American Rhapsody (38 page)

He decided in that dump of an Austin apartment that he loved what he did too much. He decided he wasn't going to lose again. It was do or die. No more sobs on the curbs. No more living out of his car. No more waiting for the phone to ring. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Go for the jugular! Get the dirt! Run the negative ads! Slice and dice! Trash and bash!

Campaigning against Bill Scranton II in Pennsylvania, he ran ads showing Scranton in a Nehru jacket and talking about transcendental meditation. Even though James enjoys a nice fat joint on occasion, he leaked details about Scranton's pot smoking to the press. Scranton lost; Carville won. Campaigning against former Rhodes scholar and Heisman Trophy winner Pete Dawkins in New Jersey: “I needed to cut Dawkins off at the knees. If he ever established credibility, we'd be in for a rough fight.” James ran ads saying Dawkins was a carpetbagger, ending with the line “Come on, Pete, be real.” Dawkins lost; Carville won. Campaigning against former Reagan attorney general Dick Thornburg in Pennsylvania, he personally attacked Thornburg: “The idea of Dick Thornburg coming back to Pennsylvania and saying ‘Send me to the corridors of power because I know Washington' is like running on a pro-leprosy ticket against Jesus.” Thornburg lost; Carville won.

By now, James had also taken to spooking his opposition candidates personally by using his physical presence, showing up in the back as they held a press conference, smiling his evil smile. “We spent too much time waiting and ducking James Carville,” a Thornburg aide said. Thornburg's campaign manager said, “What Carville is best at is
not
doing something, but making you believe he's going to do something. It's mind psych. We spent a lot of energy trying to anticipate something that ultimately never happened.”

James was on the road to stardom by then, though he was also picking up a reputation as the Democratic Lee Atwater, the Reagan and George Bush puppet master who was the founding father of negative, personally destructive, scorched-earth campaigning. A national political analyst said, “Carville is what a lot of Democrats have been looking for. Somebody who not only matches fire with fire but isn't afraid to use a blowtorch.” Occasionally, the blowtorch misfired. In a Democratic primary against Governor Ann Richards of Texas, James, who inhaled often, ran ads accusing her of drug abuse. Richards won; Carville lost.

It didn't matter. As the 1992 election approached, Bob Kerrey, Tom Harkin, and Bill Clinton all wanted him to handle them. He was a winner now, a wunderkind, a killer, a star. “This is one of the few businesses where it's actually of some benefit for people to think you're half a quart low,” James said. “Sometimes clients as well as opponents.” His newfound young partner, Paul Begala, told prospective clients, “We all know that James isn't playing with a full deck. But I'm the only one who knows which cards are missing.”

He picked Bill Clinton because he liked him personally, liked his ideas, liked Hillary, and thought he could get him elected president. “You know, you pay for my head, but I throw in my heart for free,” James told Bill Clinton. He did the opposition research he believed in so much, not just on George Bush but also on Bill Clinton, so he could defend him. He issued orders that he wanted as little as possible in writing. He worked twenty-four hours a day, a demonic figure in jeans and T-shirt, always telling his staff, “Run! Don't walk!”

On the morning Bill and Hillary did their
60 Minutes
interview about Gennifer Flowers, James woke up at dawn “wrenched and drenched” and sobbing. After the interview, he hugged Bill Clinton and was crying again. Those who saw the extraordinary bond between the two men pointed to what they called James's “Kmart life.” Inside his head, some felt, James Carville lived in a Kmart from somewhere out of his childhood. And as Jack Kennedy was the candidate from Camelot, Bill Clinton was the candidate from Kmart.

On election night, James sobbed again . . . and then got into his vicious barroom brawl with Hunter, who'd come down from Woody Creek to see his little brother. And the two comrades and brothers got off the grimy, beer-coated sawdust floor and went their separate ways. (Well, shit, every revolution ate its own.)

James didn't become a cabinet member or a spokesperson. “I wouldn't want to be part of a government that would have me in it,” he said. He moved on to other campaigns, but he stayed personally close to Bill Clinton. “I can't think of anybody who has been better to me, nicer to me, or has given me more of a chance to be at the top of the world than President Clinton and I hope I don't let him down,” James said.

He didn't seem to change much at his moment of greatest triumph. “I didn't go into the lobbying business,” he said. “I didn't show up at the Georgetown dinner parties. I didn't get a new circle of friends.” At times, he seemed overwhelmed by his fame. “I was in New York up on this dais. I don't know if it was everybody who was anybody in New York, but it was everybody I ever heard of. For forty-five minutes I'm sitting in front of all these people and all I'm thinking is—Is my fly open?” He still wore the jeans people expected him to wear. “When I started campaigning,” he said, “I'd always wear jeans and a T-shirt. Then I bought a suit to go out and speak in. People come up and say ‘Well, that's it! You elect a president and you got a nice expensive suit now. You've changed!' I get requests—‘Tell him to wear his jeans!' In Georgia, I went out and wore khakis. People were very disappointed. People said, ‘Where are your jeans, man?' ”

A part of him expected his glory to end. “It's the splat ceremony,” he said. “They run you up the flagpole and then you fall and everyone goes, ‘Gee, what a shame!' There seems to be a cycle. You get built up and you crash.” James had no great ambitions. He wanted to keep doing what he liked doing. “They used to say about Ted Williams that all he looked forward to was the next time at bat. All I look forward to is the next campaign. I'm a campaign guy. I like the smell of headquarters.”

He bought himself a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. James sat on the porch in his underwear and took potshots at rabbits. His friend Burt Reynolds visited him there, as Johnny Depp and John Cusack visited his big brother on
his
mountains, and said, “Man, I'm having a
Deliverance
flashback.” James just smiled his spooky smile, scratched the nuts he scratched so often, and kept blasting away.

That the draft-dodging Bill Clinton's most lethal defender was born at Fort Benning and spent two years in the Marine Corps was the kind of kingfish irony that James loved.

James grew up in Carville, population 1,020, deep in inbred Louisiana, where creatures who resembled him slithered horizontally through the ooze, where the stop signs looked like Swiss cheese, thanks to shotguns. His father and grandmother both served as postmasters, so the town was named after them. “I was a mama's boy,” James said. His mother, whom he called “Miss Nippy,” meant everything to him. “I had a very happy childhood,” he said. “I just assumed everybody else did, too. I cannot remember an unhappy moment as a child. I was lucky. I had a horse when I was six years old. My grandparents lived down the road. I could stay with them if I wanted to. I was loved and never wanting for anything. When my daddy broke it to me that there was no Santa Claus, it was nothing compared with the glee of being the one who knew something that my younger brothers and sisters didn't know. Plus, I got to help my father put the stuff under the tree.”

His most cathartic moments as a child occurred when his mother taught him about politics and when Harper Lee taught him about racism. His mother taught him about politics by taking him along as she sold the
World Book Encyclopedia.
James was six. “She was a great salesman, the best. We would look for any yard that had bicycles. Prime suspect. Any yard that had a bicycle and a bass boat was 100 percent. She would go in and pitch educational materials for children. And, inevitably, the man of the house would say, ‘I can't afford it.' And she would make the point that he was able to afford a bass boat for himself, but it struck her as odd that he can't afford educational materials for his children. It was the guilt approach. The deal was done by then.”

He was sixteen when he read
To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I had never really thought about things like race. I mean, you had white folks and you had black folks. And white folks got things and black folks didn't. Thus it was, thus it is, thus it shall be. And I didn't question it—it was sort of a benign world I lived in. I didn't pay attention to the fact that some people are robbed of their dignity. But then I read
Mockingbird
and what happened to Tom Robinson and I knew instinctively that—A. It happened to a lot of other people, and B. It probably happened to people right around where I grew up. And that it would happen again. And that caused me to question what I'd always accepted. It started a process that changed my view of the world.”

James played football, ran track, and rode horses. He went to college at LSU. “I drank, chased a lot of coeds, and got into a lot of fights. I made John Belushi look like a scholar.” He was thrown out of school and spent two years in the Marine Corps as a regimental food-supply corporal. He went back to LSU, graduated, got a law degree, and put out his shingle. “He was the worst lawyer in the world,” his mother said.

A nearby car dealer was running for the state legislature and he asked James to help him. The car dealer campaigned by stretching his arms wide and imitating Elvis: “I want you, I need you, I love you!” The car dealer lost; Elvis lost; James Carville lost.

It was his first losing political campaign, though he had taken his first political action many years earlier. When he was seventeen, still in high school, James went around town tearing down the campaign posters of a local politician he didn't like.

If James was the Ragin' Cajun, then his wife, Mary Matalin, was the Ragin' Croatian, a woman who worked in a steel mill and a beauty parlor before she got into politics, a striking Debra Winger look-alike who described herself as a “chick,” who cussed like James and wore blue jeans like James, but who also sported the kind of bloodred nails that James didn't dare to wear in public.

Her voice was deep and raspy and she used it to call Bill Clinton a “philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger” who suffered from what she termed, what she first defined, as “bimbo eruptions.” Mary Matalin was, unbelievably as far as James was concerned, not only a Republican but the head of the Republican National Committee when they met. She ran George Bush's campaign while he ran Bill Clinton's. Their marriage was Marilyn Chambers mating with Pat Robertson, Warren Beatty with Phyllis Schlafly, Barney Frank with Pat Buchanan.

An unlikely mating, too, because James had the same problem with his willard as Bill Clinton had with his. And few who knew James thought he could be faithful, even though he was always saying that Mary was “very cute” and “real sassy” and looked at her on a stage once and said, “My God, honey, you got a great figure!” James was the man who said, “Whoo boy! You think Gary Hart had a problem?” . . . Who admitted, “I think the double standard, I act the double standard, I live the double standard.” A friend said, “James littered the American landscape with broken hearts,” adding, “I met fifteen Marys before I saw James with Mary.” And James denied that during the 1992 campaign he'd shown his willard to a female campaign worker and said, “Hey, lookee here!” prompting her to say, “Gee, I've never seen one that old.” James said he had unzipped himself, yeah, okay, so what, but it was only his
shirttail
that was peeking out of there.

James didn't care what anybody said about his willard; he knew that he adored Mary, convincing even her friends, one of whom said, “If Marilyn Monroe was reincarnated and walked through the room naked, he wouldn't notice now.” Mary just said, “He excites me beyond compare—his brain does and other things do too,” although he teased her, saying, “Marrying a Republican means getting used to celibacy most of the time.”

Mary knew her man, though. “I don't care if you wear it in your nose,” she said, “but I want you to wear a wedding ring.” The ultimate political junkies, politics itself was sex to them, too. As James defined it, “A political campaign builds itself up, explodes, and then ends. That's the aphrodisiac of it.”

James knew how sharp she was, and while he said, “The only thing I do with Republicans is beat 'em and date 'em,” what got him were her brains, her balls, and her irreverence.

In some ways, Mary Matalin was James not as a slithering bayou creature but as a normal human being. She was smart enough to have been part of the team (led by the wicked Lee Atwater, her mentor) that transformed George Bush from an East Coast preppy into a country music–loving, pork rind–eating Texan who went down to JCPenney to buy himself socks.

That,
James knew better than anyone else, was no small feat. Mary was irreverent enough to talk about how while Bush was campaigning in Ohio on a train, an entire family bent over and mooned him. She called George W. Bush “Joooooooonior,” said Bush White House Chief of Staff John Sununu had “the political acumen of a doorknob,” and allowed that Pat Buchanan was a gnat—“Let's just take out the fly swatter and squash him.”

Mary had the balls to tell James to his face and publicly what she thought of him: “He's learning-disabled and his mind works like a Ping-Pong ball. . . . He takes it as a point of honor that everyone thinks he's a wack job. . . . The guy is a nutcake. James could get on and beat Ross Perot. . . . Is James a sensitive man? He's sensitive to pain. . . . He looks to have been sired from a love scene in
Deliverance.
”

She liked him right away. “He is, simply, unequivocally, the most brilliant political strategist, the most brilliant man, period. He scares me. . . . We agreed on practically nothing but we had a good time barking at each other. It didn't take long before we were fighting. We'd known each other for a half hour and we were screaming at each other in public. . . . When I met him, he owned one thing—a Schwinn. It wasn't even a ten-speed. And when someone broke into his apartment, they stole a bottle of Wild Turkey 'cause that was the only thing worth stealing. . . . The first thing I loved about him is that he loves his mama. He reveres his mama.”