Carville’s Winning Is Everything, Stupid serves not only as a remedy for those navigating today’s turbulent political landscape but also as a guide to steer us away from the chaos perpetuated by the media and political alarmists. This thoroughly entertaining and enlivening film, which profiles James Carville, the mastermind behind Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign (The War Room), also weaves a Romeo and Juliet-style love story. It follows two renowned political strategists—Carville, a Democrat, and Mary Matalin, a Republican who worked for both Bush Sr. and Jr.—as they bridge the political divide to fall in love and, despite their storied disagreements, remain passionately dedicated to each other. “We come from a different era where you could talk about politics, and you could disagree”, Matalin explained. The most entertaining sparring couple ever, James and Mary, were some of Tim Russert’s (Meet The Press) regulars for years and that magic is still alive today. And at that time before political pie got divided between cable and broadcast networks it worked. “They were from somewhere they weren’t these uber polished elites,” Paul Begala said.
It was also a time where money didn’t run the show. Carville before his first major success in the Casey Campaign in 1986, had to beg for a plane ticket to fly to Pennsylvania at the age of 42 because he didn’t have the money to fly there. “He said, I’m going to reimburse you,” Carville explained. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t have the money to even get a ticket. You got to send me the money to get the ticket to go to Philadelphia.” Casey won and James’ life changed. I was thinking, I don’t have to go back to Baton Rouge and beg people for a way to make a living. The Casey campaign, without that, I’m not me. I would have been a massive failure,” Carville admitted.
Fortune smiled on Director Matt Tyrnauer (Where’s My Roy Cohn) who chose the entertaining and insightful Carville as a subject for a documentary back in February of 2023 shortly before May 7, 2023, when a bombshell poll dropped: Trump was leading Biden for the 2024 election.
“I soon discovered that James’s talent for seeing around corners has only increased over the years,” Director Matt Tyrnauer explained. “That poll sprang James into action.” “That poll knocked me right off my f***ing horse,” Carville declared. What started as a deep dive into Carville’s brilliance turned into a high-stakes political thriller, with the 2024 election as the unexpected wild ride. Tyrnauer filmed the indefatigable Carville from dawn to dusk, as he hit the phones, connecting with his trusted political circle, the same one he’s called since the ’90s Clinton campaign—including Paul Begala, Rahm Emanuel, Mandy Grunwald, George Stephanopoulos, Stanley Greenberg, Sidney Blumenthal, and others.
And many of these people he still calls on a regular basis because they are friends like George Stephanopoulos and Paul Begala, who he has worked with since the Clinton campaign of 1992. Seeing the young fresh faced 31 year olds, Stephanopoulos and Paul Begala, in the flashbacks filled with enthusiasm during the Clinton campaign and the victory celebration is alone worth the price of admission. The most poignant moment being Stephanopoulos’ speech (The War Room) thanking Carville for helping push the campaign across the finish line and creating a path for the population to have better schools, jobs and pay less for health care. Carville is tearing up and so will the audience as they take in this elevating reminder of idealism. And of course the efforts of the “War Room” bore fruit with the administration’s successes employment, health care and the budget.
“I have talked to James Carville every single day since 1983,” Begala said. “I don’t miss it, usually more than once a day. He is so much more a student of the game than people give him credit for. He knows all your votes, all your quotes, and they’re locked in. He is the smartest son of a bitch who’s ever done this for a living.”
Another of the highlights for me was a journey back to Carville’s hometown, which was coincidentally named Carville. His grandfather, who was the postmaster, renamed his hometown to solve a mail delivery issue with towns that shared a similar geographic (island) designations. The house he grew up in, one of the better ones in Carville, would still by any standard be seen as meager. The town still boasts as James points out only one stop sign. But his dad drummed into James that this was one of the best places in the world, not a nothing little town in the middle of nowhere.
“My daddy said we had the best climate in the world,” James recalled. “We had the finest peaches, finest strawberries and the most fertile soil in the world. We were the luckiest people in the world.”
“Because it was named after my family, people assumed that we were land barons,” Carville explained. “We were small-time bureaucrats. “We could get into any club. We just couldn’t pay the dues. The chief driver of the economy in Carlville was the treatment center for Hansen’s disease, The National Leprosarium,” Carville went on to say. “If you were in Carlville in 1959, let’s just say… the population was a thousand. 400 of the people had leprosy and 550 were black, okay? I mean, if you didn’t get along with people, you have a pretty lonely life.”
“James Carville was one of the few strategists that understood that there were millions of Americans who lived on the outskirts of hope,” Donna Brazile explained. “He’s always been able to see beyond the levees and that’s something natural that comes to a man who understands what it is to come from nowhere to become something in this world.”
“He grew up in the Jim Crow, segregated agrarian South and saw the injustice and it pains him to this day,”, Mary Matalin pointed out. Al Sharpton went on to say, “When it was not only not popular, it was dangerous; to take a pro civil rights stand took a lot of courage. And James Carville did it, and he didn’t do it quietly.”
We see the Democrats rail against Carville for suggesting that Biden shouldn’t run again earlier in the movie. And we see it isn’t a lack of sympathy or understanding from Carville for Biden’s age. “Age is something that everybody deals with,” Carville pointed out. “If you’re like me, you’re dealing with it as we speak (79 years). If you’re a younger person, you deal with it through your parents or your grandparents or somebody down the street. You can’t pivot from that.” Maitlin points out that she loves James who is gonna be 80, “still whippersnapping around, but he quit teaching at LSU because it was too hard to drive to Baton Rouge. Imagine being President at that age.”
Despite the acknowledgement of age James is seen either teleconferencing or flying from here to there maintaining a schedule that would exhaust most people half his age. I found we also have something in common that I thought was my own peculiarity at 75: we do laps in hotel hallways when we travel.
“Hotel running is easy on the joints,” Carville says. “You can shower right after. There’s no wind, no rain and no cold. There’s one big downside it’s not overly scenic. But as any 79 year old will tell you, you don’t look at the horizon, you look at what’s in front of you because you are afraid you are going to trip.”
I recently retired from college and try as I might I’ve had precious little success conveying what politics was like growing up watching Eisenhower, JFK, Johnson and later Bill Clinton. I wish that students today could have experienced the inspiration, ideals and bipartisan (sometimes) government I knew then. Congress Adopting “The Great Society” agenda and passing The Civil Rights Act. Bill Clinton besides enacting Family and Medical Leave Act removed barriers to health care for millions of Americans. It was a time with no poisonous social media threads or AI fakes. When students do listen and I think they view me as a rambling old man remembering rainbows.
Well Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, is a film which proves those rainbows can be real and maybe if we work together we’ll someday watch them together again. Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, opens in theaters on October 11th for an Academy run and then streams on Max platform later this fall.
Photos provided by Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid
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