James Carville, the Cajun who can’t stop ragin’

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NEW ORLEANS — A few years ago, when James Carville was teaching at Louisiana State University, he heard that one of his students had gotten into the school of her dreams to work on an advanced degree. He wanted to toast her.

“I get a $25 Champagne and four plastic flutes,” he recalled, “and I said to the students: ‘All right. You are not going to get out of James Carville’s class unless you know how to properly open a bottle of Champagne.’

“I said: ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You don’t pop it like you see in the movies or you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out. You take the foil off. Now you’re going to take a dishcloth, and you’re going to execute the classic counterclockwise movement. The bottle is going to go one way; the cork is going to go the other way. You just ease it out, and the sound that you are looking for is the sigh of a satisfied woman.’

“The next Tuesday, the dean comes into my office and he said: ‘I’m closing the door. We need to have a talk.’ "

A female student had complained about the sighing line.

But this is the Ragin’ Cajun we’re talking about, so “do better” really meant “go further”: “I went back in the classroom, and I told the Gilbert Gottfried joke from ‘The Aristocrats,’ " Carville continued. “I said: ‘Girl, you wanted me to get in trouble? This is what you do when all is lost and you’re up against the wall.’ Of course, it’s the grossest joke ever.”

Nobody puts Bayou Baby in a corner. The experience soured his joy in teaching at his alma mater.

“This was LS freaking U, not Oberlin,” he said. “It was terrible. I wouldn’t take the coeds to dinner after class. I would take the male students. I was scared to death in my job. I was like: ‘I don’t need LSU’s money. I don’t need to drive up there and listen to that crap.’ I just said: ‘That’s it. I’m done. This is not for me.’ "

Carville, mastermind of Bill Clinton’s election, laughed and sipped his red wine. We were talking in the back of a Big Easy deli/wine store called Martin’s, on a break from the New Orleans Book Festival this month.

Carville is as busy as ever, raising money for Democrats, doing a podcast with Al Hunt and starring in a documentary directed by Matt Tyrnauer, who has also delved into the lives of Valentino and Roy Cohn. (He also starred with George Stephanopoulos in the acclaimed film about the vertiginous 1992 campaign “The War Room.”)

Why doesn’t Corporal Cueball, as the bald operative and former Marine calls himself, get in more trouble?

“Certain people rise above cancelability,” Tyrnauer said. “In the current election cycle, James has been really out front saying that it seems to him, based on the polls and data, that Biden has a problem. And everyone else seems to be like ostriches with heads buried in the sand. James is a truth teller.”

Indeed, there’s a scene in the documentary where the director Rob Reiner, who was in New Orleans filming “Spinal Tap II,” upbraids Carville for pushing the idea that Democrats needed fresh blood in the White House and perhaps an open convention.

“It’s the only election in my lifetime where it’s about yesterday, not tomorrow,” Carville told me.

“If you were going to ask me what I’d want the title of the documentary to be? ‘When Politics Was Fun,’ " he said. “There was actually a time when people loved doing this. People would go out, they’d drink, they’d talk to everybody, they’d leak stories. Generally, when it was over, you’d go sit with the other side and have drinks together.”

Politics now, Carville said, is filled with hatred and doctrinaire positions.

“Hubert Humphrey used to describe himself as ‘the Happy Warrior,’ " he said. “If somebody said, ‘I’m a happy guy’ right now, they’d go: ‘What’s wrong with that guy? Don’t you realize the evil in this world?’

“It’s not like it used to be, where everybody would have these huge media scrums with hundreds of reporters and local news,” he said nostalgically. “The latest fad is campaigns unionizing. Who the hell ever wanted to work on a campaign that didn’t want to work on a Sunday? It was a sprint to the end.”

Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”

“There are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior,” Carville said. And that, he said, is how you end up with Dobbs.

“If you say, ‘You dumb son of a bitch, how can you ever think that this fat, slimy, rapist, criminal, racist should be president?’ they’re going to recoil,” he said. “I think Democrats should say: ‘Look, you believed in him. You felt like you weren’t being seen, you were being culturally excluded. But he betrayed you. You thought he was going to be for you and helping you, but he was really for TikTok and tax cuts to the rich.’ "

Carville says that at 79, he is too old to hate. And certainly too old to start giving trigger warnings.

“No one wants to live like this,” he said. “Who ever thought it was a good idea to tell people you can’t hug them or you’ve got to be careful or you’ve got to think about names to call them other than the name you know them by? There’s nothing wrong with me being white or you being white or them being Black or me being male or you being female. It’s a giant, stupid argument.”

He is blithely un-PC, using axioms like “It’s the Indian, not the arrows.”

He offered a bawdy metaphor about President Joe Biden’s shaky approval ratings: “When I look at these polling numbers, it’s like walking in on your grandma naked. You can’t get the image out of your mind.”

Talking about Evan Osnos’ recent New Yorker piece about Biden, which suggested that Biden and his advisers don’t worry about polls, Carville was skeptical. “When the polls are not good, you don’t believe in polls,” he said. “If the polls are good, you believe in polls.”

Lately, he has been obsessed with Biden bleeding Black male voters.

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. " ‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’

“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48% of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’ "

He disagrees with Democrats who claim there’s been too much attention on Biden’s age.

“Now don’t tell me that Biden has more energy or cognition than Trump because it’s evident that, yeah, Trump’s got word salads, but he projects energy,” Carville said. “He’s insane. He’s a criminal of the first order. But he does have a little timing and a little sense of humor and knows how to move from one story to the other.”

Biden clinging to power has eclipsed the other talent in the party.

“The most underreported, underrealized thing is how talented the Democratic Party is right below the presidential level,” Carville said. “Everyone thinks we’re an old urban party.” He reels off the names of promising Dems: “Mitch Landrieu, Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock, Gretchen Whitmer, Gina Raimondo, Roy Cooper.”

He said most of the criticism of Kamala Harris is misogynistic, but added: “She reminds me of this great baseball player. He got arms that big. Can’t wait to see the guy. He takes three pitches and walks back to the dugout.”

Although he is worried about the president’s strength in this race, he said: “I actually like Biden. He’s a tenacious guy that’s had a real life. He’s a state school guy. He doesn’t have an iota of elitism. He doesn’t even know what ‘woke’ is. He’s been demonstrably the best president that Black America’s ever had, Clinton and Obama included. You look at incomes, employment, poverty rates, access to health care. It’s not where whites are, but it’s closer than it’s ever been.”

“I don’t think he can do much more than soldier on and let the Democratic groups kick in,” he said, shrugging.

And with that, Carville bought some wine, climbed into his red Bronco — which he likes to think of as his pirogue, a Cajun canoe — and went home to Mary.