
It’s quite a challenge to remain relevant while creating a documentary. The issue that motivated you at the beginning, the situation that you went to wartime to explore in all detail can be in a split second. The audience is familiar with this fact even before they come to watch what you constructed.
In view of ‘Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid’ is an engaging and disturbing documentary about James Carville, the Louisiana-born Democratic political consultant, who is a forceful seller and absolutely confidently crude and rude and hilarious, earning him the nickname “The Raging Cajun”.
For a lot of the footage contained in his work, director Matt Tyrnauer witnesses Carville becoming frantic quite rapidly owing to how worrying the first rounds of polling for the incumbent are early numbers show an incumbent Joe Biden being beaten by Trump. Even before most people in and outside the party started to suggest quite some reasoned or not that Biden to step back from contention, Carville had already started questioning rather graphically the sanity of the incumbent in terms of being ‘too old’ for a second term of the office.
A lot of people were shocked. And indeed in May 2024, a stunning ABC Washington poll had only 42% of likely voters backing Biden’s re-election compared to 49% who supported Trump.
“Whatever that poll was” Carville candidly recalls, “it sent me flying off my fucking horse.” Soon enough, the maverick operative began advocating for a Plan B, which stated that Biden should exit the race without anointing a worthy recipient, and call for a new nominee to be decided upon at a free-for-all Democratic National Convention.
Of course, that’s not quite how things played out. (Kamala Harris appears rather dramatically at the end of the picture credits because the sequence was added just before the film’s debut at the Telluride Film Festival in late August.) It is an admirable and remarkable testimony to the direction of the work that so “entertaining” was everything to the moment before this shocking “twist” that “Tyrnauer” gets to recount this “fulfilling” although not in a total sense story.
What also contributes a lot is the conflict as well as the rhythm in “Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid” where sequences that clearly cut across the 2024 presidential election are also building up Carville’s character from a novice in politics to a tireless political monster.
During Bill Clinton’s run for presidency, Carville played a significant role in building his profiles nationally as the chief campaign strategist. His work led Stephanopoulos to note that the candidate and the advisor had a reckless slant to them a trait which came in handy as Carville defended himself whenever Clinton’s secrets like his promiscuous affairs or draft-dodging allegations were brought up.
Carville cleverly devised combinations of words that captured Clinton as a more competent problem solver compared to George Bush. This narrative allowed Carville to minimize the impact of these and other scandals throughout the campaign. His staff would be motivated by a tagline he later introduced, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ which became a cult phenomenon that swept through the early nineties.
(Tyrnauer self-consciously quotes sections from 1993 dvdrip the war room film by chris hegedus and da pennebaker where carville along with stepanopoulos and others from the clinton’s team are shown making directives behind the curtain & carville mentions in a now hilarious tone that bush wasn’t up to being a commander in chief at an old age anyway.)
Also accentuated in the film their storybook romance that began when Matalin worked for Bush during the Clinton-Bush election. Their story has gotten old with pundits as they have been married for over thirty years now. It’s especially funny to the odd couple. It is apparent that although both have striking differences he blasted the gulf war, while bush’s white house aide matalin approved of the invasion they actually do care for and respect each other. They seems to belong to the bygone era when political squabbles did not take the sheen off people’s dignity.
In regards to this mindset, one can easily draw upon the title of his book “Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid”. Many in his field, shunning him and particularly most of his party compeers, such as Tony, feel that such attitude towards political warfare, radicalism in a party, and campaign noise alone, encapsulates the essence of his being rather low. He belittles the woke silliness of all intractable Progressives who might make moderate Democrats or Liberals join Republicans. Biden supporters might still resent him for how he tried pretty aggressively to replace the sitting president, but as he says, he doesn’t really care. For this man, winning is all there is it all matters everything.
Famous political consultant and commentator Paul Begala, one of his applauders, firmly states that Carville better than anyone else, is “the smartest son of a bitch who’s ever done this for a living.” Age has perhaps slowed him down a tad, but Carville is still in the game, and in his words ‘Still the best player in the world’.
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