James Carville: Playboy Interview

He is known as the "ragin' Cajun," "Serpent Head" and a host of other unfriendly terms—by his friends, no less. The Republicans, meanwhile, have their own word for him: intimidating.

But James Carville isn't just a jumble of temper tantrums, emotional outbursts and colorful turns of phrase. He's a serious man with a serious job: to persuade millions of people to like someone well enough to give him their votes. This year that someone is an old client: the president of the United States.

Carville is generally credited as the masterful engineer behind Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential victory. From the primaries down to the wire, that race introduced—and, in some cases, perfected—a new brand of campaign warfare, including cranked-up opposition research, hit-and-run attack ads, quick-response rebuttals (sometimes within the same 24-hour news cycle), tag-team spin doctoring, town meetings and bus caravans.

While campaign watchers had come to know Carville fairly well in the months that led up to the election, the rest of America received a crash course on the man in the swell of publicity that followed Clinton's win. Carville became a favorite on the talk show circuit, delighting audiences with campaign tales spun in his spitfire Cajun dialect. He was extolled as the brains behind the campaign's muscle in the Academy Award-nominated documentary The War Room, which tracks the Clinton crusade from behind the scenes.

Carville's celebrity was given another half-life when he married his onetime nemesis, former George Bush campaign strategist Mary Matalin. It was perhaps the unlikeliest romance in D.C. history: top dogs on opposing political campaigns, facing off in an election for the country's highest office. (When Clinton won, Matalin told CARVILLE: "You make me sick. I hate your guts.")

Once again, Carville is helping steer Clinton's campaign bandwagon—and not only on the stump. His new best-seller, We're Right, They're Wrong: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives, is Carville's attempt to sway—or perhaps bully—the electorate into seeing the world the way he views it: as a place where one can be politically progressive, socially traditional and outrageously outspoken all at once. One critic even compared the book to Thomas Paine's Common Sense.

Writes Carville: "People who have sucked from the government sugar-tit all their lives, and now want to make sure it runs dry for everyone else—it's them versus us. Ours is the morally superior position."

Carville is a confessed late-bloomer (the Clinton triumph occurred when he was 48) who embodies the loser-made-good persona. He is a hard-talking, scrappy fighter who learns from his mistakes yet stubbornly continues to make them. He will mercilessly jab at an opponent, then quickly back off and assess the damage with a healthy measure of detached Southern charm.

Those who have watched Carville at work say he is the best spin doctor in the business, effortlessly twisting a rival's words or complex policy—or even the truth—to suit his immediate needs. He is also known as a bit of an oddball. "A lot of people who don't know him well think he tries hard to be eccentric," says friend and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. "But those of us who know him know that he actually tries very hard to be normal—and never quite gets there."

"I'm like uranium 235," Carville concurs, with pride. "Not quite stable."

On the way to his success, Carville has alienated a lot of people—and not just Republicans. His histrionic eruptions are widely known. When he exploded during a White House meeting with Hollywood producers, launching into a what-do-you-rich-folks-know-about-life routine, producer Gary David Goldberg dubbed him "Anthony Perkins playing Fidel Castro on acid." Others have accused him of dancing closer to the edge than even Republican strategist Lee Atwater, to whom Carville is often compared.

His over-the-top zeal isn't the only thing that sets him apart. He is also wildly superstitious. For luck, he wore black woolen gloves during the Clinton campaign. In other races, he's worn the same pair of underwear for at least a week, though he insists he washed them out each night. He also spent one election day "in the fetal position."

But beneath the drama and superstition is a masterful mind that runs on all cylinders during a campaign—prodding his candidate, intimidating the opposition, searching for that one message to inspire the electorate. (In 1992 it was the oft-repeated "It's the economy, stupid.") At the same time, Carville is a sucker for the underdog. "If you are on top of the world," White House aide George Stephanopoulos once said, "James doesn't have much time for you. But if the world's on top of you, he's right there."

Yet until his remarkable turnaround in the mid-Eighties, Carville considered himself "a stoned-ass loser."

Born in Louisiana in 1944 to a postmaster and his wife, and raised in a town on the Mississippi River that bears the family name, Chester James Carville Jr. had a happy childhood. Even ordinary boyhood upheavals took on a cheerful, optimistic spin. "When my dad pulled me aside and broke it to me that there was no Santa Claus," Carville remembers, "it was nothing compared with the glee of being the one who knew something that my younger brothers and sisters didn't know. Plus, I got to help my father put the stuff under the tree."

In 1962 Carville entered Louisiana State University, where he concentrated mostly on partying. ("I made John Belushi look like a scholar," he told People.)

Exiting LSU early (some accounts say he was asked to leave), Carville joined the Marines, where he stayed for two years. He then returned to Baton Rouge, where he taught junior high while finishing college. He then earned a law degree from LSU. After an uneventful stint at a local law firm, Carville found politics. He worked mostly on losing campaigns, including Gary Hart's abortive 1984 presidential run. Things started to pick up in 1986, when Carville helped escort Democrat Bob Casey to the governorship of Pennsylvania. Then came the winning streak: In 1987 Carville engineered Wallace Wilkinson's come-from-behind victory in Kentucky's gubernatorial race; the next year, he managed Senator Frank Lautenberg's successful reelection bid in New Jersey. And in 1990 he took Zell Miller to the governor's mansion in Georgia.

But Carville pulled out all the stops for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. The process was captured in detail in The War Room—as were the emotions that ran beneath it: In one scene, Carville breaks down during an impassioned farewell speech to his followers after Clinton's victory. It is a moment that defines James Carville, both his political passion and his soul.

These days, Carville is living a more comfortable life—emotionally and financially. Together he and Matalin chronicled the crazy days of the Clinton-Bush contest in the 1994 best-seller All's Fair: Love, War and Running for President (Random House/Simon & Schuster), an extended two-for-one interview that reveals as much about their love affair as it does about the campaigns. The couple also tours the lecture circuit, commanding upwards of $20,000 for a few hours of political banter and well-honed arguing. And last year Carville and Matalin became parents—the first time for both—when Mary gave birth to Matalin Mary Carville, whom they call Matty.

To uncork Carville, we sent Brian Karem, who last interviewed Gordon Liddy for Playboy, to Memphis, where Carville had a small part as a right-wing prosecutor in director Milos Forman's film The People Versus Larry Flynt. Karem reports:

"Trying to gain insight into Carville's life is like trying to decipher the plot of a movie using a single frame of film. To wit: We began this interview as a casual chat on a commercial flight from Washington, D.C. to Memphis; we continued our talk in fits and starts on the set of The People Versus Larry Flynt (where I had to share James' time not only with Forman but also with co-stars Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love and James Cromwell). We wrapped up the interview with an intense session on a private jet flying from Memphis to Oregon, where Carville and his wife had a speaking engagement.

"In Portland, I got a true glimpse of the man. As subtle as a clenched fist, Carville hyperkinetically orbited his wife upon seeing her. And despite the much-discussed political chasm between them, their affection for each other appears genuine. 'My God, honey, you've got a great figure,' he drawled when he saw her. And then to me: 'Hey, you ever see a woman look so fine so soon after giving birth?'

"The couple pulled no punches while picking on each other onstage that night. But when an audience member asked the pair if they bickered at home about the president—specifically about Clinton's alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers—Carville responded quickly. 'Look at that woman,' he said, pointing at Matalin, dressed smartly in red. 'If you were married to something as fine as that, would you go home and talk about Gennifer Flowers?'

"The audience roared its approval, Matalin smiled and, in that one moment, James Carville was unmasked: At the age of 51, the unabashed defender of the left, the doggedly loyal Clintonite, had become domesticated.

"Does that leave the Democrats without their loudest, most articulate voice against the Republicans in this presidential election year? You be the judge.

"We began our conversation by talking about Carville's new career as an actor."