James Carville

James Carville is one of America's and the world's highest profile political consultants. Following his work in the war room of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign where he coined the motto, "It's the economy, Stupid," Carville's professional prominence soared. In the intervening years, Carville has retained his high public profile, and he is a frequent commentator on television and in print. He is married to Republican political strategist, Mary Matalin.

International stature

From 1992 to 1994, Carville continued to advise the Clinton White House. After the disastrous defeat of the Democratic Party in 1994 when it lost its majority in the US House of Representatives, Carville has concentrated on international political campaigns. His client list reads like a Who's Who including: President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico; President Roberto Flores Facusse of Honduras; President Jamie Mahuad of Ecuador; President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil; Senator Edward M. Kennedy; Senator Zell Miller; President Nelson Mandela of South Africa; President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa; Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain; Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis of Greece; Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany who are featured on his online client list [1]

Carville's consultancies

Today, Carville is involved in a variety of businesses. On his website[2], he describes at least three as consultancies: Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner [3]; GoCos [4] and Sebago [5].

Carville's style

Carville's personal style is direct, frank and punctuated by devastating one-liners. He is regarded as a superb general consultant, a person who is familiar with virtually all operations in a political campaign.

It would not be an overstatement to say that he is a top-ranking heavyweight political consultant with very few peers.

Beginnings

His background shaped him. Born in a small town in Louisiana named, Carville, he attended Lousiana State University where he earned a BA and a law degree. He served stints in the US Marine Corps as well as teaching high school, before becoming a litigator in Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana. Louisiana is the capitol of political campaigning in the United States. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there were no limits on campaign spending. Campaigns could receive corporate contributions and unrecorded cash donations, making it a virtual lottery for the political consulting industry. It was in this pacy and hard-hitting culture of winner-take-all politics that Carville earned his spurs as a political consultant. Before launching out on his own, Carville served his apprenticeship with Raymond Strother, one of the deans of American political consulting.

Eventually, he gravitated to work for Bill Clinton, governor of the contiguous state of Arkansas, and the rest is now history.

Carville's campaign technique

Perhaps, Carville's major contribution to the practice of political consulting is his fiercely critical concentration on defining the message of the campaign. Gifted with a rapier wit honed in Louisiana politics, the Marine Corps and the rural courtrooms of the South, Carville does not mince his words - neither does he allow his clients to present vague and amorphous messages to their audiences.

The 2004 presidential race

In 2004, Carville intervened directly into US presidential politics when the campaign of John Kerry ran adrift. On the day after the Republican Convention adjourned after a week of bashing Kerry and praising George Bush, Carville spearheaded a move to seize the helm of the floundering Democratic presidential campaign. Scheduled to appear on Meet the Press the following day, Carville threatened John Kerry with going public with a devastating critique of his badly mismanaged presidential campaign. Then, acting as an intermediary between Kerry and Bill Clinton, who had been stricken by a heart attack and was in intensive care awaiting surgery the next morning, Carville ordered a strategic reorientation to the failing presidential campaign. Carville ordered Kerry to go on the attack. He recommended a reshuffle of Kerry's political staff which meant a demotion for Bob Shrum, the leading consultant to the campaign. These dramatic events paid off. Kerry's campaign stabilized and began to gain ground on Bush. Kerry did well in the three presidential debates, but the intervention of Osama Bin Laden who launched a threatening video tape in the final days before the election tilted the balance to Bush, who won by the thinnest majority for any second term president since 1828.

Related Links

• Marc Parent, The DLC: Bush's Trojan horse in the Democratic Party, TPM Cafe, June 20, 2006