That would be the same Barack Obama he worked to defeat a few months ago when he was Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign chairman.

It's a convenient conversion, some Democrats suggest, that gives a well-publicized statewide practice lap to someone who is eyeing the 2009 race for governor.

McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman for five years, acknowledges an interest in the race, but won't commit one way or the other until after the Nov. 4 election. The whole issue may be moot should Obama win because McAuliffe could be in line for larger assignments in a Democratic administration.

McAuliffe, 51, took charge of a party that was broke and dispirited after Al Gore's wrenching overtime loss to President Bush in 2000. He restored the party to fiscal health and helped position it to win House and Senate majorities in 2006.

That earned him the admiration of party activists in every state. But in Virginia, Democrats say, it doesn't necessarily mean he's earned his stripes to run for governor.

"You don't join the church today and run for pope tomorrow," said Pixie Bell, for 40 years a Democratic Party leader in Fairfax County. "He's just kind of dropped out of the sky."

An upstate New Yorker by birth, McAuliffe came to Virginia 17 years ago and lives in McLean, a leafy suburb 10 miles northwest of Washington.

Compare him, Bell said, to Mark Warner, the Democrat who in 2001 broke a brief Republican stranglehold on every statewide elected office when he was elected governor. Warner had toiled in Virginia politics for years, serving as state party chairman and managing the historic 1989 election of Doug Wilder as the nation's first elected black governor.

"We could have used a great orator like him (McAuliffe) last year when we were struggling to win a majority in the state Senate," Bell said. Democrats in 2007 won a one-seat advantage in the 40-member Senate.

McAuliffe would be formidable in Virginia should he enter an already contentious two-way Democratic gubernatorial sweepstakes. His name and face are familiar to Democrats as Clinton's top backer and as the former DNC chairman.

Two state legislators, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Brian J. Moran and state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, have spent months raising cash and elbowing each other for an edge entering next year's intraparty scrimmage.

Current Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine was elected in 2005 and his term ends in January 2010. Virginia does not allow its governors to serve consecutive terms.

McAuliffe is better known than either potential rival and could use his national fundraising network to raise several times more money than Moran and Deeds combined. He also knows how to rouse crowds of Democrats and progressives.

Last week, he worked himself into a sweat, sleeves rolled up and arms gesturing in time with the rapid pace of his rhetoric, preaching Obama's virtues to 85 rapt Democrats perched on folding chairs in a cramped, muggy cinderblock building in Republican-dominated Hanover County.

After 90 minutes on the stump, he spent another 20 minutes shaking hands and bantering with more than a dozen party loyalists clustered around him.

He dismissed suggestions that there is an ulterior motive to last week's seven-city tour or two similar town hall-style events Tuesday in southeastern Virginia.

"You saw what I talked about. I spent an hour and a half extolling the virtues of Barack Obama. I didn't talk about myself once," he said with a wry grin. And he was right. He focused on Obama, seamlessly promoting his health care proposals, his plan for exiting Iraq, and accusing McCain and the GOP of botching two concurrent wars and wrecking the nation's financial infrastructure.

The prospect of McAuliffe bringing those campaign skills, his prominent national portfolio and his fundraising ability into next year's race for governor has sent a shudder through the Deeds and Moran campaigns.

A Deeds campaign staffer videotaped McAuliffe at some of his Virginia appearances for Obama.

"We need to know what he's saying and how he's saying it," said Peter Jackson, Deeds' chief political adviser. "We're going to do our homework and have all our research on him that we need, but in the end we can only control what we can control."

McAuliffe's high profile, however, could have a downside in a Virginia general election.

"Terry McAuliffe has two giant problems. One is he's well to the left of the Mark Warner model and, two, he has no discernible connection to Virginia government and politics," said Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "That doesn't necessarily prohibit his election, but it does make him a long shot."