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The political strategist James Carville was among the first top-level Democrats to loudly and persistently push for President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race earlier this year.
It was a controversial argument when Carville — with his uncensored Louisiana flair for a turn of phrase — started making it, long before the CNN presidential debate that opened the floodgates of concern and ultimately made Biden change his mind.
Biden’s departure, Carville told me, was a bit like having an infected wisdom tooth removed. Not pleasant, but you feel good the next day.
A new CNN documentary, “Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid,” focuses on the strategist’s early pressure on Biden and ties it into his long career. It also examines his famous bipartisan marriage to Mary Matalin, a top strategist for then-President George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 1992, who lost to Carville’s candidate, Bill Clinton. She was later a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney in the George W. Bush administration. Her decision to work for Cheney caused frustration in the marriage, according to the film.
Watch “Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid” on Saturday at 7 p.m. ET on CNN.
When I talked to Carville in New York recently, it was shortly after Cheney and his daughter Liz, the former Wyoming representative, had both endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat in this year’s election.
I asked Carville about the weirdness of being on the same side as former foes and about how the Democratic Party has changed before his eyes. Excerpts of our conversation, edited for clarity, are below:
The entire country is in a sort of Carville-Matalin relationship since women are breaking for Harris and men support Trump
WOLF: You’re in this famously bipartisan relationship. One of the stories of this current campaign is a majority of women going toward Harris in the most recent polling – and a majority of men really going toward former President Donald Trump. So there’s got to be a lot of people out there in relationships like yours, right?
CARVILLE: Usually when people meet each other, they fall in love … a lot of times they’re in the same industry. When we got married, actually, somebody said a kind of smart thing: They said what would have really been remarkable — if one of them would have married a tree surgeon from Idaho. You know? So if you work in television, you’re more likely to meet someone from MSNBC or CBS than you are a roofer.
If you think about it, we just happen to be a higher-profile example of this.
WOLF: At the Democratic National Convention, there was a coordinated message from all of the major speakers — they clearly had talking points — to not offend the other side. Maybe it’s this “politics of joy” idea. Don’t offend your neighbors, talk to people. Is that a workable strategy? Talking to people from the other side?
CARVILLE: It’s kind of funny. Colin Allred, who is the current Democratic Senate nominee in Texas — we met in Dallas, the Dallas Democrats, when he was running for Congress, and he said, “James, what advice do you have?”
I said, “Just be nice to people.”
I don’t call it politics of joy, but just — it seems like in politics, no one’s nice anymore. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s some value in that.
WOLF: But sometimes the things you say — we won’t call them mean, but in the movie, for instance, you are shown actively trying to get Biden out of the race.
CARVILLE: I wasn’t mean to him. I wasn’t not nice to him. I just thought he was too old.
I wasn’t rude. Some would say Trump is just out and out rude. But in terms of President Biden, I said, “Look, I just think if he becomes the nominee, the age thing is going to get in his way; I don’t think he’s a very strong general election candidate.”
But I mean, you can have opinions. It depends on how you say ‘em. I just think sometimes, just in public, you know, there’s more people yelling at flight attendants, and there’s more people getting irritated with the front desk at the hotel. You know, you just, you see in a country with a short fuse, now maybe some of it’s politics or some of it’s the pandemic, I don’t know.
WOLF: There’s a point in the movie where you are looking back at the Bush administration and Mary was working with Cheney, and you appear very far apart. We’re at a place right now where Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are both supporting Harris. Is that a weird, full-circle moment? I wonder if you’ve thought about that.
CARVILLE: I always liked Vice President Cheney. We’d go to Wyoming for Christmas because Mary would staff him, and I obviously didn’t have much political alignment with him, but I found him to be a great conversation.
And I always liked Liz. I mean, she was like Mary’s, I’d say, younger sister or something like that. Mary’s a fair amount older than Liz is. And we would go, you know, in the way that senior staff people and spouses go to things in Washington, to the Naval Observatory (the vice president’s official residence).
At least from my vantage point, it’s kind of taken the sting off her having actually worked for Cheney. I was always proud of what she did.
WOLF: But do you feel like you now are moving, in a weird circular way, in league with the Cheneys?
CARVILLE: Well, I think what I would say is I think the United States is really, like, in jeopardy.
Like in World War II, so OK, we were aligned with the Soviets … When you’re at war, I mean, I work very closely with a lot of old Quayle/Bush people: Bill Kristol, Bulwark people. Tim Miller, Charlie Sykes. Stuart Stevens called this morning; I’ve got to call him back. Steve Schmidt.
I mean, you’re not looking around asking questions. We just got to win this thing, and then hopefully we can get back to fightin’ again. But right now, we don’t have that luxury.
WOLF: You talk at one point in the movie about working on campaigns in 1959, and I was thinking about how the political map has changed in that time. You worked for Bill Clinton. He won Arkansas and Louisiana twice, states that are out of reach for Democrats today. The party has changed a lot. Are you changing with the party?
CARVILLE: It’s an interesting question. As the movie makes clear, my origins of being a Democrat were pretty clearly racially oriented … I had a not-a-typical view that a person of my race and gender and regional upbringing would have. I still think that by and large, that’s where the party is.
You’re right. We’ve become less blue collar, we’ve become more educated. I think sometimes I’ve been somewhat critical of the educated class and their message and their language. But I think the Democrats all share a view that inclusion is a good thing.
I don’t know that the general principle of what it means to be a Democrat has really changed.
I want to be part of a political party that wants to take some of the harsher edges off of capitalism. I think capitalism at the end can be pretty rapacious, and you need to come in and soften it up a little bit. Some people could do very well. A lot of people can get hurt pretty bad.
WOLF: Let me just get your take on the current political situation. Harris is ahead in some national polls …
CARVILLE: The one thing I have learned over many years of politics is you could find a poll question that’ll say anything you want it to, if you just look hard enough.
I can show you a poll with Harris ahead. I can show you a poll where Trump’s ahead. I don’t blame people that do that. They gotta do something …
There’s a thing called statistical noise, and you’re always going to get that. I can’t say I don’t look at polls … because that is kind of bullshitty, but I really don’t. Unless there’s something extraordinary and repetitive … I don’t think about it that much.
WOLF: What are you thinking about every day, all day, for the next 40 days?
CARVILLE: How can she position herself in such a way that she can draw a good contrast? So let me give you — this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot and I’m trying to refine my thought …
Because people always say, “Well, James, is it really ‘the economy, stupid?’” And the economy, some people think it was inflation, and some people say, well, you know, the average person is OK.
Basically, I think she has a good framework for a message, because Trump says, “You’ve got nothing to lose. The country is totally in the toilet, and we have to try something different.”
I don’t think that’s where most people are.
What he has allowed her to do, as opposed to saying, “you don’t think the economy is very good, I think it’s pretty good. I’m gonna try to convince you that you’re wrong in saying it’s not very good, and that it’s pretty good.” That’s a hard thing to present to somebody in real life.
However.
He says you have nothing to lose. Actually, most people have a job. Most people have some sense of, “I think I’m OK for the next year.” Most people have been offered another job. A lot of people have a savings account. And they go, “Well, you know, I had $20,000 and now I got $22,000. I don’t want to lose the two.”
So he’s given you the framework that I no longer have to convince you that the economy is good, but he’s trying to convince you that you got nothing to lose — and I don’t think you believe that.
WOLF: The arc of the movie is you pressuring Biden to get out of the race. We’re a few months into the Harris campaign and a month until Election Day. Are you feeling good?
CARVILLE: Safe to say I feel better. I tell people if you have an infected wisdom tooth and the dentist pulls it, you feel a hell of a lot better. You probably don’t feel any better than if you never had it in the first place, but let me tell you when that wisdom tooth is gone, the next day, you think you feel on top of the world compared to the way you felt before, right?
But I do. I think the country had a negative view of President Biden and his age, and I didn’t see they were getting ready to change at all, because it was pretty fixed.
WOLF: Is there anything else you want to say about the movie?
CARVILLE: The whole profession of politics has just gotten to be held in such disrepute, and that’s just not people like me who ran campaigns or candidates. It’s people who work in government or work in NGOs, volunteer or write stories about it. Do the 6:00 news.
Hopefully, this film gets people feeling better about it, because if we just keep telling people what a terrible business politics is, what awful people are in it, we wonder why we can’t get good people with politics, because they’ve listened to all the shit they’ve been told …
WOLF: So what do you tell somebody coming out of college? Why should they get into politics?
CARVILLE: I hope that they see the movie and they say, “Well, these guys had a pretty good time. They didn’t look like they were wearing a hair shirt the whole time; they look like they were having fun and laughing and high-fiving each other,” and hopefully they said, “They don’t look like particularly disreputable people to me.”
There’s been so much negativity toward politics, the political process, the people in politics. And my hope is this film can cause people to reevaluate that.
