James Carville tells how he became an election strategy guru, more in new documentary

Here’s a surprising fact: Celebrated Democratic strategist James Carville didn’t win his first political race until he was 42.

Until then, Carville had mostly lived in Baton Rouge, where he practiced law, worked for then-Mayor Pat Screen and advised several campaigns — and wasn’t terribly successful at any of those pursuits.

But perhaps being a late bloomer ultimately was to his benefit. While most of his political contemporaries are retired or dead, Carville’s on-the-money analysis and high-octane comments remain in high demand as he turned 80 on Oct. 25.

So much so that CNN Films has just begun broadcasting a 98-minute documentary that will receive a special invitation-only premiere in New Orleans at the Prytania Theater on Tuesday night.

Looking back on his early career disappointments, Carville joked in an interview, “For every 40-year-old who hasn’t found your place yet, I’m your guy.”

Asked about the documentary, he added, “I don’t deserve this award, but I don’t deserve arthritis either.” He credited the late comedian Jack Benny with the line.

'Experience James Carville'

Titled “Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid,” the documentary highlights his early failures, his abundant later successes and his unique and durable marriage with Mary Matalin, who worked for President George H.W. Bush and later for Vice President Dick Cheney and is as sharp-tongued about Democrats as Carville is about Republicans.?

The documentary is aimed at a national audience. After all, Carville has been famous since the 1992 presidential election when he captained Bill Clinton’s war room in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the afterglow of Clinton’s triumph, Carville acquired his renowned sobriquet, the Ragin’ Cajun, and won acclaim for creating what has become the single most enduring message of any recent political campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

“You’re not hiring James Carville. You’re going to experience James Carville,” Donna Brazile, a Kenner native who twice chaired the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview.

The documentary will have special resonance in Louisiana because Carville’s over-the-top personality so thoroughly represents the exotic nature of the bayou state and because the documentary showcases New Orleans, where he and Matalin have lived since 2008.

“This is a sign of an advanced civilization,” he says at one point as a camera captures him biting into a beignet at Luzianne Cafe in the Warehouse District.

Geaux Tigers

The documentary also shows Carville’s ever-present attachment to LSU. He’s practically always seen wearing a baseball hat, a purple and gold shirt or socks with the university’s logo.

In the interview, Carville noted that he graduated from LSU as an undergraduate and from the law school, he taught there and some two dozen family members studied there, including both of his daughters.

“It’s so ingrained in the culture of our family,” Carville said.

He was born Chester James Carville Jr., the oldest of eight children, and is indeed Cajun thanks to his mother, who was known as Miz Nippy. She insisted that he go by James, not Jim, Jimmy or Jr. No one questioned Miz Nippy.

Carville describes her as a great salesperson and says she taught him a key maxim: “If you’re not willing to sell, you’re not willing to win.”

He hails from Carville, a speck of a place on the Mississippi River in Iberville Parish. The village took the name of his grandfather, who was the local postmaster, in 1909.

Carville was best known for housing some 400 patients afflicted with Hansen’s disease, known at the time as leprosy.

The documentary accompanied him on a visit to the leprosarium, where he played softball as a boy with the patients and which is now a school for wayward teenagers.

An early, tough start

In 1984, Carville seemed to have won his big break by getting the assignment to move to Texas and manage the Senate campaign of a promising Democrat named Lloyd Doggett. But in a year where President Ronald Reagan cruised to reelection, Doggett was crushed.

Carville returned to Baton Rouge, facing a dim future. In 1986, he was invited to interview to manage the campaign of Bob Casey to be governor of Pennsylvania. Casey had already run three times and lost.

On the documentary, Carville relates that he asked the Casey campaign to buy the airplane ticket and send it to him. The campaign staffer said not to worry, they would reimburse him for the expense.

Carville: “I said, ‘You don’t understand. I don’t have the money to get a ticket. You have to send me the money to get the ticket to go to Philadelphia.’”

Casey won.

Thanks to the victory, he said on the documentary, “I was thinking: I don’t have to go back to Baton Rouge and beg people for a way to make a living.”

Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! Carville won more four campaigns in four different states. Then Bill and Hillary Clinton called him.

Carville’s achievements don’t surprise Roy Fletcher, a political consultant in Baton Rouge who worked with Carville on Louisiana races in the early 1980s and on Doggett’s campaign.

“People did not see his talent and let his persona get in the way,” said Fletcher, referring to Carville’s hell-raising reputation. “He knew what was important in a political campaign and how to discard bulls***. That’s extremely important. It keeps the campaign disciplined to a message.”

Fletcher identified one other factor in Carville’s success: “What he never struggled with publicly was confidence. He knew what he knew, and he just got better and better.”

'Talk about politics and disagree'

Mary Matalin certainly played a role in that.

He had to be on his game to keep up with her verbal assaults against Clinton, at a time when they were living together.

Matalin gleefully called Clinton “a philandering, pot-smoking, draft dodger.”

Political pundits later tried to figure out how the country’s best-known bipartisan couple made it work.

“We come from a different era where you could talk about politics and disagree,” Matalin explains at one point during the documentary.

Apparently, their most difficult time came when Matalin was working for Cheney, who with President George W. Bush launched the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 over what turned out to be a false pretense, Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Carville, who served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War but didn’t see combat, profoundly opposed the Iraq war and stopped talking to Matalin for a time.

“At least it wasn’t over the toothpaste cap,” Carville is seen saying before adding, “At some point, you move on. We had to stop fighting. It wasn’t going to change anything.”

A stance in the election

In 2023, Carville emerged as perhaps the loudest voice calling on President Joe Biden to step aside rather than seek reelection this year. Biden stubbornly refused to do so until his disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump in June.

“I’m getting more attention, more requests than ever before,” Carville said in an interview immediately afterward. “It was a lot before, and it’s a lot more now.”

He believes that Vice President Kamala Harris will defeat Trump.

During the final stretch of the campaign, Carville is busy raising money for Democrats, trashing Trump during interviews and attending film festivals screening the documentary.

It will soon be available for wide release on a streaming service.

Carville hopes the documentary will inspire young people to get into politics with the goal of electing candidates who will make life better for others.

“We might succeed,” he said during the interview.