A few years ago, when James Carville was teaching at Louisiana State University, he heard that one of his students had gotten into the school of her dreams to work on an advanced degree. He wanted to toast her.
“I get a
$25 champagne and four plastic flutes,” he recalled, “and I said to the
students: ‘All right. You are not going to get out of James Carville’s class
unless you know how to properly open a bottle of champagne.’
“I said:
‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You don’t pop it like you see in the movies or
you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out. You take the foil off. Now you’re
going to take a dishcloth, and you’re going to execute the classic
counterclockwise movement. The bottle is going to go one way; the cork is going
to go the other way. You just ease it out, and the sound that you are looking
for is the sigh of a satisfied woman.’
“The
next Tuesday, the dean comes into my office and he said: ‘I’m closing the door.
We need to have a talk.’”
A female
student had complained about the sighing line.
He
wanted to mutter to the dean, “Her boyfriend has never heard that sound,” but
he simply said, “OK, I’ll endeavor to do better.”
But this
is the Ragin’ Cajun we’re talking about, so “do better” really meant “go
further”: “I went back in the classroom, and I told the Gilbert Gottfried joke
from ‘The Aristocrats,’” Carville continued. “I said: ‘Girl, you wanted me to
get in trouble? This is what you do when all is lost and you’re up against the
wall.’ Of course, it’s the grossest joke ever.”
Nobody
puts Bayou Baby in a corner. The experience soured his joy in teaching at his
alma mater.
“This
was L.S. freaking U., not Oberlin,” he said. “It was terrible. I wouldn’t take
the coeds to dinner after class. I would take the male students. I was scared
to death in my job. I was like: ‘I don’t need L.S.U.’s money. I don’t need to
drive up there and listen to that crap.’ I just said: ‘That’s it. I’m done.
This is not for me.’”
Carville,
mastermind of Bill Clinton’s election, laughed and sipped his red wine. We were
talking in the back of a Big Easy deli/wine store called Martin’s, on a break
from the New Orleans Book Festival last week.
Carville
is as busy as ever, raising money for Democrats, doing a podcast with Al Hunt
and starring in a documentary directed by Matt Tyrnauer, who has also delved
into the lives of Valentino and Roy Cohn. (He also starred with George
Stephanopoulos in the acclaimed film about the vertiginous 1992 campaign “The
War Room.”)
Tyrnauer,
who’s still working on the movie, said he was drawn to the project because
“James is an American original. He’s a one-off.”
Why
doesn’t Corporal Cueball, as the bald operative and former Marine calls
himself, get in more trouble?
“Certain
people rise above cancelability,” Tyrnauer said. “In the current election
cycle, James has been really out front saying that it seems to him, based on
the polls and data, that Biden has a problem. And everyone else seems to be
like ostriches with heads buried in the sand. James is a truth teller.”
Indeed,
there’s a scene in the documentary where the director Rob Reiner, who was in
New Orleans filming “Spinal Tap II,” upbraids Carville for pushing the idea
that Democrats needed fresh blood in the White House and perhaps an open
convention.
“It’s
the only election in my lifetime where it’s about yesterday, not tomorrow,”
Carville told me.
“If you
were going to ask me what I’d want the title of the documentary to be? ‘When
Politics Was Fun,’” he said. “There was actually a time when people loved doing
this. People would go out, they’d drink, they’d talk to everybody, they’d leak
stories. Generally, when it was over, you’d go sit with the other side and have
drinks together.”
(Or in
the case of his wife, Mary Matalin, whom he met during the 1992 campaign, when
she was a top George H.W. Bush adviser and he was a top Bill Clinton adviser,
there was “Sleeping With the Enemy.” Matalin has since switched her
registration to Libertarian.)
Politics
now, Carville said, is filled with hatred and doctrinaire positions.
“Hubert
Humphrey used to describe himself as ‘the Happy Warrior,’” he said. “If
somebody said, ‘I’m a happy guy’ right now, they’d go: ‘What’s wrong with that
guy? Don’t you realize the evil in this world?’
“It’s
not like it used to be, where everybody would have these huge media scrums with
hundreds of reporters and local news,” he said nostalgically. “The latest fad
is campaigns unionizing. Who the hell ever wanted to work on a campaign that
didn’t want to work on a Sunday? It was a sprint to the end.”
Carville
has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he
advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist
“faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself.
He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a
language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx”
and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as
in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”
“There
are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it
makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior,” Carville said. And that, he
said, is how you end up with Dobbs.
He
thinks Donald Trump’s voters see him as akin to King Cyrus or King David in the
Bible, a flawed messenger, so it’s best to use a biblical narrative about
betrayal.
“If you
say, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, how can you ever think that this fat, slimy,
rapist, criminal, racist should be president?’ they’re going to recoil,” he
said. “I think Democrats should say: ‘Look, you believed in him. You felt like
you weren’t being seen, you were being culturally excluded. But he betrayed
you. You thought he was going to be for you and helping you, but he was really
for TikTok and tax cuts to the rich.’”
Carville
says that at 79, he is too old to hate. And certainly too old to start giving
trigger warnings.
“No one
wants to live like this,” he said. “Who ever thought it was a good idea to tell
people you can’t hug them or you’ve got to be careful or you’ve got to think
about names to call them other than the name you know them by? There’s nothing
wrong with me being white or you being white or them being Black or me being
male or you being female. It’s a giant, stupid argument.”
He is
blithely un-P.C., using axioms like “It’s the Indian, not the arrows.”
He
offered a bawdy metaphor about President Biden’s shaky approval ratings: “When
I look at these polling numbers, it’s like walking in on your grandma naked.
You can’t get the image out of your mind.”
He told
CNN’s Dana Bash that Biden “is like a mosquito in a nudist colony: It’s hard to
pick a target, but you’ve got to pick one and go after it. He ought to tell
Bibi Netanyahu to shut his stupid pie hole.” Carville added, “He’s got to
understand how much money the United States has sent to Israel during his prime
ministership.”
Talking
about Evan Osnos’s recent New Yorker piece about Biden, which suggested that
Biden and his advisers don’t worry about polls, Carville was skeptical. “When
the polls are not good, you don’t believe in polls,” he said. “If the polls are
good, you believe in polls.”
Lately,
he has been obsessed with Biden bleeding Black male voters.
“A
suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the
culture of his party. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat
hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything
you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’
“If you
listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk
is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m
like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they
have some consideration?’”
He
disagrees with Democrats who claim there’s been too much attention on Biden’s
age.
“If you
do a focus group,” he said, “the first thing out of anybody’s mouth is ‘Old,’
so how do you say we’re going to act like this doesn’t exist?”
“Now
don’t tell me that Biden has more energy or cognition than Trump because it’s
evident that, yeah, Trump’s got word salads, but he projects energy,” Carville
said. “He’s insane. He’s a criminal of the first order. But he does have a
little timing and a little sense of humor and knows how to move from one story
to the other.”
Biden
clinging to power has eclipsed the other talent in the party.
“The
most underreported, underrealized thing is how talented the Democratic Party is
right below the presidential level,” Carville said. “Everyone thinks we’re an
old urban party.” He reels off the names of promising Dems: “Mitch Landrieu,
Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock, Gretchen Whitmer, Gina
Raimondo, Roy Cooper.”
He said
most of the criticism of Kamala Harris is misogynistic, but added: “She reminds
me of this great baseball player. He got arms that big. Can’t wait to see the
guy. He takes three pitches and walks back to the dugout.”
Although
he is worried about the president’s strength in this race, he said: “I actually
like Biden. He’s a tenacious guy that’s had a real life. He’s a state school
guy. He doesn’t have an iota of elitism. He doesn’t even know what ‘woke’ is.
He’s been demonstrably the best president that Black America’s ever had,
Clinton and Obama included. You look at incomes, employment, poverty rates,
access to health care. It’s not where whites are, but it’s closer than it’s
ever been.”
So how
does Biden change the narrative?
“I don’t
think he can do much more than soldier on and let the Democratic groups kick
in,” he said, shrugging.
And with
that, Carville bought some wine, climbed into his red Bronco — which he likes
to think of as his pirogue, a Cajun canoe — and went home to Mary.
https://dnyuz.com/2024/03/23/james-carville-the-cajun-who-cant-stop-ragin/
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