When I saw the headline of James Carville’s FT article today – “Time to halt America’s political hara-kiri” – my heart sank. Surely, I thought, not another sanctimonious counterblast from Team Clinton moralising about Samantha Power having the temerity to call their queen a ‘monster’.
Silly me. Duh – this is the Ragin’ Cajun we’re talking about, after all: the man who met Paula Jones’ claims of sexual harassement by Bill Clinton with the succint epithet, “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find”.
So it should not surprise us that he’s appalled that Samantha Power had to resign. Rather like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Wag the Dog (“This is nothing! During the filming of ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ three of the horsemen died two weeks before the ending of principle photography. This is nothing, this is nothing…”), Carville’s seen far worse than this before:
I think back to the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, in which I played a role. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, Paul Begala, my colleague, began belittling the victory of Senator Paul Tsongas by arguing that Mr Clinton’s comeback was a much bigger story. In doing so, Mr Begala called Mr Tsongas a “son of a bitch”. Mr Clinton asked him to write an apology note but also requested that it not affect his aggressiveness. The story lasted one day.
Later in the campaign, my then girlfriend and now wife Mary Matalin called my client “a philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger”. Naturally, someone made a perfunctory call for her to resign which got nowhere, and we all got a good laugh and moved on.
Near the end of that campaign, George H.W.Bush, the president, boldly asserted of Mr Clinton and Al Gore that “my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos”. Thank God nobody asked Mr Bush to resign. Life as we knew it went along quite nicely because it was all part of that entertaining, rough and tumble endeavour we know as politics.
It has always been that way. In the late 1950s, Earl Long, the then governor of my home state of Louisiana and in my view its most courageous politician since the second world war, referred to one of his political enemies as “nothing but a little pissant”. Or consider the election of 1828, in which surrogates for John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s wife a bigamist and his mother a prostitute. And that was before television.
So for heaven’s sake, he concludes: “Ms Power, come back to work. New York Times, get out of these candidates’ way and let them run for president. Everybody take a deep breath. And if somebody somewhere refers to their rival as a little pissant, do not sweat it. Nobody seems to even know what that is.”
