That’s “Terry” as in Terry McAuliffe. And this has been, for most of 2009, how McAuliffe rolls. The consummate Democratic Party insider — and the single most loyal supporter of both Bill and Hillary Clinton over the years — is now running in Virginia’s gubernatorial campaign, trying to become the state’s very own Barack Obama. Polls show he’s got the lead, and the momentum, with less than a month before the Democratic primary on June 9. McAuliffe says stepping up from campaign chairman to candidate was a natural fit. “It’s fun doing it for yourself,” he told Salon Wednesday. “You got control.”

If he wins the nomination, the general election that would follow might give the political world the first hint of an answer to two questions: One, just how blue is Virginia these days? The state’s demographics have shifted; this isn’t the same Virginia that Clinton lost twice in the 1990s. But it still isn’t reliably in the Democratic column. How well a nationally prominent fundraiser who’s never so much as run for dogcatcher will do seeking to become chief executive of a purple state remains to be seen. The second question — which a McAuliffe loss in the primary might help settle, too — is, can the Obama campaign’s strategy and grass-roots tactics work with a rich white guy at the top of the ticket instead of Barack Obama?

At Monday night’s party, a $20 fundraiser that drew a crowd of BlackBerry-toting 20-somethings who looked like they had arrived directly from their jobs on Capitol Hill, Biz Markie was only the warmup act. The main attraction — besides McAuliffe, of course, who rarely gives the impression he thinks anyone else is the main attraction — was will.I.am, one of Obama’s most famous celebrity fans last year. Introducing the singer from the stage, McAuliffe provided a heavily edited history of their political friendship.

“In 2005, I was the chairman of the big national Rock the Vote dinner, and we gave out two awards, and I’m happy to say that we gave Will an award, but we also got to introduce him to our other award winner — the brand-new senator from the state of Illinois, Barack Obama,” McAuliffe boasted. “So they got together and they did some great things — brought our party together. He did the ‘Yes We Can’ video — 55 million people saw that, just incredible — and we were one, we all came together to fight.” That was true — sort of. The video did inspire millions of Obama’s supporters, but it appeared in February 2008, when Obama was battling McAuliffe’s candidate, Hillary Clinton –- when McAuliffe was Hillary’s campaign chairman. John McCain hadn’t even clinched the GOP nomination yet.

McAuliffe, though, would like you to forget about all that, especially if you live in Virginia. To win the Democratic nod for governor in a three-way race, and then to win the general election in a contest Republicans desperately want to take to show they’re on the comeback trail, he’ll need to emulate the plan that helped Obama blow Hillary Clinton out in last February’s Virginia primary and then win the commonwealth in November’s election by 5 points over McCain. McAuliffe is banking on bringing out a good chunk of the nearly half a million new voters who registered in Virginia last year, when Obama became the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election since 1964. The higher turnout is on primary day, June 9, the better McAuliffe and his aides will feel; if it’s well above the 155,000 who voted in the 2006 Senate primary between Jim Webb and Harris Miller, that’s good for McAuliffe. One aide said they expect between 200,000 and 400,000 voters — though that’s a range big enough to drive Bill Clinton’s motorcade through.

So McAuliffe is aiming his primary campaign squarely at young voters and black voters, who formed the bulk of the new registrants and were key parts of Obama’s base last fall. Both McAuliffe and rival Brian Moran are from Northern Virginia, and the region’s white suburban liberals account for about a third of the Democratic primary vote. But significantly, about a third of the Democratic primary electorate in the Clinton-Obama contest was black. The state’s African-American population is heavily concentrated in the South and East, but all three Democratic candidates are white men from Northern Virginia or the mountains. With no contender an obvious choice for one of the party’s biggest voting blocs, McAuliffe is making his play, betting that he can put together a coalition like the one Obama built.

Besides will.I.am, McAuliffe is also touring the state with Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, this week, drawing nearly 700 people out in the middle of the day Wednesday in the D.C. suburbs of Herndon and Annandale. But his campaign team is more Obama than Clinton. Several top aides and advisors worked for Obama, including McAuliffe’s polling firm, Benenson Strategy Group, and his ad maker, Jim Margolis. (Other top staffers worked on Mark Warner and Tim Kaine’s races in the state, and for Hillary Clinton in the presidential contest.) Even his campaign logo, a silhouette of Virginia painted to look like a rising sun, evokes Obama’s.

In fact, McAuliffe is talking about the current president so much you’d think last year’s long primary never happened. “Barack Obama needs a partner in Virginia,” McAuliffe hollered Monday night, his voice hoarse from a campaign schedule that even aides decades younger than he is sometimes find tiring. “I’ll be that partner.” He repeated the line almost verbatim Wednesday appearing with Clinton.

For a backroom guy who’s just stepping out at the front of his first campaign, McAuliffe does have a few advantages that make his bid less quixotic than it might seem at first glance. One, which won’t surprise anyone who remembers the hundreds of millions of dollars he raised for the Democratic Party when Clinton was president, is cash. By the end of March, McAuliffe had raised $4.2 million for his campaign — that’s more than Creigh Deeds and Brian Moran, his Democratic opponents, and Bob McDonnell, the only Republican candidate, had raised combined. He was already well known outside his northern Virginia home base before he got into the race, unlike Moran; Obama sent McAuliffe out on the stump around the state for him last fall. (McAuliffe has lived in northern Virginia for decades, though his campaign can be skittish about national interest in the race, preferring to play up his state roots.)