To Have and To Spin

...When it comes to critiquing the press in general, however, Carville and Matalin can barely contain their rage...

...And in keeping with the circus atmosphere surrounding their book's release, Carville and Matalin have even posed for publicity photos with a live donkey and elephant...

...But given what had happened to Gary Hart, it was inevitable that the press would report Flowers' story...

...I didn't cover George Bush's campaign, but I did cover Clinton's, and I know that Carville is dissembling when he says, for instance, that Clinton's Sistah Souljah speech was not intended to be a big deal...

...But it's unfair to say that issues tend to get ignored during a campaign...

...The strongest charge against the campaign press is, as Carville and Matalin both note, its unrelenting negativity...

...Matalin is particularly on target when she talks about the pack mentality of the press and its tendency to get a line on something and not to let go...

...Clinton is calling from the campaign plane to Carville in Little Rock to complain about exhaustion...

...First, there are some misstatements of fact...

...James Carville and Mary Matalin received almost a million dollar advance to tell the story of their oddball romance and to wax about their roles in opposing camps in the 1992 presidential election...

...And as Carville noted, the Flowers episode caused only a temporary dip in Clinton's polls...

...To Have and To Spin How Mary Matalin and James Carville are campaigning to be Washington's hottest celebrity couple BY MATTHEW COOPER All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President Mary Matalin and James Carville, with Peter Knobler Simon & Schuster and Random House, $24 If you're like me, you find it almost irresistible to be suspicious of a book like this...

...But it isn't always smart...

...Beyond politics, other things bind them...

...The phone slips," says Carville, "are stacked up like unpaid bills and you were always calculating which to get to first...

...job of explaining the Carville-Matalin relationship and why it works despite their political differences...

...Similarly, U.S...

...First off, All's Fair tends to be disappointingly short on the kind of insider gossip that makes politico memoirs so much fun...

...Still, there is a phoniness to much of the book and, in some ways, to Matalin and Carville...

...Perhaps one reason their marriage works is that their first love isn't the governing part of politics but the campaigning...

...Perhaps...

...And it's no doubt true that personality, conflict, and campaigns tend to soak up more of the press' collective energies than issues stories...

...phone calls during the campaign or their pre-celebrity days when they first started dating, it's easy to see that they're much alike...

...there's Mary leading a conga line down the aisle of Air Force One...

...There's James in the now-infamous Clinton campaign War Room, offering volunteers $100 if he can crack eggs over their heads...

...It is conventional wisdom, of course, that consultants are bad for America...

...They dutifully noted that she was getting paid and that there were holes in her story...

...Part of the negativity, though, comes from being spun constantly by a White House communications operation, whether it is Bush's or Clinton's, that is rarely willing to be candid or acknowledge the obvious...

...The scene symbolized how vacuous the modern American campaign had become...

...In the hours leading up to the speech, Clinton aides made it quite clear in asides to the press that it was going to be a very big deal and, of course, by challenging Jesse Jackson so directly it proved to be a huge event...

...After all, most memoirs that are so heavily trumpeted don't live up to the fanfare, and All's Fair is, well, being trumpeted blaringly...

...All said, I think reporters handled the episode pretty well...

...Both are basically moderates...

...In one of the funnier scenes in All's Fair, Carville describes the fights over Clinton's crowded campaign schedule...

...Carville reminds us constantly that it was only after a series of botched careers—Marine, science teacher, small-time lawyer—that his life hit an upward trajectory...

...Meanwhile, Louisiana Senator John Breaux is on line two, livid that the campaign has cancelled a Louisiana event that he had labored to assemble...

...Carville uses quotation marks promiscuously when it's clear that he's not quoting people exactly...

...The Vietnam War was one of the great moral issues of the late 20th century and the question of how Bill Clinton in 1992—or Dan Quayle in 1988 or Dick Cheney in 1996—dealt with it is a key issue, one that Americans eventually resolved, at least last time around, in his favor...

...For her part, Matalin offers a funny account of trying to set up an "impromptu" visit of Bush to a bingo hall that ends up with the presidential motorcade getting lost...

...He despairs about liberal elitism in the Democratic Party on issues such as arts and abortion funding...

...Interestingly, the book offers a contrarian and provocative defense of political consultants...

...documents, but they seemed too ambiguous to publish—especially during the crucial final days of a campaign...

...But there's nothing here so interesting as, for example, the nugget in Donald Regan's memoirs that Ronald Reagan took political counsel from Nancy's astrologer...

...As you read the book—which is divided into chunks marked "Mary" and "James" and (ghost)written in their respective voices—some things about their relationship do make sense...

...Mary on Newsweek's Joe Klein: "He's very hip, a lot of fun to banter with...

...Capitalizing on the Hatfield-and-McCoy quality of their marriage, rivals Simon & Schuster and Random House are making a big deal about their co-publishing the book...

...They share a blue-collar, hard-knocks kind of background...

...By clobbering Tsongas with such vehemence, Clinton later looked foolish when he adopted some of those very same positions...

...All's fair in politics...

...That would make sense because they're at their best explaining the zaniness of daily life during a campaign...

...When it comes to dealing with the press, Carville and Matalin are particularly squirrely...

...The grim consultant offers no answer over the rising cheers of the crowd...

...Always foraging, it must be fed a daily dose of pictures and soundbites and anecdotes, otherwise it will write nasty stories about the candidate...

...Much of the time this is true, but there are also examples in this book that show consultants at their worst...

...Carville dispatches valentines to institutions: "The L.A...

...She is pro-choice, for instance...

...The couple's dining habits are, of course, their own business...

...When the two describe their terse 3 a.m...

...He grew up in tiny Carville, Louisiana, the son of a postal worker dad and a mom who sold encyclopedias...

...Why not just admit that they like it...

...Folks wonder why it's always the same people volunteering," says Carville...

...There are thousands of people who go from campaign to campaign with little interest in sticking around for the governing part...

...News examined the charges, which include some official U.S...

...Carville is at his weakest when he declares that the press are scandalmongers, willing to pick up any rumor and run with it...

...And Matalin piles on John Sununu, bashing the already-pummeled former chief of staff for being dictatorial...

...Likewise, Matalin understates the involvement of British conservatives in spreading rumors about Clinton's Oxford days...

...Matalin and Carville are just as obsessed with photo-ops, soundbites, and strategy as the political reporters they love to criticize as shallow and superficial...

...Throughout the Clinton campaign I had lots of accusations about Clinton land in my lap that I looked into and did not touch because they seemed groundless in the extreme...

...Political scientists such as Samuel Popkin, a Clinton consultant, have shown that most voters, by Election Day, do have a pretty good sense of where the candidates stand on the basic issues...

...The authors obviously felt no compelling need to sort out all the facts before going to press...

...In the last line of the film the suddenly successful Senate candidate, Robert Redford, asks: "What do we do now...

...Besides, the campaign strategists themselves are obsessed with photo ops and strategy, as this book makes clear...

...Given the mood of the country and Congress, more cuts are on their way...

...Other political types are yelling at Carville to get Clinton out around the country to visit more states that look shaky...

...More important, the book does only a modest Matthew Cooper is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...But the problem for Carville is that they are now President Clinton's positions...

...The 1972 film "The Candidate" was the apotheosis of this belief...

...At one point Matalin complains about a dinner she and Carville have with reporters at a fashionable Washington restaurant named I Ric-chi, "this loud, to-be-seen kind of Washington restaurant...

...Such unions face real and complex hurdles, but Carville and Matalin are too frenetic to explain how they work it out...

...And in other ways small and large facts sire fudged...

...The problem, though, is that Carville and Matalin don't offer much of a guide for the rest of us about how to relate to people with whom we have political differences...

...Times distinguished itself in this campaign and clearly belongs in the pantheon with the leading East Coast newspapers...

...For Carville, it's the same need to be needed that draws people into volunteer work...

...In one hard luck scene set in 1984, he is crying on the platform of Washington's Union Station, 38, completely broke, with nowhere to go after Gary Hart's presidential campaign, itself broke, said it couldn't pay him for the office work he was doing at its headquarters...

...He raised the gas tax and made more of Social Security income taxable...

...Matalin's rise was not much different...

...Such positions are elitist, says Carville, favored by the media, but insensitive to the needs of the middle class...

...And he tosses them to individuals: "David Von Drehle and David Maraniss [of The Washington Post] and Maureen Dowd [of The New York Times] were probably the best writers on the campaign and did the funniest, most interesting pieces...

...They'd never ask you about what Bill Clinton was trying to do for the country, they'd want to know how he was going to get there...

...As Mickey Kaus notes, the best way to deal with today's cynical press is not to moan like "a dinosaur trapped in a tar pit" but to deal with it...

...Justifiably so...

...Their marriage is bound, too, by a sassy lightheartedness...

...To some degree, this rap on political reporters is right...

...Even Matalin herself accuses Carville of being disingenuous on this point...

...It was the volatile combination of Clinton's evasiveness on the draft and Gennifer Flowers' accusation that created the Slick Willie problem...

...Besides, we reporters ought to get some credit for all the garbage we don't print...

...They're said to trivialize politics, coarsen debate...

...It's because people come down from being a part of something, from being needed, and have to move on to something else to get that feeling...

...That's a forgivable transgression, but it has no place in a book that lambastes the press for its ethical flaws...

...Running mates Most irksome is their attitude toward celebrity...

...Naturally, he cites the Gennifer Flowers and draft stories as examples of the press running amok...

...News, my employer, received a tip late in the campaign that George Bush may have violated the Geneva Convention and strafed surrendering Japanese soldiers when he was a pilot during World War II...

...They argue that all consultants do is help a candidate clarify and hone his message...

...But it happens that Carville and Matalin eat almost nightly at The Palm, a loud, to-be-seen kind of restaurant across the street from I Ricchi...

...Both of them love the rush of working 18-hour-days amid the whirl of fax machines and cellular phones...

...But her posturing that she hates the Washington glamour scene is grating and unnecessary...

...Carville admits that a lot of his kinetic Cajun routine is, simply, hype...

...Sure, Carville takes a few shots at longtime Clinton campaign aide Betsey Wright for screwing up the Clinton response to George Bush's charge that he raised taxes 128 times...

...The magazine held on to the story, as did Newsweek and other outlets...

...The press, in the Carville-Matalin view, is The Beast...

...Everyone is angry at him...

...Carville is particularly proud of the way that the Clinton campaign crushed Paul Tsongas on issues of sacrifice such as the gasoline tax and cutting entitlements...

...Their enthusiasm for their job, even when it's hard, is pretty infectious...

...They rip into the press as an institution—but pull their punches by refusing to lash out at any individual reporters...

...In a reverse spin on the press tendency to cultivate sources, Carville and Matalin throw bouquets to individual members of the Fourth Estate, even as they skewer them as a whole...

...More important, you walk away from the book not knowing how much of Carville and Matalin's life is pure schtick...

...The granddaughter of Croatian immigrants, she grew up in ethnic Chicago and went through several career miscues—including a stint as a beautician—before rising in politics...

...We didn't get into a lot of intellectual discussions about the future of America," Carville says of his chats with reporters...

...This is the lowest common denominator theory of journalism, the idea that the tabloid papers publish sleazy stories which in turn force the mainstream media to latch on...

...Their politics aren't all that far apart...

...if anything they spared Clinton by making less of the Flowers-Clinton tape...

...To say that the media overplayed the draft story is a mistake...

...theirs is basically a sanguine view of politics—as relentlessly upbeat as Matalin's nightly talk show on CNBC, on which she interviews guests on a set that looks more like "Saturday Night Live" than "Meet the Press...

...The person who does the church fairs is the one who does the United Way drive is the one who does the Heart Association picnic...

...I hated this scene...

...The fear of being labeled "in the tank" is the deepest fear any political reporter lives with, and it leads to a harder edge than is often appropriate...

...Zillions of gallons of ink are spilled analyzing American political races, but Carville and Matalin's book does the rare thing of explaining the addictive quality that draws so many people into a life of campaigns...

...I think my suspicions were merited...

...Not surprisingly, Carville and Matalin reject this view...

...Kaus notes that Barney Frank's brutal honesty in dealing with his relationship with a male prostitute helped stave off what seemed like a certain death knell to his career...

...Carville did a disservice to the public debate and made his boss look bad...

...There's no question that the press gave Gennifer Flowers a lot of air time...

...Hillary and her pal, the notoriously tough New York lawyer Susan Thomases, are bellowing to Carville over how Clinton is overbooked, tired...

...While there was some evidence that the tape had been doctored, Clinton nevertheless apologized to Mario Cuomo for saying on the tape that the New York governor acts like a Mafioso—proof positive that at least parts of the tape were accurate...