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Maureen Dowd

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from New Orleans.

A few years ago, when James Carville was teaching at Louisiana State University, he heard that one of his students had gotten into the school of her dreams to work on an advanced degree. He wanted to toast her.

“I get a $25 champagne and four plastic flutes,” he recalled, “and I said to the students: ‘All right. You are not going to get out of James Carville’s class unless you know how to properly open a bottle of champagne.’

“I said: ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You don’t pop it like you see in the movies or you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out. You take the foil off. Now you’re going to take a dishcloth, and you’re going to execute the classic counterclockwise movement. The bottle is going to go one way; the cork is going to go the other way. You just ease it out, and the sound that you are looking for is the sigh of a satisfied woman.’

“The next Tuesday, the dean comes into my office and he said: ‘I’m closing the door. We need to have a talk.’”

A female student had complained about the sighing line.

He wanted to mutter to the dean, “Her boyfriend has never heard that sound,” but he simply said, “OK, I’ll endeavor to do better.”

But this is the Ragin’ Cajun we’re talking about, so “do better” really meant “go further”: “I went back in the classroom, and I told the Gilbert Gottfried joke from ‘The Aristocrats,’” Carville continued. “I said: ‘Girl, you wanted me to get in trouble? This is what you do when all is lost and you’re up against the wall.’ Of course, it’s the grossest joke ever.”

Nobody puts Bayou Baby in a corner. The experience soured his joy in teaching at his alma mater.

“This was L.S. freaking U., not Oberlin,” he said. “It was terrible. I wouldn’t take the coeds to dinner after class. I would take the male students. I was scared to death in my job. I was like: ‘I don’t need L.S.U.’s money. I don’t need to drive up there and listen to that crap.’ I just said: ‘That’s it. I’m done. This is not for me.’”

Carville, mastermind of Bill Clinton’s election, laughed and sipped his red wine. We were talking in the back of a Big Easy deli/wine store called Martin’s, on a break from the New Orleans Book Festival last week.

Carville is as busy as ever, raising money for Democrats, doing a podcast with Al Hunt and starring in a documentary directed by Matt Tyrnauer, who has also delved into the lives of Valentino and Roy Cohn. (He also starred with George Stephanopoulos in the acclaimed film about the vertiginous 1992 campaign “The War Room.”)

Tyrnauer, who’s still working on the movie, said he was drawn to the project because “James is an American original. He’s a one-off.”

Why doesn’t Corporal Cueball, as the bald operative and former Marine calls himself, get in more trouble?

“Certain people rise above cancelability,” Tyrnauer said. “In the current election cycle, James has been really out front saying that it seems to him, based on the polls and data, that Biden has a problem. And everyone else seems to be like ostriches with heads buried in the sand. James is a truth teller.”

Indeed, there’s a scene in the documentary where the director Rob Reiner, who was in New Orleans filming “Spinal Tap II,” upbraids Carville for pushing the idea that Democrats needed fresh blood in the White House and perhaps an open convention.

transcript

“You said something quite a while ago. This is before Biden announced. You said that you thought time for new blood, time for a changing of the guard, open primary season. Then, within the last month or so, you said you wish there would be an open convention, like the old-fashioned days, where they’d broker and find a candidate. And that was a little upsetting to me because this is about whether or not we preserve our 249 years of self-rule or we slip into a theocratic autocracy.” “I don’t think people really appreciate how bad Biden’s poll numbers are. When you look at them, it’s like walking in on your grandmother naked. You can’t unsee them, no matter how hard you try. And the deeper you dig, the kind of worse it is. I don’t think we thought this thing through. I don’t think people realize the hunger and appetite for something different in this country. And I don’t think they realize this terrific pool of candidates out of there.” “I don’t disagree with you that we have a........

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