Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid: Creating a documentary on a sensitive current event can be risky. It is quite possible that the situation you were exploring in the first place has already changed significantly. This leaves you with very little to say about it in the general conception of your movie. The reality is, the audience is pre-emptively informed of those developments even before they come to see what you have made.
Let’s take the example of ‘Carville: Winning is Everything Stupid’ which is an interesting but disturbing documentary about James Carville for being loyal to Democrats. Primarily because of his aggressiveness, convincing capabilities and vulgar sense of humor he has been nicknamed Raging Cajun.
For a large part of his documentary, film maker Matt Tyrnauer documents events of Carville increasingly becoming more anxious as the 2024 Presidential race draws closer, all the while seeing the former president Donald Trump polls higher than the current president Joe Biden. Long before many in the party and in the public began to raise the issue, politely or otherwise, that Biden may want to withdraw from running Carville himself started to wonder if he was not too old and senile to sustain the pressures of a second term in office.
And then, in May 2024, came the first real evidence to back those worries. ABC/Washington Post reported a poll that showed only 42 percent of likely voters would vote for the re election of Biden’s presidency and 49 percent would vote for Trump.
“Polls are that poll,” Carville affirms still in his familiar abrasive voice so typical to him, “it whitewashed right off my morale horse.” Soon enough, the stray operative started activley pursing implementation of a Plan B: Biden should back out of the election and without naming a successor, call for one to be elected at a contested Democratic National Convention.
Naturally, that was not the case. (Kamala Harris appears, very briefly, just prior to the end credits, in footage that was clearly added not long before the movie was released to the festival at the end of August.) This play is fundamentally such a crass disruption in the momentum of Tyrnauer as a documentarian that it is incredible that he was able to return with a dramatic resolution at the expense of its completeness, to put it mildly, to say the least.
The fact that “Carville: Winning is Everything Stupid” relocates some of the focus from the nail biting election sequences and instead, highlights Carville’s evolution from sheer iignorance to him becoming an uncontrollable political whiz also helps a lot.
Carville built the first strong national presence in his career after serving as chief campaign advisor to Bill Clinton, in Governor Clinton’s winning presidential campaign of 1992. George Stephanopoulos, who joined Carson as Carville’s assistant rather early, remarks that the candidate and the advisor “both had a little rogue in them”, A virtue that would benefit both men whenever Carville found himself having to defend against effigies of Clinton’s past, these included Lady Chatterley’s Lover and accusations of draft evasion.
During the critical campaign, Carville strategically focused the public’s attention away from these and other scandals by branding Clinton as a superior problem solver than the reigning president, George H.W. Bush. Later, Carville came up with the slogan, ‘the economy, stupid’, which would serve as a rallying cry for his personnel, and engineered it into the cultural context such that the slogan became a hit of the early 1990s universe.
(Tyrnauer cleverly intersperses moments from ‘The War Room’, which is an interesting documentary released in the year 1993 by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker which focuses on the backroom activity of Clinton campaign aides, among these James Carville, Evans, and George S. Stephanopoulos plus James’s sarcastic claims on George’s age as a hindrance to his success.)
Also outlined in this case is the remarkable love story between Carville and the right-wing consultant Mary Matalin whom he met while on the campaign. For a couple of more than three decades now, this is what most of the observers tend to find very stunning thus making the doctors-an uneasily matched pair- laugh.
Regardless of the fact that the husband and the wife have completely opposite views, such as the husband — railed against the Gulf War — while the wife, in the years spent as George W. Bush’s White House staff — supported the invasion, they still love each other. Such unbreakable bond these people share makes them great exemplars of an ancient time when people were, at least, polite to one another despite their political differences.
“Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid” does not dispel the notion that Carville himself expects that the way he approaches political warfare, for example, partisanship, and campaign rhetoric does attract the label of being an old school. In fact, many of his former colleagues: his fellow Democrats among them, would probably agree with this.
He expresses disdain over the “woke silliness” of unyielding progressives who might drive centrists and even staunch liberals into the Republican fold. But if supporters of Biden could still bear a grudge against him on account of his loud advocacy to replace the sitting president, well, as it turns out, he does not mind at all. For him, it is quite clear: winning is really it all.
As his longtime partner in crime, Paul Begala, aptly puts it, “Who else would speak like that?” Carville is the smartest son-of-a-bitch who has ever done this as a profession, which to him is nothing short of absolute praise. He might have lost a step or two with age, but Carville still fights in political battles and one can be assure he is not playing kindly.
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