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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Ragin' Cajun savages spineless Democrats, journalists who suck up to Bush and the GOP politicians who brought us Enron.
Mar 11, 2002 | I met Democratic campaign wizard James Carville just days after President Bush's inauguration last January, and it was already clear that political exile didn't agree with him. Dining with friends at Carville's Washington restaurant, West 24, I watched the celebrated political strategist try to play the role of celebrity restaurateur, but his heart wasn't in it. The restaurant was crowded -- Washington Post political dean David Broder was dining at a nearby table -- but Carville seemed to be going through the motions, flitting from table to table a little too quickly, doing a herky-jerky meet-greet -- a handshake, a quick serpent's smile, a second or two of awkward chitchat and then on to the next party.
But when he got to our table, we engaged him about the recent Florida recount, and then Carville came alive. He railed against the Democrats' spinelessness, against the media's giving Bush a free pass, and predicted the only way the Democrats would recover from their defeat was a populist assault on the GOP. A year later, Carville's restaurant is still going strong, but it may have to do without his nightly hosting, now that he's been hired as co-host (with colleague Paul Begala) of CNN's "Crossfire." They'll be facing off "from the left" against columnist Robert Novak and writer Tucker Carlson on the right -- or as Carville puts it, "Corporal Cue Ball" against "the Prince of Darkness and Bow Tie Boy."
Carville is probably best known for his role running Bill Clinton's 1992 war room, for inventing the campaign's motto, "It's the economy, stupid" and for his strange-bedfellows marriage to GOP spinmeister Mary Matalin, now an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. But he came to national attention when he and Begala ran liberal Harris Wofford's successful insurgent campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 1991, in which health care reform, against conventional wisdom, became a cutting-edge issue. It set the stage for Clinton's presidential campaign a year later.
From the beginning of the Clinton presidency Carville was the administration's attack dog, defending the president and Hillary Clinton against their enemies in both parties, and in the media. He disrupted a sleepy breakfast club for Washington pundits in April 1994 to rail against the media's coverage of the Whitewater scandal, as well as the emerging Paula Jones sex scandal. Over bacon and eggs, he presented his homemade chart depicting a "media food chain" -- the folksy Carville prefers to call it his "puke funnel theory," but nobody printed that term -- in which anti-Clinton stories were funneled from tabloid newspapers into the mainstream with the help of right-wing media partisans like Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal's Robert Bartley. Eight years later, Carville says his food-chain chart was the first attempt to document what Hillary Clinton would famously call "the vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband. (He was also a Salon columnist in 1996 and 1997.)
But Sept. 11 blunted even Carville's political edge, a little. Last fall, a memo he co-authored with his consulting partners Stanley Greenberg and Robert Shrum urged Democrats "to support the president and set a tone that lacks a sharp partisan quality," backing Bush on the war while supporting Democratic stands on Social Security and education and health care reform. And on Chris Matthews' "Hardball" last month, he resisted criticizing Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric, and his apparent plan to spread the war beyond Afghanistan, even as Matthews railed against it.
Warning Democrats away from "sharp partisan" stands seemed positively un-Carville, and indeed, when he spoke to Salon last week, he'd changed his tune a little. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., had just survived a scorched-earth GOP assault on his patriotism for asking mild questions about Bush's war in Afghanistan, and the experience seemed to have awakened Carville's inner partisan warrior. He talked to Salon about how Sept. 11 did and didn't change the political landscape, what Al Gore did wrong and what kind of candidate he thinks should lead the Democratic Party in 2004.
The morning of Sept. 11, just before the attacks, you were meeting with reporters to go over polling numbers. And things were looking good for the Democrats. You'd found that 43 percent of those polled thought President Bush was "in over his head" at that point. But six months later, a lot has changed -- Bush has had approval ratings between 80 and 90 percent ...
That's no longer true -- he dropped about 10 points in the last week.
That's right, I saw that yesterday. But clearly, Bush would be having a very different presidency without this war. Did Sept. 11 change everything politically?
I don't have the memo we did [before Sept. 11] in front of me, but some things are the same. I think we saw that back then, people thought Bush was just in it for the powerful, and that's what we're still urging Democrats to talk about now.
