Love & War

by James Carville

  “It’s just a polite thing. Some people like the option.”

  “None of my people.”

  “Point taken. If you still don’t like it in a week, out she goes. Promise.”

  Then a week later—wait for it—we have the exact same conversation.

  But here’s the kicker. I overheard James at our last party telling one of his people, “This is for puttin’ your drink on. Go ahead! Put your drink down! Nobody gonna take it. Mary got it on sale. It’ll make her happy.”

  So who wouldn’t want to marry that guy three times?

  • • •

  The first time we got married was in 1993, in glorious beautiful New Orleans, a place we both agreed upon and loved. It was a bipartisan extravaganza, but there were no political confrontations because most of the guests couldn’t figure out if it was a wedding or hootenanny. As Louisiana/Carville tradition dictates, weddings are celebrations to be remembered. Except the celebration aspect often works at cross-purposes with the remembering part.

  James’s sister Pat attended her husband’s aunt’s funeral the morning after the reception and announced upon her return to the day-after lunch (which was just an uninterrupted extension of the night before), “Sparky’s aunt looked better than me.” And no one disagreed.

  In 2003, the year I’d left the White House, on our tenth anniversary, we did marriage number two. What started out as a small quiet renewal of our vows turned into a rockin’ near repeat of 1993. The best part was, unlike our first wedding, which I labored over for months, I had nothing to do with this one. In fact, I didn’t even know about this one. James pulled it off—the only good surprise of my life (I don’t like surprises)—somehow assembling all my cherished loved ones from my college roommate to my whole family. I was so overwhelmed by James’s thoughtfulness (and, to tell the truth, his organizational skills, which heretofore had not been in evidence) that much of that great day at our farm is a blur, though I distinctly remember Tucker Carlson and my usually civilized father raucously belting out show tunes at the piano.

  Our best buds and the girls’ godparents, Maria Cino and Paul Begala, read the beautiful and funny tributes they’d composed, and Matty “performed” the ceremony, witnessed by her “assistant,” Emerson, each outfitted in matching black velvet girl gowns. I wore my Vera Wang pencil gown from wedding number one, which, to my mind, was as great an accomplishment as making it through ten years and two kids.

  Much merriment ensued, most of which is unrecountable to protect the innocent, but I cried, I laughed, and whatever James was trying to pull off with this lovely stunt certainly worked. No man would have gone to that much trouble if he didn’t mean it, I had to figure. Any lingering residue of the last couple of not-so-blissful years evaporated.

  And guess what? We got married another time. At this point, you are thinking, What is wrong with these lunatics? or Can’t they can’t come up with another party theme?

  We weren’t trying to do a “third time’s the charm” thing; we were getting truly married. During my RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) work toward my conversion to Catholicism in 2010, my wonderful by-the-book priest, Monsignor Nalty, informed me my marriage of seventeen years was not valid. My cradle Catholic nonhusband and I had been living in sin. I didn’t bother asking what this made our daughters.

  So, on Holy Saturday, in the beautiful New Orleans St. Stephen’s candlelit church, the day before Easter, along with being received into the Church, James and I received the sacrament of marriage.

  It was the only quiet marriage of the three, but by far the most memorable.

  We were a bit sorry that we couldn’t take our vows at the church where James’s grandparents were married in New Orleans, which we believed was Mater Dolorosa.

  JAMES

  MARY HAD BEEN MARRIED BEFORE. So when we got married in New Orleans back in 1993, we didn’t bother trying to get hitched in the Catholic Church, which can be pretty stingy about such things. Instead, we got married by the chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court inside the Royal Orleans hotel. Married was married in my book.

  But after we moved back in 2008, Mary got very involved in the Catholic Church. She started taking religious instruction. She became a regular fixture at Masses, much more than I ever was. She decided she wanted to convert to Catholicism.

  We figured maybe we ought to have a proper church wedding—renew our vows, reaffirm our commitment to our new city, have a priest bless this crazy union of ours.

  So, after the Easter Vigil Mass that Saturday evening in April 2010, we got married all over again at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church on Napoleon Avenue. Some of my sisters and cousins came down, along with a few friends, but it was a low-key ceremony. We said our vows, grabbed a bite to eat and came on home.

  About two days later, I get a call from one of my sisters, who’s pretty dramatic anyway, and she says, “My God, you’re not going to believe this.” She’d been going through some old papers, and she found our grandparents’ marriage certificate. “They were married in April of 1910, at St. Stephen’s,” she said.

  My jaw dropped. Without having the slightest clue, we had gotten married—or remarried, I suppose—in the same church, at the same altar, one hundred years to the month after my grandparents. Unbelievable.

  I knew that my grandmother, Pearl Slangerup (who everyone called Lala), had grown up in the Carrollton neighborhood of New Orleans, not too far from Palmer Park. I’d always assumed she and my grandfather, Louis Arthur Carville (known as Pa), got married at Mater Dolorosa, the Catholic church right around the corner from her house. St. Stephen’s was several miles away.

  I don’t know how to explain exactly what it meant that Mary and I came along a century later and said our vows at that same altar. But I know it sent shivers down our spines, and I know it reminded me once again just how friggin’ deep my roots run here.

  MARY

  FOR MY BIRTHDAY the year of Marriage Three, Monsignor Nalty presented me with a work of his own handicraft, among my most cherished gifts of all time. He mounted and framed our marriage certificate side by side with James’s grandparent’s. Before I even had a chance to hang Monsignor’s masterpiece, James absconded with it and hung it prominently in his office! Events such as these make me say almost every day now, “There are no coincidences.”

  JAMES

  IN MY OFFICE AT HOME, I now have two framed marriage certificates hanging side by side, both from St. Stephen’s Catholic Church.

  Louis Arthur Carville & Pearl Slangerup, April 1910.

  James Carville & Mary Matalin, April 2010.

  9.

  Changes in Washington, and What Never Does

  JAMES

  I READ MARK LEIBOVICH’S BOOK, This Town, which focuses on what an incestuous, opportunistic place official Washington can be. It’s a fair critique, and probably a book that needed to be written.

  But many of the people he focuses on aren’t the people who are really at the center of what’s wrong with Washington. The Bob Barnetts and Tammy Haddads and Mike Allens might contribute to the inbred, superficial nature of Washington, but they aren’t harming the country.

  The real obstructionists, the people doing the real harm, are the ones whose names never show up in the society pages. They’re the lobbyists and other deal makers who are helping to write bad legislation that helps the rich get richer or who are helping to kill efforts that might hurt the bottom line of corporate America while actually helping normal people. So much of it comes down to the god-awful amount of money that is spent by special interests in Washington.

  I don’t know who the top three lobbyists are at the American Petroleum Institute. Or the top three lobbyists at the Financial Services Roundtable. I don’t necessarily know who is in the room when they’re writing stuff alongside congressional staffers or when they’re meeting with people at various government agenci
es. And that’s the point. These are the people who are actually running the country.

  MARY

  THE POLITICAL CLICHÉ “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” has survived the decades for good reason, and the acts of betrayal and disappointment in Washington are numerous, notorious and even evil. These make for good stories, juicy takedowns in the media, and perpetuate an image that Washington largely deserves (and which I’ve discussed at length, maybe too much, in the why-the-hell-did-we-want-to-move explanation earlier in the book). But what you don’t hear—almost ever—are that political friends can be among the most generous and loyal. These consistent (and not random) acts of kindness rarely get remarked upon or are lost in the quagmire of negativity.

  Sometimes politicos will even request that you not publicly share some generous act of theirs—for fear it may tarnish the badass reputation they are trying so diligently to cultivate and nurture. Another reason they may not want selflessness and service to others to be made publicly known is that it’s so easy for that to look self-promotional and personally aggrandizing.

  There is no one who appears by name in this book who hasn’t been the giver of thoughtful gifts, kindnesses and support in times of need, usually unsolicited. And there are plenty more unnamed.

  You don’t hear or read about the private visits to sick or depressed friends, or the support to the families of lost colleagues or all-night vigils with colleagues in crisis for whatever reason. You don’t hear about the job and career help, food and board when friends are down and out, or loans exchanged during the many campaign droughts, which no one ever expects will be repaid and would be offended if they were. This sort of thing happens interparty, intraparty, cross party and even between the adversarial politico and media types. These are the gestures, the ties, the acts of true friendship between people that you hear least about—and that keep the whole crazy culture glued together.

  And while I am a fan of Mark Leibovich personally and professionally, and confess to being as titillated as everyone else with his takedowns, one of the things I didn’t like about This Town is how it makes all kindness and true connection between Washington friends look suspect—as if there were no such thing. This Town is an extraordinarily insightful presentation of the ugly side of that town, but the place is not as completely one-dimensional as you might have been led to believe. I am pretty sure Mark knows this, because he is a genuinely good guy and understands the sometimes unattractive accommodations necessitated by the rough-and-tumble of politics. People enter public service and politics for many reasons—and quite a lot of them are good. And the friendships created in D.C. are not all transactional. They can be real, and true and of pure motive.

  JAMES

  STARTING OUT, most people who run for president or Congress have a well-placed contempt for Washington and its ways. It doesn’t really matter if you’re on the right or the left. You run for office because you have a grievance or a long list of grievances that probably are pretty well founded.

  That clearly was true with George W. Bush and Barack Obama. They never really liked Washington. They never really embraced it. But by the same token, they were both defeated by Washington in a lot of ways. They both got some of the things they wanted done. Bush got his tax cuts. Obama got health care. But they also both encountered massive opposition to any meaningful change.

  The real distinction between Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign was not on the issues. If you took any ten issues, they basically agreed on at least nine of them. The main difference was the argument each made for getting elected. Hillary’s message was “I’ve been around this place. I know it. I can work the system and cut through a lot of the crap. Maybe I’m not all warm and fuzzy, but I’m the kind of person you need in there to deal with tough things.” Obama’s message was “I’m going to transcend Washington. I’m going to change the culture of Washington.” So you had this classic confrontation between somebody who says, “I can work within the system to get things done,” and somebody who says, “I can fly above the system. I can alter it.”

  If I heard this two times, I must have heard it a thousand times. Even good friends of mine would say, “James, I’m a Democrat. I like Bill Clinton. I was for him both times. I think Hillary’s great. But we’re not going to get anything done if she’s elected because they’re just going to drag up the same old fights. Obama is going to be fresh, and he’s going to be able to work with people and is not going to have all of that baggage.” And I was like: Do you really believe that shit? Am I really hearing this from you? They’d say, “We just have to turn the page.”

  Smart, well-meaning, patriotic people would say that stuff, and it was like you were an asshole if you argued with them. You wanted to say: How exactly is this guy going to come here and change anything? You think that all these Republicans are going to change? You think these lobbyists and all the other interests are going to stop fighting you tooth and nail? You think groups like the NRA are going to change one whit?

  It became pretty clear right after Obama got into office that he wasn’t going to change shit, and neither is anybody else. Not because of the individual. Not because Obama was dishonest about it or that he didn’t really think that he could. I think he and the people around him really thought they could change Washington and genuinely wanted to, but when they realized that wasn’t going to happen, they failed to engage it on its own terms.

  I think it was naïveté. You get into office and you realize the sheer number and the sheer strength of all the barriers that are in place. Congress is a real force. You can’t pass anything unless you go through this committee chairman or that Speaker of the House. And that same guy—because the place is basically run by special-interest groups—is really cautious about not pissing off the lobbyists he’s going to go make a gazillion dollars for when he gets out of office. The incentives are screwed up in all kinds of ways, but that’s the reality that a president has to confront. It’s a fact of life.

  Listen, I sympathize with Obama. He’s saved the auto industry. He’s gotten us out of these cockamamie wars. He killed bin Laden. And still, total and utter gridlock. He can’t get any legislation passed. Virtually none of his appointments get confirmed. A lot of people on Capitol Hill exist solely to see him fail. But that’s also a fact of life as president.

  I remember back in the spring of 1993, when Clinton had just taken office and was trying to get an economic stimulus package through Congress, and it was kind of languishing in partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill. I remember Cokie Roberts going on air one day and being asked if Bill Clinton could end “business as usual” in Washington. She said something along the lines of “There’s only one way that business is conducted in Washington, and that is ‘as usual.’”

  I remember thinking, Goddamn. She’s exactly right. Because she’d seen it, again and again and again.

  It’s sad. It’s depressing. But it’s true. On some level, every president has tried. They come into office, and they’re going to show Washington how to operate, and it lasts all of about a day. The difference is, unlike Bush or Obama, Bill Clinton adapted to it. He took the time to learn the system and try to game it.

  I do believe that you can effectuate change. When Bill Clinton left Washington, you could hardly think of something in the country that wasn’t better in January of 2001 than it was in January of 1993. But the one thing he didn’t do was change the culture of Washington. He dealt with the culture the way it was. Sometimes you can game it, sometimes you can negotiate with it, sometimes you can do an end run around it.

  But you cannot change it.

  MARY

  IN ALL’S FAIR, I breathlessly recounted how cutting-edge the 1992 campaign was, with our amazing “blast” fax machine that could reach one hundred supporters simultaneously. The campaign’s one twenty-pound cell phone was another wonder of the modern age, and which James likes to remember as being bigger t
han George Stephanopoulos (inarguably the most handsome man in modern politics, which was a fundamental change at the time).

  Twenty years later, nothing has changed. It is another universally unquestioned scripture of political gospel that Information Age technology has been a game changer when, in truth, technology has only made the game faster and more expensive.

  Sure, an exponentially greater number of activists can scream and screech 24/7, but they are bellowing about the same stuff, if a darker version. There is arguably more political disinformation than policy truth speeding through the vapors.

  The one thing that really did alter the political landscape, a truly transformative game changer, was ushered in by the most antiquated of twentieth-century information technologies: the radio.

  Before Rush Limbaugh, there was no conservative sound system. There were erudite magazines and a handful of unusually gifted political orators who could be informative and influential, but their reach was infinitesimal compared to El Rushbo’s.

  His example spawned legions of common-sense talkers and transformed both the radio industry and political broadcasting in general. His daily enlightenment—making the incomprehensible clear and exposing political posturing and fraud with brilliance and hilarity—informed and empowered a citizenry that would have otherwise lost their grip on reality. Not to mention their constitutional rights.

  Rush was my personal sanity ground zero in 1992. Almost single-handedly, he ushered in the first GOP House majority in half a century in 1994, and kept conservatives from mass suicide in 1996. He continues to inspire and move political mountains. I don’t know how it is possible, but he is even smarter and funnier and more fearless today than he was when he brought us conservatives back from the precipice of extinction and out of a political desert.