He Snarled, She Snarled : ...
A clever title. After all, you couldn’t have a more exciting come-on than love and war. But as one who believes products should be completely accurate in their listing of ingredients, I feel obliged to point out that this book’s love affair was displayed mostly in phone calls of the most unimpassioned sort. And while the presidential campaign of 1992 could certainly be called a political war, the account of it here is anecdotal in a rather frothy fashion. Yes, it’s fun, but it amounts to little more than the kind of barrel-of-beer bull session that front-line veterans of any war are likely to have when they get together.
Admittedly, the bull session takes on some luster because the veterans held the rank of generals: James Carville, who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, and Mary Matalin, deputy manager of George Bush’s campaign.
Of the two, Carville is the most interesting, perhaps because the man from Carville, La. (general store and post office), is so different from the man from Hope, Ark. While Clinton is concerned about his hair-do and image, Carville (mostly bald) makes little effort to hide his rough edges. Except that he lacks bigotry, he seems a throwback to Dixie’s more colorful political past.
No Rhodes scholar, this fellow; no political protege; no handsome dude (one unkind Republican described Carville as looking “like a fish that’s swum too close to a nuclear reactor”). After 565 hours of failing grades, Carville was kicked out of Louisiana State University. He served two undistinguished years as a desk-bound Marine; went back to LSU and limped through to a law degree; failed at the profession, became a political consultant but didn’t manage a winning statewide race until he was 42.
But in the late 1980s his luck made a dramatic turnaround, and in 1991 he became a very hot item among political consultants when he took Harris Wofford from a 47-point deficit in the polls to beat Richard Thornburgh, George Bush’s attorney general, for one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seats. Many then bid for Carville’s service’s but Clinton got him.
Carville and Matalin were already lovers when the campaign began. But knowing their colleagues might suspect them of trading secrets if they had much to do with each other, they cooled it for the duration. Consequently the cliche-addicted press never tired of portraying them as Romeo and Juliet, with the deadly rivalry of the Montagues (Democrats) and Capulets (Republicans) threatening to ruin their romance.
The publishers of this book continue to exploit that angle, of course, but Matalin, to her credit, says that by the end of the campaign she was “plenty damn sick” of the R&J; stories.
So am I, though I’ll admit some passing interest in the romance, mainly because of what seems to be Matalin’s neurotic love-hate attitude toward her sweetie. When she learned that Carville was going to handle Clinton’s campaign, she threw up; when the election was over her first remarks to Carville (whom she would marry ere long) were, “I cannot believe you could live on this earth and know that you were responsible for electing a slime, a scum, a philandering, pot-smoking, draft-dodging pig of a man. . . . You make me sick. I hate your guts.”
As you see--and as she demonstrates these days on her TV talk show, “Equal Time”--Matalin is given to outbursts of strong judgments. There is, for example, a refrain running through the book of her hatred of John Sununu, who “had the political acumen of a doorknob.” But she saves most of her virulence for Democrats. Here she reflects the passion of a convert. Matalin used to be a pot-smoking (she inhaled), brassiere-less, South Chicago hippie Democrat who voted for Jimmy Carter. In college she got Republican religion, and now her heroes are folks like the late GOP hit-man Lee Atwater (“one of the most wonderful people the world has known”) and the right-wing blabbermouth Rush Limbaugh, whose voice, she admits, has the power to make her palms sweat. She’s the kind of true believer who says, “We have worked with the religious right for years. The last thing they are is hateful and intolerant.”
“All’s Fair” will have its widest appeal among political junkies who keep hoping for blood and who enjoy even the minutiae of partisan attacks and counter-attacks, of propaganda duels and psychological one-upmanship. Matalin is obviously talented at all of the above, but too much of her stuff comes across as “cheap, whiny political rhetoric” (Carville’s description) emanating from “a sort of Miss Know-It-All” (her own description). I finally got to the point that when it was her turn to speak again (the format is that of alternating voices: Carville, then Matalin, on and on) I begrudged the space she took from him.
A documentary film about the Clinton campaign, called “The War Room,” was nominated for an Academy Award last year, but for once the written word is superior to pictures. If you want to get a feeling for the multilayered emotion and semi-organized pandemonium that rocked around the clock at headquarters in Little Rock--the endless chatter, the running and yelling, the scheming, the joking, the frustration, the anger (including what workers called Clinton’s “Standard Morning Outburst”)--go immediately to Chapter 14, also titled “The War Room.”
Carville and Matalin are alike in some respects. Campaigns make them vicious. “When I’m running a campaign,” Carville says, “I always say I want the people I’m running against to catch the clap and die.” Matalin: “In every campaign . . . you’re totally myopically fixated on destroying the enemy.”
Since the press rarely performs as they want, they agree that it is shallow, prone to snap judgments and infuriatingly hardheaded. Carville speaks for them both when he says: “Something happens and three minutes after the event (the reporters) all talk to each other and decide ‘This is the story.’ . . . Once the collective mind is made up, it will not change. . . . History gets created in about three minutes. Don’t miss it. If you get there late, you’re dead.” The scenes in “All’s Fair” of the spinners in action after the Bush-Perot-Clinton debates are enough to prove the truth in the old saying that nobody should watch sausage or politics being made.
For these two, political campaigns are extraordinarily emotional. A lot of these pages are wet. Carville, clearly a world-class weeper, wept often. He says he sobbed for hours, “drained, weeping piteously, I was just so scared” before Clinton went on “60 Minutes” to explain his love life. When the taping was over, Carville rushed sobbing into Clinton’s arms “and he held me.”
When things are going just right, says Carville, the result can be an ego trip that is “very sexual. It’s very gratifying, it’s very intense. it builds up to a climax, if you will. And once you get that feeling, there’s nothing that can match it. . . . It’s fun playing the game, it’s fun being in the battle. Everyone in the country is watching this one event, say a presidential debate, and, hey, man, you’re playing in it. Ninety-three million people worldwide watching, reporters from all over the world sitting there covering it, and you know what the guys on stage are getting ready to say. Sometimes I’d just sit there and say, ‘Damn. Here’s James Carville of Carville, Louisiana . . . in the middle of the biggest goddamn event on the planet Earth . . . and I know everything. Ain’t this fun.’ ”
But there are also plenty of moments of panic and blunder. One of the hardest jobs is to make a candidate say what he is supposed to say and not get in trouble by ad-libbing. Carville’s tricksters started planting a man dressed as a chicken at Bush rallies. The man carried a sign saying “Chicken George,” meaning Bush was afraid to debate. Instead of ignoring the stooge, as Matalin and others asked him to do, Bush continued talking to it, explaining to his frustrated managers, “I like the chicken.”
Carville had similar troubles. Campaign strategy was to have Clinton talk almost entirely about three things: change, the economy and health care. But sometimes, to Carville’s horror, Clinton would criticize Bush’s character--a topic that made Clinton extremely vulnerable to counterattack.
Sometimes nothing seems to go right. Matalin admits Bush’s campaign managers lost control of the GOP convention after the opening night and that “we had a tin ear” and didn’t realize the sour impact Pat Buchanan’s mean-spirited speech would have on the party’s reputation.
How does the winning campaign manager profit? Well, aside from the $15,000 to $20,000 per lecture Carville can now demand, plus a king’s ransom in consulting fees, plus his share of the nearly $1 million he and Matalin reportedly received for putting their names on this book, he has some good memories.
The best goes back to the time when Hillary was not very popular with the public. Carville’s crew had just received the result of a dial group--that is, a group of people watching a video with their hands on a dial; they turn the dial up if they see or hear something they like, down if they don’t. When Hillary appeared on the screen, Carville recalls, “the dials just plunged. All of them. I mean they dropped into a trench. Clinton looked at the chasm line and said, ‘You know, they just don’t like her hair.’
“I dove under the coffee table. If I caught somebody out of the corner of my eye I was gonna die laughing. No one could talk, no one could even make eye contact. There was this stifled silence. I stayed under that table, pretending to tie my shoe. No way was I standing up. Finally Clinton left the room.
“You know how you laugh so hard you’re scared you’re not going to catch your breath? People were collapsing.
“ ‘They don’t like her hair!’
“This was a man who desperately loved his wife. He could not deal with the fact that, at the time, Hillary was unpopular. Couldn’t deal with it? He couldn’t see it! If someone asked me one moment to remember from the campaign, it would have been ‘They don’t like her hair.’ ”
Clinton’s blind loyalty and affection supplies the note of softness that this tale of unrelenting combativeness needs for relief. It’s the kind of softness the absence of which in the Carville-Matalin affair makes one uneasy. Not until the last line in the book do we finally get the feeling this affair may be real. Opening the door of Matalin’s apartment, Carville calls out: “Honey, I’m home.”
Honey? After nearly 500 pages, it’s about time.