Love & War

by James Carville

  No technology, no computerized algorithms, no crowd sourcing, no microtargeting, no fleeting political flavor of the day could do or has done what this amazing American has to save this great country from the desperate aspirations of the loony left. And no one gives the far-left lunatics more gas pains. Day after day. Year after year.

  JAMES

  THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS really changed in recent years. It has moved decidedly and decisively to the right. It’s a different party from the one Bill Clinton faced. The Newt Gingriches who were involved in the Republican “revolution” back in the 1990s are nothing compared to these guys today.

  At every juncture, the party has moved further and further and further to the right. There’s no doubt about that. The transformation has picked up speed, if anything, in the last few years in Washington. The center of gravity has moved way off-kilter.

  I’ve used this analogy before, but it’s like Lester Maddox once famously said, “The problem with the Georgia prisons is the quality of the inmates. If we could just get some better inmates.”

  There seems to be this idea that if only Republicans had better statesmen, better leaders, everything would be fine. The problem is the people who vote in the Republican primaries. They’re not looking for a statesman. They don’t want to send somebody to Washington to transcend the partisan divide. Fifty-nine percent of the Republicans who say their party is going off on the wrong track think it’s not conservative enough. This idea that small-minded, dug-in, ideological, fanatical Republican politicians are leading the party down a bad path is not the whole story. No. Small-minded, ideological-driven Republican voters are doing it.

  Why can’t we have leaders like we used to? Well, why can’t we have voters like we used to?

  The Republicans were pretty intransigent under Gingrich, but there were still people willing to deal and to govern. They didn’t do too much dealing in ’95, and they didn’t really start dealing until they screwed up on the government shutdown and Clinton had the upper hand, and he basically got most everything that he wanted. But even Gingrich came to the realization that votes are votes and they didn’t have enough of them.

  Not now. The current Republicans in Congress have to be against anything the Democrats are trying to do. If they actually agreed with Obama on anything, they’d all lose in their next primary. You see it happen again and again and again. And there’s no evidence that they’re going to change. Take last fall’s government shutdown, for instance. They decided they would close down the federal government for the first time in seventeen years and furlough 800,000 public servants—for what? Because they simply didn’t like a law that tries to extend health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans. A law, by the way, that was passed by Congress, signed by the president and upheld by the Supreme Court. All three branches of government signed off on it, and the country reelected the president who championed it. But because a handful of Republicans decided they didn’t like it, they’d rather burn the whole house down.

  I think 80 percent of what’s wrong in the country is all contained in the Republican Party. I really do. And I don’t say that because I’m a Democrat. I wouldn’t be surprised if some average Republicans actually agree with me. The 1 percent is becoming more and more powerful economically and politically. I mean, they’re really running the country now, and that’s not a good thing.

  If you go back to the start of the century, conservatives have been massively wrong about almost everything. There’s something about the conservative mind that the more wrong they are, the harder they dig in. You can see it on the question of quantitative easing or the Obama stimulus package. You can see it on tax cuts and the deficit, on “global cooling” and any number of other issues.

  If you still argue that invading Iraq was a good idea, or that quantitative easing in a depressed economy is going to cause high interest rates or that cutting taxes for rich people helps Joe the Plumber, you’re beyond reason.

  For whatever reasons, conservatives these days also take great pride in never reading anything from liberal media outlets—or, for that matter, straightforward, down-the-middle media outlets. It’s part of their culture.

  If I bragged to one of my liberal friends that I’d never listened to Rush Limbaugh or watched Fox News, or that I never read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, that would not be cool. The first question would be “Aren’t you curious to see what they’re saying over there?” Similarly, if you were at a liberal or progressive party and someone said something like that, the natural response would be “What are you afraid of?” I’ll argue with certainty that liberals tend to read way more conservative literature than conservatives will ever read of liberal literature.

  They view it as some sort of weakness to be exposed to another viewpoint, like you’re going to be corrupted if you have to listen to other people’s views. I do have a theory on this. I believe conservatives view their principles as the “Truth.” There is a truth. They’ve figured it out. And it can’t be diluted or questioned or compromised. But their “truth” so often turns out to be false.

  Liberals are much more nuanced than that, sometimes painfully so. We can see six sides to the Pentagon. But that’s preferable to being so dogmatic that you wear blinders. Like John Maynard Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

  Progressives would say that there is one economic policy that you pursue at a given time in a business cycle, and a different approach under different circumstances. We’re more able to say when we’re wrong and evolve over time. We don’t view being inflexible and doctrinal as a virtue. For example, being soft on crime was not very smart. We pretty much abandoned that position. Busing was well-intentioned, but I’m not sure it was a very big success.

  Look, every country that I’ve ever worked in has some version of a traditionalist, government-skeptical, pro-business, mercantilist, nationalistic party. And, honestly, that’s not an unattractive kind of thing to rally around. Can you have too many taxes? Sure. Can there be too much regulation? Of course. Some of it can be mind-bogglingly stupid. Should a party revere the country, its traditions, its past? Absolutely. Is it better for people to grow up in stable, two-parent families? Yes. Is there sort of a correlation between some of this and church attendance? Yeah, I think so. Is there reason to be skeptical of academics proposing radical change? Yes.

  But the stuff that they’re wrong about—and it’s an ever-growing list—they’re never able to admit. They are the party that can’t ever find the courage to say, “We screwed up.”

  • • •

  What certainly has changed over time is how politicians get themselves sent to Washington, especially those trying to become president. Campaigns change over time. That’s just the business. A lot of the basic principles remain, but the methods and the technology evolve.

  The night before Bill Clinton’s election in 1992—this was captured in the documentary The War Room—I gave a teary-eyed speech to a roomful of staffers and told them that we had changed the way campaigns are run. “Used to be, there was a hierarchy,” I said that night. “If you were on one floor, you didn’t go to another floor. If you were somewhere on an organizational chart, there was no room for you [anywhere else]. Everybody was compartmentalized.”

  I was proud then of how we had shaken up the old way people did things. I’m even more proud of it now because I see how that approach has endured over the years. I hope that part of my legacy in politics will be that I had the wisdom to recognize that within a political campaign, as within almost any organization, the very smartest and best ideas should rise to the top, not just the ideas of certain “important” people.

  From the time I began working on campaigns, long before Clinton came along, I had one hallmark: I never wanted an office. Mainly, it was because I didn’t want to have meetings. They’re usually a waste of time. They’re unproductive. So I always had my desk out in the open.
If you were on the campaign and you wanted to ask me something, you could come over and ask me.

  My theory always was, if you’re part of a campaign, whether you’re the deputy campaign manager or the guy opening the mail, I’m going to tell you exactly what’s going on because what we do here is not a secret. We’re actually in the business of disseminating information. It’s not supposed to be secret. I’ll tell you what our polls are showing; I’ll tell you how I think we’re doing. And if you have something to say to me or an idea to pitch, come tell me. Anybody is welcome to listen in; anybody can have his voice heard. If I can’t trust the people in that room, then who can I trust?

  For so long, campaigns were run like big, lumbering corporations. There was a floor for the financial people, a floor for the strategists, a floor for the advance team. The real power might be concentrated on the sixth floor, but maybe you worked down on the fourth floor and your ideas never got heard. What bullshit. A campaign should not work like an insurance company. We really changed all that during the Clinton campaign. We flattened out the hierarchy and the infrastructure. And what we learned was that people can be trusted. You don’t need to hide things from people working for you. Also, a good idea can emanate from any direction. To pretend that only a few top people have all the knowledge in any organization is a failure of imagination and leadership.

  I’ve watched plenty of campaigns come and go since then. Some have taken that approach to heart more than others. Some have maybe even done better at it than we did. But they have all recognized the value of it on some level.

  MARY

  LIGHT-YEARS AGO IN terms of politics—in the 1980s and most of the 1990s—the media covering Washington really went crazy when they were called “liberal” or “conservative.” Those labels were the exclusive provinces of opinion columnists. Today, it seems almost quaint when you hear journalists protest accusations of partisanship. Some political reporters still make a big to-do about not voting at all, or they volunteer their independent leanings, or they give disproportionate coverage to “no-label” or any bipartisan policy or political effort that ends up, more often than not, producing an inconsequential impact.

  In truth, there actually are a handful of truly nonpartisan reporters, but it’s a dying breed.

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw a poll on the media that quantified what I already knew by living with them. Eighty-nine percent of journalists self-identified as liberal. I was surprised. Who were the 11 percent who confessed to not being liberal?

  As annoying as it is to the public, I much prefer today’s open partisanship of the media. Nothing produced more hair pulling, breast thumping and chain-smoking in GOP camps than reporters professing no bias while reporting like Democratic operatives. Now at least, the Chris Matthews ilk just let their freak flags fly and I don’t have to pretend like they’re not crazy. It’s kind of irksome that conservative media keep trying to be fair and balanced. Do you ever see even a scintilla of fair and balanced reporting on MSNBC (with the possible exception of Joe Scarborough on some topics)?

  Anyway, the topic of “bias in the media” has been so hashed over, it’s too boring to even think about anymore. But what continues to make me wish I still chain-smoked is the unremitting double standard, how the media swarmed on the Dan Quayle “potatoe” incident or the glee with which it hashed over Sarah Palin’s geographic proximity to Russia. Yet, Barack Obama can repeatedly pronounce the “p” in Marine Corps—or redraw the map of the USA with South Carolina, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico—and he’s applauded for his brilliant insights.

  Maybe it’s not a double standard; maybe it’s just a reflection of the disintegrating state of our education system.

  The press will counter they put President and Hillary Clinton through their media meat grinder, but without the existence of some irresistible, salacious details, the Clintons wouldn’t have gotten any of the treatment Republicans expect as standard operating procedure.

  And in any event, the Clintons now enjoy a star treatment that you wouldn’t want to hold your breath waiting for Bush or Cheney to get. A variation on the theme is the media’s portraying Biden’s dufus-osity as the lovable John Belushi and Cheney as the demonic Darth Vader.

  Along with political bias, agenda bias is increasing at the same velocity. How often do you sit around the dinner table talking about reproductive rights or global warming, to pick just two recurring media all-time hits? And how much better would it be for your family, and the country, if equal attention was paid to public pension fund fraud or the irrefutable mandatory entitlement spending death spiral?

  The good thing is—and in all things, per my mother, there always is a silver lining—the bias got so blatant and obnoxious and detached from reality, it produced two tectonic shifts in political reportage. The public lost trust in the mainstream media while conservatives and other inhabitants of “Realville” (where Rush Limbaugh reigns as mayor) broke out of their own parallel universe.

  The advent of Information Age technology accelerated the public’s ability to get some real and true and relevant info. It is no longer completely impossible to get a grip on what’s really going on. And find some ideas about what to do about it. Or get connected to like-minded sane people. How is this so awful? It isn’t. It’s not clear our media environment is what he had in mind, but I hold with Thomas Jefferson’s “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”

  This new, almost-even playing field spawned a new generation of political and public information entrepreneurs. With Drudge and Rush blazing the trail, the route to practical truth quickly expanded. Now the Daily Caller, Redstate, NRO, Transom, Instapundit, and a plethora of online common-sense policy experts are giving normal people regular access to normal information, that is, info relevant to their daily lives and critical to preparing for their futures. They can now also rediscover our history, long lost to the revisions, distortions and/or denial by progressives (who truly believe they know best and are oh-so-smarter than you), from fearless patriots like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.

  For you liberals and lefty bloggers who live to demonize, can you identify one time, just one, when your rendition of a conservative utterance wasn’t taken out of context or flat-out fabricated?

  Have you ever found the covey of racist Tea “Baggers” that populates your ugly fantasy world?

  Have you ever considered for a nanosecond that the female, black, Hispanic, gay—or any other conservative Americans you artificially hyphenate—aren’t all sellout toadies?

  I will never forget in the mid-1980s being asked by a media maven if I had “ever met an evangelical.” She had the same tone you’d use if you were asking a person if they’d been exposed to the Ebola virus. You’d think that twenty years would be enough time to get over this kind of thing, but I was just as disgusted when a reporter in the first Obama midterm cycle asked, in the same creepy tone, if I had “ever met anyone from the Tea Party.”

  I’m sure these observations just reinforce the notion that I am hopelessly biased myself. So let me clarify my perspective: there are plenty of good people in journalism and bad people in political activism. There are fine Democrats and goofy Republicans. Just as there are good cops and bad cops; a handful of sick priests sprinkled among a legion of decent men of faith; hardworking public servants and trough-sucking government parasites; authentic discrimination fighters and money-grubbing victim hustlers; life-enhancing investors and Bernie Madoffs.

  Therein lies the essential beauty of conservatism: you are obliged to judge each person on individual merit. So rather than gripe about generic, generalized “ugly partisanship,” I prefer to expend my emotional outrage on individual jerks.

  JAMES

  WHAT DOESN’T CHANGE OFTEN enough is what happens when the election is over and the candidate is now the officeholder. What gets talked about most on the campaign trail seldom is
what gets talked about most in Washington.

  In short, Washington too often ignores the middle class. That’s way more true for Republicans, of course, but both parties bear a measure of guilt.

  During the 2012 election, like in almost any election, you heard a whole lot about the middle class. “I’m going to do this for the middle class; I’m going to do that for the middle class,” the candidates said. It’s all about the middle class.

  Except that as soon as the election’s over, what are the biggest issues that everybody talks about in Washington? Immigration, gay marriage, guns, NSA spying and on and on. I’m not saying they’re not important to society. I have a position on all those topics; almost everybody does. To a certain number of people, each of those issues is incredibly important. But to the great masses of people in the country, those issues are ancillary to their daily lives.

  Most people who have a gun don’t own a thirty-round clip with it. They’re law-abiding citizens who have no problem undergoing a background check. Most people are not directly impacted by gay marriage. They might have a gay cousin or a gay friend. I understand if you’re gay and you want to get married, it’s a huge deal—I’m totally with you. No one’s for that more than I am. But it doesn’t affect most people. Immigration? By and large, most Americans don’t spend their days mulling over our immigration policy. In a macro sense, immigration affects wages and employment, but that’s not what gets talked about when people discuss immigration.

  I’m not saying that all these issues aren’t significant, that they shouldn’t be written about and debated. What I’m saying is that if you live somewhere in the middle of Ohio, for example, you’re just not that affected by these things on a daily basis. These are not the topics that keep you up nights. So it’s no wonder the debate in Washington feels so completely disconnected.