Political consultant James Carville has something to say about his notorious academic career at Louisiana State University, where he racked up 56 hours of F’s but decades later received an honorary doctoral degree:
“If a guy with my grades can end up with a doctor’s degree,” he tells about 150 people at a fundraiser for DePaul University, “and a guy with my looks can end up married to somebody as beautiful as Mary Matalin, then I want all of you stupid, ugly guys to hang in there. Never give up.”
The room roars with laughter.
He tells another self-effacing joke and then another, and within minutes, the spin mission is accomplished–the audience is his.
It’s just that simple. At least Carville, 50, the animated Cajun largely credited with Bill Clinton’s dramatic presidential victory in 1992, makes it look that simple. He punctuates his delivery with snaps of his head, squeaks in his already shrill voice and plenty of grins into which his entire face seems to disappear.
The months since November 1992 have been a glistening whirl for Carville, who reached this point in life after hitting bottom on a cold, drizzly day in April 1983.
With $6 to his name and a string of defeats as a political consultant on his resume, Carville was heading back to his hotel in Maryland after having received instructions from the campaign of presidential candidate Gary Hart. He was standing on a curb in Washington, D.C., when the garment bag carrying all his belongings broke and emptied into the mud on Massachusetts Avenue. He began sobbing.
Now, Carville reportedly gets up to $15,000 for sharing his life`s lessons with groups.
Now, he is awaiting publication of his second political book in January. The first, “All’s Fair,” on which he collaborated with Matalin, a former Republican consultant, brought a $925,000 advance and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for eight weeks.
Now, the national Democratic Party pays him $15,000 a month to advise Clinton. In February he re-enlisted to help run Clinton’s re-election campaign, although Carville maintains he will assume a more modest role than his famous reign of rage in the 1992 election that was chronicled in the Academy Award-nominated documentary “The War Room.”
Now, he has a tan and love handles, and he and Matalin are expecting their first child.
“I don`t ever want to confuse luck with skill, and I’ve been pretty lucky,” he said in an interview before the DePaul fund-raiser, which he did for free. At $75 a plate, the luncheon raised an estimated $11,000 for the college of liberal arts and sciences scholarship fund. Later, he spoke at a campaign-management class taught by his close friend, and former Democratic National Committee chairman, David Wilhelm.
“The kindest thing I would say about myself is that I was skilled enough to put myself in a position to get lucky.” Carville added.
He is about to put that skill and luck to perhaps their greatest test by trying to help Clinton gain re-election. And that challenge comes on the heels of one of his more infamous defeats. He helped run the rancorous 1994 re-election campaign of New Jersey Gov. James Florio, the Democrat who lost to Christine Todd Whitman, now being considered as a vice presidential candidate for the GOP in 1996.
How can he expect the beleaguered Clinton to be re-elected?
“The basic concept is going to be (A) he came promising change and he delivered change,” Carville said while sipping coffee in a Chicago Hilton and Towers restaurant. “(B) he has a unique understanding of the kinds of things that are important to people.”
He notes that Clinton’s popularity has risen somewhat in the weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing.
“As people start to take a second look at him, I think they’re saying, `We’re starting to realize more and more of the good things he’s actually done,’ and I think on a lot of stuff quite a strong case can be made.”
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more people are working, Carville said. The administration has cut the deficit. Clinton is leading the charge to put 100,000 more cops on the streets. The Brady Bill, parental leave.
“Sure, we can accept some blame for not being crisp enough sometimes, maybe on his economic policy,” Carville continued, “but I think what’s going to happen now is that people are realizing that, hey, the guy is really getting some of the things done that I wanted to see done.”
Christine Dudley isn’t buying it.
Dudley, executive director of the Illinois GOP, said people her party has surveyed register “indifference and embarrassment” at the mention of Clinton. Not only has he mismanaged U.S. policies in Bosnia, Haiti and Cuba, but Clinton is too dependent on Democratic pollsters and too fearful of making tough decisions that will offend people, Dudley said.
“I never underestimate Clinton,” she said, “but I find it interesting that Carville said `once people realize what we’ve done. . .’ Well, if it is that important, why didn’t people realize it immediately?”
And, Dudley said, Carville actually may turn out to be a detriment to Clinton’s re-election chances. His celebrity status may cloud colleagues’ critical thinking, she said, “when he walks into a room and says something and everybody thinks it’s the gospel.
“Well it may not be the gospel,” Dudley said. “It almost becomes you starting to believe your own public relations. The celebrity has that Disadvantage.”
A memorable college career
Chester James Carville Jr. is the eldest of eight children born to the owner of a general store and his former-schoolteacher wife who made a second career of selling encyclopedias door to door. Carville began honing the skills of political strategist in 1960, when, after becoming mesmerized with politics as a page in the state Capitol in Baton Rouge, he volunteered in the campaign of a candidate for the Louisiana legislature. The candidate, Price LeBlanc, lost.
After graduating from high school in 1962, Carville enrolled at Louisiana State University but was expelled for failing academically while excelling in college excess.
“I was going to tell you about my college career,” he drawls to about 200 people in Wilhelm’s lecture-hall audience, “but I’m sure your parents would rather I don’t, and I’m not sure the statute of limitations has passed on everything I did.”
To impose what he has described as self-penance, Carville enlisted in the Marines and spent two years in the service before returning to Louisiana State and taking classes at night while teaching junior high school science during the day. He earned his bachelor of science degree in 1970, and with financial aid from an uncle went to law school at Louisiana State.
While unhappily practicing law, he worked political campaigns, and his first three candidates lost. He left law in 1980 and began working for a Baton Rouge political consulting firm, helping Pat Scree win the Baton Rouge mayoral election that year.
From that point, Carville orchestrated one candidate’s loss in a bid for a U.S. Senate campaign in Virginia, went to work briefly for Gary Hart’s presidential campaign, then quit to organize Texas state Sen. Lloyd Doggett’s campaign for the U.S. Senate against Phil Gramm. Doggett lost by 18 percentage points.
Turning things around
In 1984, Carville was 40, broke and unemployed. For the next two years he paid his bills by working as a part-time lawyer and political consultant.
A friend called and hooked him up with Bob Casey, former Pennsylvannia state auditor who was running for governor after three previous bids for the office ended in failure. It was a record that gave him the nickname “the three-time loss from Holy Cross.”
Perhaps out of desperation, or fear, Carville dug in and clawed for his political life in the 1986 campaign. He played up Casey’s humble, workmanlike reputation and tried to frame opponent William Scranton III as elitist, patrician and somewhat wiggy.
The critical, and now legendary, moment in the contest occurred in the final days, when Carville helped create a controversial TV ad showing a college photograph of a scruffy Scranton while sitar music twanged in the background and the voiceover quoted Scranton saying that he wanted to bring Transcendental Meditation to state government.
Down by 8 percentage points one week before Election Day, Casey won by 2 points. Carville’s harsh, attack-style campaign tactics were forged.
The next year he ran the successful underdog gubernatorial campaign of Kentucky businessman Wallace Wilkinson. In 1988 Carville managed the successful re-election run of U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey.
He lost a Houston mayoral campaign in 1989 but won Casey’s re-election campaign in 1990; organized Georgia Lt. Gov. Zell Miller’s successful bid for governor, but lost in a bruising run as campaign adviser to Texas Atty. Gen. Jim Mattox, who was defeated in the gubernatorial race by Ann Richards.
The race considered Carville’s watershed moment was Harris Wofford’s effort in 1991 to retain the U.S. Senate seat he was appointed to after the death of John Heinz of Pennsylvania. Wofford faced U.S. Atty. Gen. Richard Thornburgh, who resigned at the request of President George Bush to run for the office.
Carville’s advice to Wofford, a former college president and founder of the Peace Corps, was to capsulize his message into two slogans on economic recovery and national health care. Wofford won.
The campaign of ’92
A few weeks later, Carville turned down offers from presidential candidates Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey to instead join Clinton’s campaign in December 1991.
“Neither of us felt any sense of destiny about hooking up with Bill Clinton,” Carville writes of himself and partner Paul Begala in the book “All’s Fair.” “He just seemed like a good guy, someone we could work for.”
At the same time, his relationship with Matalin, a South Chicago native who was chief of staff of the Republican National Committee, was heating up. Matalin, who asked a mutual friend to introduce them after she read about Carville in a Wall Street Journal article, began dating him in January 1991.
Weeks after Carville accepted the job with Clinton, Matalin was named political director of Bush’s campaign, and the relationship largely was put on hold for the duration of the race.
The two were married on Thanksgiving 1993 (it’s his first marriage, her third), and are expecting a daughter, Matalin Mary Carville, in late July. Matalin hosts CNBC-TV’s politcal talk show “Equal Time.”
At the DePaul fundraiser, Carville is charming the crowd with his lilting Cajun drawl–some say it’s more affected than native–but then abruptly begins shouting. Perspiration surfaces on his brow, and the ambience has moved from a collegial luncheon to a tent revival meeting.
“If we’re going to say that work is central and work is essential and skills are essential and skills are important,” he yells, “then we ought to be talking about what we’re going to do to improve that.”
That’s the theme he believes the Democrats should embrace for the 1996 election–that education and worker training are the critical elements to strengthen the nation’s future.
“It’s the economy, stupid” was the rallying cry in the ’92 campaign. Next year’s chant may be, “It’s the schools and the workplace, stupid.”
He tells the audience that Democratic leaders need to be optimistic about the U.S., that he believes with all his heart “that there is something that unites us as a nation. It is that we are taught that if you use something that belongs to somebody else, you turn it over a little better.
“You weren’t just given a country. You were given a special, precious place, with a special, precious character.”
The crowd erupts in applause. Carville grabs his white and red canvas book bag and heads for the door. He looks like a candidate on the stump. He is asked if he has considered running for office.
“`Nooo,” he says, grinning again, “only for the state line.”
