Profile James Carville -The man who could help make a US president - againJohn Kerry's decision to call on James Carville, the man credited with leading Bill Clinton to victory, marks a political rebirth for the eccentric spin-master, writes Shane Hegarty
How much does James Carville care about the election campaigns he manages? This much: during a state gubernatorial campaign in 1986 he became so stressed that he urinated blood.
The Carville story is filled with such episodes. Here's another: during the 1992 campaign, on the day that 60 Minutes was to interview then-candidate Bill Clinton about rumours that he'd had an affair with Gennifer Flowers, Carville awoke at 4 a.m. sobbing uncontrollably, "wrenched and drenched". When the interview was over, he rushed sobbing into Clinton's comforting arms.
It's hard to imagine John Kerry holding Carville in his long, stiff arms, but you never know. Having retired from American political campaigns because he had become more famous than his client, the most famous spin-doctor in the business is back. A campaign that is confused, weakened and faltering has turned to several of Clinton's old team, but it is the man some call the "Ragin' Cajun" - and others call "Serpent Head" - who has been most conspicuous among them.
He will always be best known as the man who masterminded Clinton's route to victory in 1992, bringing him through crises and disasters to the White House. He is the man who coined the famous motto, "It's the economy, stupid" as a reminder that, in a rollercoaster campaign, only one issue mattered.
THANKS TO THE fly-on-the-wall film about that campaign, The War Room, he is a media star: a presenter of CNN's Crossfire and author of several books.
But it is as a political consultant that he truly gets his kicks. A campaign, Carville once wrote, is "very sexual. It's very gratifying, it's very intense. It builds up to a climax, if you will. And once you get that feeling, there's nothing that can match it." Whether he will be able to sex up the Kerry campaign remains to be seen, but it should at least provide some spice to those involved in it. "I'm like uranium-235," he once said. "Not quite stable." He has always had a fondness for bombastic public gestures. He reacted to press misinterpretation of a magazine interview with Hillary Clinton by offering $100,000 to anyone who could point out where exactly she had linked her husband's sexual misconduct with his childhood. When, in 2002, Republican Senator Trent Lott apologised publicly for making controversial statements about racial segregation, Carville faxed a letter to Lott's office accepting the senator's apology.
Lott, in fact, had been one of those who is reported to have suspected Carville of encouraging bombing raids on Iraq in 1998 as a diversion from President Clinton's growing scandals. Carville enjoys the reputation of a man who can twist the news agenda to his employer's advantage and has attracted opprobrium for it, especially from conservative quarters. They range from his opinions to his looks. One Republican once described Carville as looking "like a fish that's swum too close to a nuclear reactor".
His personality, though, has endeared him to others. In 1993, Clinton spoke of "the whole jeans thing, the whole eccentric story about James that has really preceded him wherever he goes. There are a lot of people who don't know him well who think he tries really hard to be eccentric. Those of us who know him know that he is actually trying very hard to be normal and never quite getting there."
He was born in 1944 in the hamlet of Carville, Louisiana - it was named after his grandfather, the local postmaster - and is the eldest of eight children. He first became interested in politics when he volunteered to help a candidate in a local election. He lost; the first of many failures before eventual success. He went to Louisiana State University (LSU) but was kicked out after failing repeatedly. He joined the marines, but spent two quiet years at a desk before returning to LSU and earning a law degree. Unhappy as a lawyer, he became a political consultant. Initially unsuccessful, by April 1983 he had only $6 and a string of defeats to his name.
It was while aiding the Pennsylvanian Democratic candidate's 1986 campaign for governor that Carville's fighting instinct began to pay dividends. He helped create a controversial TV ad showing a photograph of the Republican candidate looking scruffy in his college days, while sitar music played in the background, with a voice-over quoting him as saying that he wanted to bring Transcendental Meditation to state government. Carville's candidate won an election he had seemed destined to lose.
In 1991, he helped deliver a surprise Democratic victory in a Pennsylvania senate race and it was this that encouraged Clinton to bring him in during the primary elections. Carville went with Clinton, he says, simply because he "seemed like a nice guy".
CARVILLE HELPED BRING a particular formula of speed, agility, repetition and focus. The War Room showed his aggression, his obsessive nature, his ability to focus both a campaign and the Democratic Party. It captured a manager in jeans and T-shirt with a southern charm and deep sentiment. It revealed a strategist who constantly badgered editors, planted negative stories about then-President George Bush Sr and who met attack with counter-attack while recognising the emergence of a media world that operated 24/7.
In a bruising campaign, victory was hard-fought. Only a couple of months before the election, Bush was looking strong, Clinton was struggling. "How scared are you," fellow strategist George Stephanopoulos asked Carville one evening. "How scared?" Carville replied. "I'm this scared: if we lose, I won't commit suicide, but I'll seriously contemplate it." Perhaps the quirkiest aspect of the campaign, though, was that his girlfriend, Mary Matalin, happened to be Bush Sr's political director. By way of appeasing critics, the couple announced a temporary hiatus in their relationship. However, they continued to see each other in secret. When Clinton won, Matalin told Carville that she "hated his guts" but the couple married a year after the election, by which time the story had melted the hard hearts in Washington DC. They claimed to be tired of the Romeo and Juliet clichés, but not enough to stop making money from it. Together, they cropped up on the political shows, bringing with them their dinner table debates. They wrote a book together, All's Fair: Love, War and Running for President.
Matalin was brought to the White House by Bush Jr for a time in 2001-02, and while she and Carville remain professionally divided, she is the one who must put up with his bizarre habit of not changing his underwear during the final week of an election.
Carville continued to work on political campaigns. He had a more modest role in Clinton's 1996 re-election and while never part of the White House staff, he continued to advise the president. He has gradually widened his influence, becoming something of a gun for hire, turning up in election campaigns across the world, including Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada and Honduras. In 2001, he advised the British Labour Party on how to win a second term.
He has also milked his celebrity. Billy Bob Thornton may have played a character based on Carville in the movie Primary Colours, but Carville turned up in a cameo role in The People Versus Larry Flynt and also appeared in the television sitcoms Mad About You and Spin City. As well as co-hosting CNN's Crossfire, a programme previously presented by his wife, he has written several books. They are typically strident, barging on to the shelves with titles such as Buck Up, Suck Up and Come Back When You Foul Up and We're Right, They're Wrong: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives.
Carville has been extremely critical of the current White House, recently starring in an anti-Bush advert with the rather pompous title, "ASpecial Message From James Carville" and writing Had Enough?: A Handbook for Fighting Back, in which he outlines his "rules for progressives to live by". Rule No 1: Stop apologising for everything.
This week, he was brought inside the campaign, at a time when it is Republican strategist Karl Rove who has been handing the Democrats a lesson in how to run a presidential campaign. Carville's arrival, along with the other "Clintonistas", has more than a faint whiff of desperation to it, but for the second time in his life, he has been called upon to prevent a George Bush from being re-elected. Rule No 9: Sometimes you've got to be willing to fight.