James Carville, Populist Plutocrat
Carlson, Tucker
James Carville, Populist Plutocrat By Tucker Carlson It is the afternoon of the Arizona primary, and James Carville is talking on the phone in his office on Capitol Hill. Dressed in jeans and a...
...Not anymore...
...This thing clearly wasn't meant to be taken literally...
...But apparently he does not identify with them...
...Heineman's crime...
...It starts right at the beginning, when readers learn that, "It's them [Republicans] versus us [Democrats...
...Most senators do it every day...
...He's a demanding guy...
...And, as it turns out, it's not...
...But give him points for effort...
...We're Right, They're Wrong is so partisan and cant-filled that months before it was published it reportedly caused a feud between Carville and Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who considered it too polemical and therefore bad for the president...
...I necked with them in back seats...
...We're right, they're wrong...
...He's a frequent patron of The Palm, one of Washington's most expensive restaurants...
...In the meantime, though he may advise the upcoming Clinton campaign in some as-yet undetermined capacity, there will be no more living in motels, no more all-night strategy sessions, no more War Rooms...
...And that's what he's good at telling...
...Rappelet, an old-time Louisiana politician who was eventually booted out of office and ended up, briefly, in jail...
...As Carville once said, ideology is "wherever my clients are...
...Lots of them...
...Or that the "Contract with America is a direct assault on black people...
...If my name were Bunky Auchincloss or Sam Greenfield, I'd be just another guy in Washington...
...Definitely, when you're with James, you have a full-life commitment to him...
...He then launches into a disjointed accounting of his humble origins, his working-class relatives, his brother-in-law who runs a bowling alley...
...See you at The Palm," said Larry...
...It took the group about seven months to accomplish the task...
...Believe me, I did a little bit of everything," says Weiss...
...It's one thing to accuse a political opponent of neglect or wrong-headedness, quite another to charge the other side with actively seeking to injure the downtrodden...
...Stop that," he says, but it's obvious he doesn't really mean it, and the dogs chew happily on...
...I wouldn't describe myself as upper class...
...This principle was on full display one night late last month when Carville made an appearance on Larry King Live...
...I know these people...
...And no wonder...
...Hardly anybody outside of a small group of campaign junkies in a few states knew his name...
...Along with the usual polemics, his new book contains recipes for barbecue and "Carville's Top Five Potato Salad Tips...
...That's what he's making money on...
...James Carville didn't actually write the book...
...Better to ignore the details, one soon realizes...
...In his latest book, Carville the stock market junkie goes on at some length about how the country is in trouble because "almost all the productivity gains are going into corporate profits" rather than workers' paychecks...
...As he explained to Vanity Fair a couple of years ago, "My populism doesn't extend to my choice of hotels...
...Carville came close to admitting as much to the Chicago Tribune earlier this month...
...Ten years ago, Carville was 41 and nearly broke, the veteran of a string of losing political races...
...Like a campaign, the process of transforming tape recordings of bull sessions with Carville into a readable manuscript required more than a few all-nighters...
...For example, Carville writes that during the Reagan years (a period described as "a god-awful disaster that we're not going to recover from anytime soon"), a "powerful minority got richer...
...Asked for comment, Carville immediately assumed his nastiest campaign persona...
...He started giving speeches...
...Carville, according to the book, arrived at the podium to speak, only to realize he had left his speech in the hotel room...
...For Carville, the graduated income tax is at the core of what makes America great, the tax rate on capital gains non-negotiable (though privately he admits indexing them for inflation seems like a pretty good idea...
...As Carville listens to the news, grinning and grunting into the receiver, his two dogs, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, explore the corner of the room...
...In 1994, Sen...
...Thank you, sir," replied James...
...Carville began We're Right, They're Wrong with low hopes-"If you can't read this thing on a moderately long airline flight, I'll be pretty disappointed," he told the Washington Post before starting out-and there are few surprises within...
...He offers no stories about nights spent writing out chapters in longhand on legal pads or the pain of the "editing process...
...Carville apparently reached his the day Paula Corbin Jones held a press conference to announce her sexual harassment suit against President Clinton...
...It's a great hook," he once explained, "this crazy Cajun guy, just in from the swamps, who probably bites the heads off moccasins...
...Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his belt unbuckled, Carville is leaning back in his chair with his running shoes on the desk while a friend brings him up to date on the latest exit poll numbers from Phoenix...
...Ronald Reagan...
...Larry Flynt is hardly upper class," he says, referring to the pornography publisher, "but he's certainly upper income, and that is the distinction that I make...
...He respects them for their political ability, as one professional to another...
...Last night I gave a speech to [corporate executives, hosted by] the Forbes magazine people...
...What he didn't give them was cover billing...
...Even a would-be Louisiana populist has his limits, however...
...A few days later he calls back to clarify his position on which class he belongs to...
...When Carville appeared on the Tonight Show to flog his book, he flew his stable of research assistants, including Weiss, out to Los Angeles, put them up in a hotel, got them backstage passes, and took them out to dinner afterwards...
...Plus, being an author again gave Carville cause to indulge one of his favorite pastimes: heading to The Palm for lunch, this time with famous people like Norman Mailer to discuss which policies best help the poor...
...A ton of it...
...Or, as a close friend suggests, a comedian: "He knows people want to hear a little bit about politics, but basically they want to hear jokes about politics...
...Republicans, according to Carville, are monsters who actually enjoy hurting the weak and poor...
...Manic and witty, Carville became legendary among coworkers for his unpredictable, superstitious behavior during campaigns, most famously for refusing to change his under-shorts during the final week before an election...
...When members of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers' Union went on strike at The Palm last fall, Carville took pains to show his solidarity...
...During the Lautenberg Senate race in New Jersey, one friend told the Washingtonian, Carville was known "to lie on the couch in the fetal position wearing brown gardening gloves...
...Carville has boasted to acquaintances that he has given 200 speeches over the past three years...
...And this from a man, scolded Carville, whose "annual income is round about, oh, say, $180,000...
...The appearances add up fast...
...Or that Republicans "are washing their hands of all responsibility for anybody but well-to-do white folks...
...In one of the book's most memorable vignettes, for instance, Carville describes the time he gave the commencement address at Louisiana State University...
...In 1994, Carville gave an enthusiastic interview to Smart Money magazine in which he outlined his investment strategies...
...Statements like this beg the question: Of what class does Carville consider himself a member...
...He begins by following the market closely...
...This doesn't sound like the generally measured rhetoric of the schmoozing, socially bipartisan Washington insider James Carville has become...
...So far, so ordinary...
...Pat Buchanan...
...And I'm the commencement speaker at the University of Virginia this year...
...Eating big lunches and chatting with the broker is, after all, what wealthy people do, at least in the movies...
...And though he is now a burgher in good standing, Carville plays up his smalltown roots, often making surprisingly self-aware and at times nauseatingly cute references to the Louisiana hamlet where he was raised (Carville, La., home of a federally funded leper colony), his mother "Miss Nippy," and the country store "my daddy had...
...He enjoys quality room service, plush bath towels, and cars that come with drivers...
...Carville may not like them all, but that hardly seems the point...
...I would describe myself as having a healthy income," he says, his voice rising, "but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination...
...None of this should come as any surprise...
...Sunday it was-what?-Orlando for the National Grocers [Association...
...And, as if to make the caricature complete, he loves to play the stock market...
...His political work since Bill Clinton's election has yielded some especially choice disasters...
...Which is part of what made Carville a successful campaigner-and what makes him such a wonderful plutocrat...
...This is the kind of person Carville admires...
...I know he interviewed a number of very, very quality people, probably a number of people who are brighter than I am, better writers and have a lot more experience...
...And that most definitely is the point...
...If Carville had had his way, it would have been more...
...America's best-known political operative has joined the plutocracy...
...and advised Greece's New Democracy party candidate Constantine Mitsotakis in what turned out to be his upset defeat in that country's national elections...
...So much success has left little time for old-fashioned political work, but that doesn't appear to bother Carville...
...Of course, that didn't mean he skipped lunch...
...The truth is," Carville says, that Republicans "believe in comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted...
...I hope I don't have to do it again...
...Period...
...My brother-in-law and I are of the same class," he says...
...If that's what it takes to earn a living, then I'll do it...
...Very wrong, it soon becomes clear...
...Carville did his usual routine, firing off a few zingers about Republicans, throwing out some pointed statistics about the federal government, taking the requisite call from Cedar Rapids...
...But it is not the errors in the book that stick in the mind, it's the tone...
...And, like all truly evil people, they achieve their wicked ends not through democratic means, but by conspiracies...
...He may make a lot of money, he explains in an agitated voice, but that doesn't mean anything...
...He's consistently trying to raise it," says the agent, "but we say, 'No, keep it where it is.'" By all accounts an unusually skilled speaker, Carville jets around the country nearly every week to meet new audiences...
...According to the book, Republicans aren't merely "greedy," "inexcusably hypocritical," "unpatriotic," "malicious," "criminally stupid" "terrorists" who would sell poison hamburgers to children in order to pay "off their own campaign IOUs to the meat industry...
...And a number of them just insisted in the first couple minutes of their interview, 'I'd like my name on the cover.'" That, apparently, was it for them...
...James Carville is contented...
...The facts may be true, but like everything Carville says, they've been spun...
...That would be Lowell Weiss, a 28-year-old staffer at the Atlantic Monthly who, along with at least four other researchers and two editors, assembled We're Right, They're Wrong...
...Carville has been an especially energetic mouthpiece for liberal populism, particularly the idea that in the American economy the cards are stacked against the Little Guy and it's high time government did something about it...
...Plus, he's really not that well-off...
...A wine aficionado (northern Rh?nes are his favorite), Carville once consumed no fewer than 11 drinks in the company of a reporter on a flight to Los Angeles...
...Harris Wofford hired him as a $25,000-a-month consultant in his ill-fated Pennsylvania reelection effort...
...Take for instance the case of Rep...
...A couple of years ago, Carville's booker, the Washington Speaker's Bureau, accidentally sent his annual earnings form to another speech-giver with a similar last name...
...Here's the twist: According to Carville, "that result was no accident...
...With some spectacular exceptions, Carville's relatively brief career as a political consultant (he didn't begin serious campaigning until 1982) has been decidedly spotty...
...Not only do I look at the tables, I look for the symbols of the stocks I own running across the screen all day long...
...he asks, stalling for time...
...Then again, to his considerable credit, he doesn't claim he did...
...The rest sat there waiting for trickles of prosperity that never came...
...Not if James Carville can help it...
...I spent nights with them...
...You drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there's no telling what you'll find," he said, sounding more like a snobbish old woman by a country club pool than a defender of the exploited classes...
...After all, he explains, "My wife works...
...Heavy stuff...
...Instead, he is apt to recount anecdotes about some of America's most controversial, and sometimes repugnant, political figures...
...Certainly it's not so bad for Carville, whose latest project-again following the lead of so many others who came before him-is turning his celebrity into a lucrative career as an author...
...For an unabashed populist, however, Carville can seem a little touchy when questions arise about his own financial circumstances...
...signed on to help the administration win public approval for the doomed Clinton health-care plan...
...Still, such admissions do seem odd coming from Carville, who made his reputation-and, ironically, his fortune-by attacking the very people he now brushes elbows with at The Palm...
...His second book in two years, We're Right, They're Wrong, has just been released by a major publishing house and already is climbing up the bestseller list...
...But it's not, which is too bad for Carville, since the ostensible author might want to share the blame with someone else for some of the whoppers that made it into We're Right, They're Wrong...
...That seems to settle the matter, and Carville quickly changes the subject, but the exchange clearly has bothered him...
...Carville is a hero to the many people, most of them young, who work for him...
...Other paying customers include Aetna insurance, Seagrams, Citibank, Prudential, and the National Organization of Investment Professionals...
...Carville is a bon vivant of the 1940s variety...
...Carville simply called ahead...
...Carville won't specify how much he has made from the lecture circuit- "I can't imagine why it would be anybody's business," harrumphs the man who once made a living digging into his opponents' personal lives-but it's apparent Carville isn't kidding when he says he's been fortunate...
...I went to school with them...
...To be fair, Carville isn't the first person to insist there's a difference between living like a rich guy and actually being one...
...The form, the recipient was shocked to discover, indicated Carville had made more than $900,000 in speaking fees in a single year...
...King loved him anyway, proclaiming the author "one of my favorite people...
...Never comfortable with social issues (a Catholic, he seems squeamish about the liberal positions on abortion and homosexuality), Carville has instead made soaking the rich the guiding theme of the notoriously hardball campaigns he has run...
...That is, when he's not ringing up his stockbroker, something he does "an average of three times a week...
...It was the money bet...
...It was the game plan all along...
...It's probably just as well...
...When it comes to ghostwriters, Carville is no Hillary Clinton...
...Heineman, a former police chief from Raleigh, has come in for repeated abuse from Carville, both on television and in print...
...I would describe myself as decidedly middle class...
...Most of all, he demands loyalty...
...As if that weren't enough, that same year Carville also embarrassed the White House by criticizing NAFTA in a Washington Post op-ed and worked for California assemblyman Richard Katz in the Los Angeles mayor's race...
...It worked before...
...Then, gathering his wits and putting on his thickest Bayou accent, Carville does what he does best-go on the offensive...
...But is it true...
...Even losing campaign consultants make money, and for Carville the defeats weren't entirely wasted time...
...He's a cult figure," Weiss says...
...As it is, Carville is a novelty act to his audiences, like a circus performer with political insight...
...a tax return?-and quickly reduce it to confetti...
...But, hey, sometime I might have to...
...Great story...
...Nor is he likely to bring up his favorite federal programs, a topic explored at eye-glazing length in We're Right, They're Wrong...
...Clinton, for his part, likes the book so much he's taken to citing it in speeches...
...The alert consumer opens the covers, pen in hand, ready to catch misstatements, exaggerations, and falsehoods as they may appear...
...With this in mind, it's not surprising, as Carville asserts, that "right-wingers don't want public education to succeed...
...True to form, however, he winged it, firing off some of his trademark self-deprecating one-liners even as he laid down some serious profundities...
...In his latest book, Carville gives Heineman the first spot on his list of the "Top Five Ridiculous and Pathetic Republicans...
...I don't know, give me an example," he says...
...According to his agent, Carville receives $15,000 a speech, plus first-class airfare and hotel accommodations...
...He and his wife (former Bush partisan and talk-show host Mary Matalin) have what he calls a "country house" in rural Virginia...
...With Carville, you can get the feeling it's the only point...
...Today he is famous as the architect of the 1992 Clinton victory...
...Katz came in fourth with 10 percent of the vote...
...It's arguable that Carville's most marketable asset has always been his eccentric personality...
...And indeed it doesn't...
...The dogs find an unidentified piece of paper- a memo from the president...
...A grin spreads across his face: "I've probably spoken to them...
...George Wallace...
...Still, the pay's not bad for 160 pages of aggressive opinions in big type...
...As usual, it is Carville himself who says it best: "If I were the kind of person who put justice before ego," he writes in the book's acknowledgments, "Lowell's name would be on the cover of this book with mine...
...Along the way, the man who in 1985 was taking out loans against his life insurance has become a millionaire several times over...
...Before long, the reader feels like an English teacher grading a paper turned in by a dyslexic- the margins fill with exclamation points, corrections, dozens of bewildered question marks...
...He is an entertainer...
...And Carville and partner Paul Begala still received $300,000 a year for peddling their talents to the Democratic National Committee...
...In 1993 alone, Carville ran Governor James Florio's nasty but ultimately unsuccessful campaign against Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey...
...When the picketers left, he showed up for steak...
...Before long the show was over, and King turned to his guest to send him off...
...Carville "took a very large risk on hiring me," Weiss says, sounding grateful...
...Dressed in a Yale-cut navy blazer, a blue button-down oxford, and a red and gold rep striped tie from Brooks Brothers, Carville didn't really look himself, but in this environment that hardly mattered...
...As he put it in a particularly restrained moment to Campaign magazine, "Most people don't think the rich pay enough...
...Ours is the morally superior position...
...For once, Carville is at a loss for a snappy answer...
...Actually, he seems to delight in it...
...I think I'm extremely fortunate...
...How about International Paper, or some other corporation reviled by liberals for pulping old-growth forests or otherwise despoiling the environment...
...Their owner smiles and goes back to his conversation...
...He once described himself as "lower middle class...
...No, they're worse even than that...
...This is not a good sign, to say the least...
...If Carville does not display an intimate familiarity with his own work that's because, as he puts it, "Lowell's the one who really put the book together...
...The task quickly proves impossible, simply too enormous to undertake...
...It's a lot of work...
...Well, says Carville sheepishly, "No, it's kind of...
...I'm kind of like Nixon when they asked him why he didn't go to church on Sunday," Carville explains...
...No one knows why...
...During the 1980s, Carville tells reporters, he helped to found the Washington chapter of the Andy Griffith Rerun Fan Club...
...His new volume, an extended paperback screed Carville calls "pamphleteering," brought him a much smaller advance, which he describes derisively as in "the low six figures...
...I never crossed any picket lines," he says with apparent pride...
...Asked if there are any groups he wouldn't speak to, Carville pauses, evidently confused by the question...
...Nixon said, 'I've already done that.' Well, I've already run campaigns...
...Nonetheless, at some point Carville realized that his future lay in hiring himself out not to campaigns, but to audiences...
...He really did the book...
...He trails off, then quickly changes the subject to a story about Clarence Darrow It is in many ways the perfect Carville comeback, if only because Clarence Darrow is the perfect Carville hero: flamboyant, nasty, friend to rogues and underdogs, a man who was himself once tried for bribery...
...His reptilian features are known to millions from television appearances and countless speeches...
...It's hard to tell to what degree Carville's odd behavior is a part of a sales shtick, but it is clear he cultivates his public image as an unusual and folksy guy...
...Fred Heineman of North Carolina...
...And why shouldn't he be...
...If Carville affects nonchalance about his efforts to make money, he is equally direct about how he spends and manages it...
...Carville looks up calmly...
...And apparently returns loyalty, as well...
...The only politician to be honored with a photograph in Carville's office is a mustachioed man in a hat and dark glasses named A.O...
...You're not supposed to look at the stock tables every day," Carville said...
...His first book, a gossipy semi-autobiography he wrote with his wife, earned the couple a $950,000 advance and became a bestseller...
...I may have lost a bit of contact with the rest of the country," he explained with his characteristic mixture of bluntness and spin, "but compared to others who came before me, it's not so bad...
...Spend an hour with James Carville and you're not likely to hear much mushy liberal blather about Shining Tomorrows or why-can't-we-all-just-get-along platitudes...
...Earl Long...
...I give a lot of speeches," he admits...
...Just the same, even a man used to the relentless doublespeak of political life is bound to have difficulty balancing economy-class rhetoric with an Admiral's Club lifestyle for long, and Carville is no exception...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 26
