Is Mary Just Too Contrary for GOP?

Mary Matalin may have set some sort of record by resigning from a presidential campaign before she was actually hired--and then possibly being rehired, this time quietly.

Matalin’s “major strategic” role with Sen. Bob Dole’s campaign hadn’t even been finalized last week before her bosses at CNBC announced that she would stop co-hosting the network’s “Equal Time” to volunteer for the Republicans. Over at Dole’s Washington headquarters workers were apparently stunned that this all became public even before it was decided exactly what role Matalin would play.

Meantime, Beltway insiders, media gossips and political connoisseurs inhaled the news. The conservative-leaning Washington Times led off with a report of GOP state chairmen trashing Matalin as a symbol of what went wrong in 1992: They didn’t want the same woman whose affair with Clinton advisor James Carville became a distracting sideshow that begat a bestseller and a movie on the team this go-around. Moreover, they didn’t want someone so closely associated with Bush’s defeat in the spotlight in 1996.

The feminist patrol was not happy by these candid grunts from Republican sexists. Not only had she married Carville since 1992, they had had a baby in June. Even George Bush spoke out publicly in her defense. And, it was noted by several Matalin supporters, she wouldn’t have been the only Bush advisor working for Dole: several men, including Rich Bond and Don Sipple, have already been hired without an uproar.

But by week’s end Matalin took herself off the Dole team, saying she didn’t want to be “an instant distraction.”

The candidate seemed both taken aback by the fracas yet friendly.

“Well, I didn’t make that selection,” Dole told reporters during a campaign stop in Dallas last week. “Mary Matalin is very fine, she’s a good friend of mine, she’ll do a good job. We’re going to win the election and, you know, she wants to be a volunteer so she’s going to be very helpful.”

Asked if he was bothered because Carville worked for Clinton, Dole smiled and said, “He has to work somewhere, I guess, or else he’d be unemployed.”

But his aides back in Washington didn’t fall over themselves to keep her.

“I’m not shooting my way into any campaign,” Matalin said in an interview this week. “I’ve been talking with these guys for a long time and I’m still going to work for them when this goes away.”

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A closer look at the Republican complaints about Matalin reveals that this dust-up was perhaps about a subtler dissatisfaction with Dole’s Washington operation as much as about “Mrs. Carville,” as one GOP chairman referred to her.

GOP state chairmen Tom Slade of Florida and Patrick McSweeney of Virginia each stood by their initial complaints in the press that Matalin’s marriage to Carville created a murky perception about her loyalty that they just didn’t want to put up with again.

“She’s not just someone who worked on the losing Bush campaign but someone who was working with the enemy at the time,” McSweeney said. “I didn’t want to accuse her of that but perception is reality in politics.”

Slade said that “hardly a day went by” when he was raising money for Bush in 1992 that some Florida donor or voter didn’t grouse about the Matalin’s much-publicized love affair with Clinton’s attack dog Carville.

“I told Mary when she called this week to find out if I was mad at her that I had nothing against her personally,” Slade said. “It’s that son of a bitch she’s married to.”

Although neither Slade nor McSweeney could produce any hard evidence that either Matalin or Carville had violated a confidence or were disloyal to their competing candidates in 1992, the Republicans stood by the notion that the appearance of conflict was enough to disqualify her.

“They’re so high profile and from such opposite ends of the world philosophically,” Slade said. “People out there just don’t buy that they can keep their opinions and jobs separate from their life together. And so there is a limitation that the relationship places on their freedom to go ply their trade.”

(Apparently only in Republican circles. Even though Carville is set to work for Clinton, the Democrats seem inured to the couple’s Tracy / Hepburn act. Nobody even blinked over at Clinton’s reelection headquarters when news leaked about Matalin’s role with Dole, according to an aide. Then again, as the Republicans point out: Carville helped Clinton win in 1992 while Matalin’s candidate lost.)

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But after balking about the marriage, both Slade and McSweeney went off on a different tangent about their problems with Dole’s operation in general.

Said McSweeney: “People are panicky that the challenger is just not making the right moves right away. Matalin is just one case in point.”

Said Slade: “Bob Dole should be operating a different role than in past campaigns. He’s the quarterback. His values and his past are what we need to sell. We don’t need big visibility people like Matalin.”

Tom Pauken, the Texas GOP state chairman, who didn’t weigh in initially, expressed similar concern that Dole’s advisors in Washington were getting away from an “issue-driven campaign as opposed to a personality one come November.”

“The Matalin hiring and departure took on some other baggage of increasing aggravation in the field and with the way D.C. experts do things,” said Pauken, adding: “The experts are letting Democrats and Clinton frame the debate. We’re only playing defensive football and not addressing issues.”

Pauken also said he thought it was more important for the D.C. experts to focus on bringing out Dole’s many strengths rather “than have superstars around who get a lot of attention.”

Matalin bristled at the idea that she was some kind of celebrity who might overshadow the candidate.

“I’m a star because I have a cable TV show? Because I can put two sentences together? I don’t even do all the shows anymore. . . . I just do ‘Meet the Press’ because you get more than a sound bite.”

But there’s a little more to her fame than that. Not only was the Carville / Matalin wedding covered in People magazine and not only did they write a bestseller together, their relationship inspired a thinly veiled B-movie “Speechless”; both have become major fee-earners on the lecture circuit; and together they are poster children in glossy magazine stories about modern marriage for Mr. and Mrs. Professional Conflict.

All that, however, should not disqualify her, Matalin insists, or supersede her 20 years of political experience including work on five GOP presidential campaigns.

“Nobody from Washington is telling the state chairman how to run things in their states,” she said. “But somebody for Dole has to be in the major media markets to go blow for blow with the demagogue Democrats. If [state chairmen] want to do mud wrestling with George Snuffleupagus, let them do it. It’s not like fun, you know.”

Matalin, who also hosts a 3-hour radio show on CBS, said she knows by this summer’s GOP convention in San Diego she’ll more be involved in the campaign. And Dole, she said, called Tuesday to make sure she’d be around to help.

“He said to me, ‘You’re coming back, you’re doing it,’ ” Matalin said. “I don’t need a title or a job description. I’ll be a senior advisor like everyone else. I didn’t walk away. There’s another way, many other ways I can help.”