James Carville is one of the few instantly recognizable political strategists. Carville, who turns 80 in October, has spent decades running campaigns (most famously Bill Clinton’s in 1992) and advising candidates while playing pundit on TV and himself in movies. More recently, he has warned his party about the perils of nominating President Joe Biden a second time. A new documentary, Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, which recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, chronicles his fight to get Biden off the ballot but also serves as a career retrospective for a Democratic fixture. I spoke with Carville about the coin-toss 2024 election, what Kamala Harris needs to do in Tuesday’s debate, and a missing sense of fun in politics.
You recently wrote a New York Times op-ed where you outlined three things Harris should do to beat Trump. One of them is “Break from President Biden on policy.” And she does seem to be separating herself from him a little bit, proposing a smaller tax hike on the rich and emphasizing cost-of-living stuff more. But these are pretty minor differences. Do you think it’s enough?
She’s going to need some more, but it doesn’t have to be anything major. There’s plenty of opportunities. But she can’t run as a continuation candidate, and that’s the point.
She’s been pretty vague, actually, on policy altogether, except for—
So what? To be honest with you, I think campaigns are not about specifics but about direction.
A good slogan will do the work of 20 policies.
Anything that you put out, somebody’s going to say, “Well, this is not totally workable, or you’re not going to get it off in Congress.” All truth. But there’s a lot of research that says you should pay attention to what candidates say in an election, because they generally get about 75 percent of it done. It might not be exactly the same proposal, but the best barometer of what a president will do has traditionally been to listen to the campaign stump speech. And there’s a lot of academic research to back that up.
And that makes you want them to say less?
I would say “direction,” okay? We’re going to travel west, but I can’t tell you if we’re heading 270 or 260 or 280. But generally, we’re going west. I don’t need a specific compass point.
Another thing you’ve pointed out that you think Harris should do is revise some of the more left-leaning views she took in 2019 and 2020, which I know you were critical of at the time. And she’s doing that. She’s saying, “I’m not going to ban fracking. I’m not going to do Medicare for All. I’m not going to ban plastic straws.” Which, personally, I was happy to hear.
I did a whole video on straws. I’m perfectly fine with paper straws.
I think they have about a 10 percent approval rating.
But if you look at my video — it’s on YouTube.
I’ll check it out.
I did exhaustive research on straws.
You’re the world’s leading expert.
Oh, yeah. I’m an expert on sucking.
Harris is sort of blanket disavowing her past positions. She’s saying, “All right, well, I’m not in favor of this, this, this, this, and this.”
You just say, “I’ve grown. I’ve learned a lot of things.” The truth of the matter is that, for some reason in 2020, people just kind of lost it. And it was all really — I don’t want to say dumb, but just not very smart stuff. And everybody has kind of dropped it. No one likes the word “woke” anymore, so I won’t use it. But the whole identity left — no one wants to talk about it anymore, for good reason. It was a giant mistake.
Biden was the one person who didn’t go that way.
Oh, you couldn’t explain it to him. He wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
Right, his 1940s lingo really came in handy there.
Yeah, it did. And that actually kind of helped him. I think it was bad political consultants, but I don’t know where people started taking this stuff seriously. And at its height, it was 15 percent of the Democratic Party, 8 percent of the country.
Obviously, there’s this hugely important debate coming up on Tuesday. You’ve emphasized that Harris could use her prosecutorial skills and her humor to draw Trump in to make him look like a clown, which shouldn’t be that hard to do. I was reading an interview you and your wife, Mary Matalin, did with Puck. You said you’d heard some secondhand information out of debate prep and that “I think they’re doing pretty good.” Can you elaborate any further on what you know?
I don’t want to get into specifics because I’ll lose my source, but I know some of the people in there picked the right people. From what I can tell, she has the right people doing the right things. And that gives me a lot of encouragement.
You’ve said that one of her big advantages right now is that people don’t really know her that well.
Correct.
They know Trump all too well, and they knew Biden very well, and that was what made you think that he was the wrong guy because their views weren’t moving on him.
Right, you’re not going to change anybody’s mind. I knew so many friends in the industry that do research and they would say, “James, they just can’t get past his age — it doesn’t make a shit what you say.” You’ll give them a positive statement about him, a negative statement about Trump, and both change one percent. They know, or they think they know, and probably they do, everything about Trump. It’s just name recognition. You can say, “Give me a word that describes him,” and people are not going to hesitate to give you a word. He’s sent by God, or he’s sent by the devil, or anything in between.
But with Harris, it’s not the same thing. People know who she is, but a lot of people don’t know what she is. There seems to be a pretty high number of people who say they could change their mind. And those are people that I think are for the most part not excited about voting for Trump but don’t know enough about her to say “I’m going to vote for her.” I hadn’t done a deep dive, but most of the numbers I see — there’s like 15 percent that say that they’re persuadable, which, in a country as divided as this, that’s a pretty good bit.
The debate is a big moment for her to win those people over. But doing media and doing interviews and getting out there is another way, and she hasn’t really been doing that. I know the press tends to make itself the story to some extent, and I don’t want to do that. But she’s only done one CNN interview.
So what do you want her to do? I mean, honestly, what is she supposed to do? Just say, “You know, I’m going to sit there for two hours”? I mean, she’s got plenty of time left. She had to put an entire campaign together, pick a vice-president, plan a convention, raise money, and then you got a bunch of: “Why don’t you talk to me? Come talk to me!” She’s doing a 90-minute debate. I’m sure she’s going to do stuff after that.
Okay, I hope so. I’m glad you don’t think it’s a problem.
If it continued, maybe it could be, but I think she’s going to do all of that. And anything you do is never enough. This is one thing I’ve found out about the press: It’s not satisfied. You can try as hard as you want. During the whole Clinton foolishness of Whitewater and that, people said, “Well, do that and the press won’t bother us anymore.” And at one time, I was so stupid that I thought that.
I’m that stupid. I still think that.
It still won’t be enough.
I ask because one of the knocks on her is that she’s overly cautious and deliberative.
That may be true. Maybe she is. Maybe she could have been a little more cautious in the 2020 presidential campaign.
That was the one time she wasn’t.
Yeah, when she threw caution to the wind, it blew back in her face.
There’s a new documentary about you that premiered in Telluride. A large part of it focuses on your role in warning Democrats that Biden was too old to run for a second term and that they were veering into disaster. You were an early voice on that, and one of the loudest after the debate. Did you get much blowback from his people, who I know you’ve known for a long time?
You know, not any more than you would expect. I’d get someone to say, “So-and-so wants to give you a call.” And I would say, “Fine, I’d be glad to talk to so-and-so and I’ll be very nice and polite, but I’m not going to change my mind.”
But they didn’t try to rough you up in an alley or anything like that.
There was nothing in this whole endeavor that surprised me in the least. I knew what people’s reaction would be, and a lot of people, of very good friends of mine, were like, “Man, you’re crazy. It’s just what it is. We got to take the army we got and go to war. We’re not going to get a new army. You were right four months ago, but it’s too late now.” And I just couldn’t go along with it.
Do you get the sense that Biden is still pissed off about the way things went down?
Yeah, I do, but less than a month ago, and it’ll be less a month from now.
Watching videos of him this week, it’s sort of hard to imagine him as the candidate.
There’s not one person — when I say not one, I’m not exaggerating — who has come up and said, “Man, you really screwed this thing up.” I’m sure there are people that would say that, but I haven’t run into them.
A few of his staffers might be the only Democrats in America who feel that way.
That’s about it.
The documentary is also a look back at your long political career and your early life in Louisiana.
Let me address the documentary for just a second. Its origins were from Susan McCue, who was Harry Reid’s chief of staff when she was 30 years old. And she said, “I saw The War Room when I was a student at Rutgers and it made me want to get into politics.” So at least from my vantage point, or my wife’s, the film is — I don’t want to say it’s an ode to the profession of politics, but I think its overall message, particularly to young people, is “Hey, these people had fun.”
The whole word “politics” has just been so driven into the dirt. People like you who cover it, and people like I used to be who work in it, or people who are staffers … I mean, we’ve got to inspire people to get into this, because if we don’t get good people, we’re never going to get good politics. And you’re not going to get good people by decrying it as a forced march, corrupt, ego-driven business. Some of that may be true, but certainly not all of it. And I hope when people watch this, one of their conclusions is, “Hey, these people have a good time in their lives.” You know?
I think one reason it feels like a forced march now is that the stakes feel utterly existential with Trump.
If you look at my op-ed, I said what I really think. One joke is worth 100 fact-checks, okay? We have forgotten about mockery and ridicule. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with fact-checks or we shouldn’t have them, but for whatever [reason], people seem to be kind of oblivious to it. But if you make him not cool, then we could hurt him.
But does this moment feel more existential than others for you?
Yes, yes. I’m not going to argue that, I agree 100 percent.
At the same time, it’s easy to say, “Oh, back in the ’80s and ’90s, politics was so comparatively low-stakes.” But it wasn’t, because every election feels pretty existential.
Right. It does. We always say, “We stand on the precipice. If not us, who? If not now, when?” There’s a whole body of that kind of apocalyptic language. But a broken clock is right twice a day, and that language is actually right. It wasn’t before, but humanity is at a crossroads, a fork in the road.
Judging by interviews I’ve read and watched, you seem to think the Democratic Party is in a pretty healthy place after all your time in it, whereas the Republican Party — is this something you ever would have predicted it would become when you were younger?
You have an entire professional class of Republicans — Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, this guy Tyler Cowen. And they’re forever writing articles about how the Democratic Party could come back. Except for one thing: We haven’t lost an election for two years. Why are you worried about us? I mean, I appreciate the concern and the advice, but … There’s always been this whole thing about how the Democrats can fix themselves. Fix us from what, winning elections? I don’t want to be fixed from that.
It’s the only political party that goes on a winning streak and still thinks of itself as in disarray, because it’s full of neurotic people.
Editors say, “Every 65 days, we have to write a ‘Dems in Disarray’ story.”
It’s a cliché.
It’s such a cliché and it’s so true.
Republicans have this attitude of, “We might be losing, but we’re going to project utter confidence that we’re going to win.”
Yes. And the truth of the matter is there’s a little-known doctrine among political consultants, which is that you want to have “strategic space.” In other words, that your party and your supporters are going to let you operate on a fairly wide bandwidth. And Harris has that right now. And where Trump is really caught is with the abortion thing. He doesn’t have space. If he goes too far pro-life, people go nuts. If he doesn’t go far enough, the people he needs as part of his coalition go nuts. They need to drive him hard during the debate on this issue. When he talks about her flip-flopping, she can say, “Well, yes, I did. I flip-flop. I grew over four years. You change your mind on this every four hours.”
He has no coherent views on anything except maybe racism and trade.
What about child care? A friend of mine called me, said, “There’s not enough vinegar and oil in all of Italy to dress that word salad.”
That’s a good line.
Yeah, use it and my friend will be happy.
You’ve been in a lot of TV shows and movies over the years, sometimes playing yourself, sometimes not. I still quote one of your lines from Old School: “We have no response. That was perfect,” after Will Ferrell’s debate answer.
I saw Will a couple times out in Telluride. He’s got a movie out. I told him he made me famous.
Do you have a particular favorite of your Hollywood forays?
I think the current movie. And after that, probably Old School. I mean, that was as much … I was telling Will, they called me at Cornell to be the commencement or graduation speaker. They picked me up at the airport and I said, “What the fuck y’all having me at Cornell for?” And they said, “Oh, well, everybody saw you in Old School.” So an Ivy League school had me as a commencement speaker because of Old School. My wife says that that movie was perfect for me because the target audience was 13-year-old boys. And every boy wants to be 13 again, so they like Old School.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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