Carville Clueless About Sex, War and Money?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 2, 2004

Byline: Ralph R. Reiland, SPECIAL TO INSIGHT

"Democrats lied about something we really like: sex. Republicans lie about something they really like: war and money." That's the analysis by former Clinton campaign strategist James Carville in his book, Had Enough? This means, I suppose, that the sixties Democrats had it right all along: Make love, not war.

On the money issue, I doubt if Carville is donating many of the proceeds from his latest book to the Little Sisters of the Poor. And measured in the number of dollars that can be pocketed in the shortest amount of time, Carville isn't doing all that bad for someone putting himself in the opposite camp from those who "really like" the cash. Represented exclusively by the Washington Speakers Bureau, it takes $20,500 to get Carville to the podium for one hour, plus first-class expenses and top accommodations.

Also on the money, "The Office of James Carville," i.e., "The Official Website of James Carville," explains how Carville, "an author, speaker, restaurateur and talk-show host," parlayed his "winning streak" in politics starting in 1986 "when he managed the gubernatorial victory of Robert Casey in Pennsylvania" and on through to 1992 "when he guided William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency" into a global cash cow.

"After the Clinton victory, Carville began to focus on foreign consulting," the Website explains. "Since that time, Carville's political clients have included the following: Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis; Brazilian President Fernando Enrique Cardoso; Honduran Prime Minister Carlos Flores; President Jamil Mahuad of Ecuador; the Liberal Party of Canada; British Prime Minister Tony Blair; So Paulo Mayor Celso Pitta; Argentine Economic Minister Domingo Carvallo; Francis Labastida of Mexico; Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Basdeo Panday; and President Hipolito Mejia of the Dominican Republic. In 1999, Carville led Ehud Barak to victory in his campaign to become prime minister of Israel."

I might be wrong, but it seems like someone would have to "really like" money" to do all that globe-trotting just to put together a bang-up media blitz for some politician in So Paulo or to get the right set of bureaucrats installed in Honduras.

Carville might be way off base, too, when it comes to sex as far as Democrats being more frisky. All I know is that pornography consumption per capita is higher in the "blue states" won by Al Gore, while population growth is higher in the "red states" won by George W. Bush. I'd say that means Republicans are doing the real thing and that Democrats need to get over their pie-in-the-sky utopias, the same as in economics.

None of the above, of course, will much matter in the next election. No one will care about Monica Lewinsky's handbags or Carville carrying on about Republican money grubbers while he's piling up his own stash. The big issue will be war a thing, Carville says, that Republicans "really like."

On the one side, Bush will be saying what he's been saying since 9/11: "Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale."

On the other side, Democratic presidential contender Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, taking a stand a bit to the left of Howard Dean, recently told a Cleveland audience that he was "running for president of the United States to enable the goddess of peace to encircle within her arms all the children of this country and all the children of the world."

Well, call me an agnostic but the goddess of peace certainly appeared to be asleep at the switch when Saddam Hussein dumped thousands of Iraqi kids and their parents into hundreds of mass graves during the last three decades. What put a stop to that was American B-52 bombers and M-1 Abrams tanks, not pipe dreams and mythology.

The issue now and into the next several decades is not whether Republicans "really like" war but what we're going to do about the terror ahead. What do we do about Pakistan's "Islamic bomb," the phrase used by former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto? What do we do about the nuclear-weapons programs in North Korea and Iran?

Leaders of "two crazy states," i.e., North Korea and Iran, writes Gabriel Schoenfeld in the November 2003 issue of Commentary, "both perpetrators of acts of international terrorism, both animated by a blistering hatred for America and the West, are bent on acquiring weapons of unthinkable destructive power."

It's my bet that the goddess of peace won't be able to knock out the threat without some pre-emptive action by the Pentagon.

Ralph R. Reiland, a columnist for the Pittsburgh TribuneReview, is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University. Contact Reiland at Rrreiland@aol.com.