spent more time with Al Gore than with my own wife in 1993” as chairman of the DNC’s Business Leadership Forum.