All's Fair
Matalin, Mary & Carville, James & Knobler, Peter
/ am writing this review of All's Fair under protest. It is the obligation of every book reviewer to read every word of the book he is reviewing, and I have fulfilled my obligation. But I am full of...
...It's one thing to use newspaper columns and soundbite quotes to curry favor and reward friends, but it's quite another to do it in hardcover...
...Politics is entirely personal for Matalin...
...Given the emptiness with which these two approach their profession, the emptiness at the center of this book isn't surprising...
...Once you get past the fact that Matalin is a Republican who worked for Bush and Carville is a Democrat who worked for Clinton, there's nothing left...
...Oh, sure, they pay obeisance to the governing philosophies of their respective parties, but I doubt they mean it...
...Carville is more troubling, because he clearly knows that his main political skills are encouraging candidates to be demagogic, to appeal to the lowest forms of envy and rage in an electorate, and to play dirty...
...It has also helped to destroy them once they are in office, as we are seeing with Bill Clinton today...
...71 ALL'S FAIR: LOVE, WAR, AND RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT Mary Matalin and James Carville, with Peter Knobler Random House and Simon & Schuster/493 pages /$24 reviewed by JOHN PODHORETZ The American Spectator December 1994 83...
...After all, nobody actually expects you to read All's Fair, not really...
...The decision of rival publishers Random House and Simon & Schuster to issue the book jointly—a ridiculously self-conscious parallel to the union discussed in its pages—is testimony to the contempt with which this entire project was conceived, sold, produced, and marketed...
...And does James' s bleeding heart make Mary' s sing...
...She loves Rush Limbaugh the same way she loved George Bush—because they were both nice to her...
...T he book, like the relationship itself, is what Hollywood calls "high-concept"—you can sum it up in a sentence, like "Bus will blow up if it goes less than 50 miles an hour...
...And what of Matalin's nauseating and repeated praise for Washington Post White House reporter Ann Devroy, whose vim-lent bias against Matalin's candidate was an ongoing Washington scandal throughout the Bush presidency...
...The person who carved their notes and mutterings into this he-said-she-said account of the lives, triumphs, tragedies, passions, and presidential campaign experiences of Matalin the Bushie and Carville the Clintonite is a long-suffering soul named Peter Knobler...
...Don't let them do it to you...
...But I am full of gall and wormwood, because I know its authors have not actually written it—and I would demand to see an affidavit before I believed they had even actually read it...
...Mary Matalin calls herself a conservative, but she was legendary in the 1992 election cycle for her tone-deafness about the vitality of the conservative message...
...There's something obscene about this kind of log-rolling...
...There is not...
...Is there any reason to believe that Carville's portrait of Hillary Clinton, for whom he may well work in 1996, is entirely frank...
...account in which you cannot be sure a single anecdote is being told honestly or straightforwardly...
...For Mary Matalin and James Carville have been far too busy over the past few years converting themselves from real live human beings into Disneyland figures, famous-for-beingfamous spouses who happily insult each other publicly in the opening joke of a speech or the closing joke of a nightly cable show...
...Run your candidate on a platform of class resentment and the minute he has the reins of power that very resentment will turn on him...
...That would be a heroic accomplishment if there were any reason for this book to exist in the first place...
...She clings to every last stupid idea about why Bush lost—it was Quayle's fault, we were badly organized, the economy was sour, Perot was crazy, the Houston convention was full of hate—which is yet another indication that her vaunted tactical abilities are a matter of Washington myth...
...You expect a certain honesty from a book, but buying and reading a book like All's Fair is a little like having your pocket picked and your brain vacuumed...
...It's inarguable that his counsel has helped get people elected...
...He has managed to make moderately interesting an John Podhoretz is the author of Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies 1989-1993 (Simon & Schuster) and the television critic of the New York Post...
...They say nothing about that, probably because she doesn't have an ideology and he doesn't have a bleeding heart—these are political operatives, who carry around their contempt for the centrality of ideas in politics like abadge of honor...
...Is there something about Mary's bootstraps ideology that attracts James...
...These are two people whose most intimate moments are now objects of the same sort of "spin" they provide to political candidates, so you cannot take even the expression of their private thoughts or fears seriously...
...Where would they possibly find the time to read a 493-page volume, even if their names are on the dust jacket, the spine, and the title page...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
