James Carville's WaPo op-ed of today has already been diaried here, but rather than respond rhetorically along the lines of "that means Clinton is Jesus," I'd like to deconstruct his bullshit arguments in this space. It seems to me that Carville has written some very telling things in that op-ed - perhaps more telling than he intended. His attempt to defend his indefensible "Judas" reaction by disguising it as a matter of principle is frankly laughable; I think, though, that besides failing to make his case, Carville has also inadvertently exposed more of his thought process to the light of day than he might perhaps intend, were he able to see "the beam in his own eye." In particular, reading his op-ed, I got the impression that for him, the purely personal trumps everything else: personal loyalty matters more to him than, say, loyalty to the good of the country. Personal relationships, it seems, are for Carville the only absolute principle, and everything else is just details.
Carville's odd and problematic way of looking at the Richardson endorsement is on display already in the op-ed's first paragraphs:
Last Friday the New York Times asked me to comment on New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for president. For 15 years, Richardson served with no small measure of distinction as the representative of New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District. But he gained national stature -- and his career took off -- when President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and later made him energy secretary.
So, when asked on Good Friday about Richardson's rejection of the Clintons, the metaphor was too good to pass by. I compared Richardson to Judas Iscariot. (And Matthew Dowd is right: Had it been the Fourth of July, I probably would have called him Benedict Arnold.)
For me, two problems emerge immediately here. First, by writing "no small measure of distinction," he plays with words: he can't plausibly argue that serving in the U.S. Congress is no big deal, so he compliments that service in a way that subconsciously associates it with the word "small." As a communication/PR guru, Carville is expert at "saying without saying. His point seems to be, "Richardson was nobody (only a Congressman) before we made him. He owes us." Second, Judas betrayed his God, and Benedict Arnold his country; for Carville, evidently breaking with someone to whom you owe a big favor is in the same category.
Carville later tries to defend himself with a familiar smear tactic: false equivalence. For example, he writes,
Was it a desperate gambit for attention? Was I just trying to prove my point that both Samantha Power's resignation from the Obama campaign for calling Sen. Clinton a monster and the Obama campaign hysterically promoting Geraldine Ferraro's misguided statements were equally silly and superficial?
By referencing Power as well as Ferraro, he seems to be saying, "both sides do it, I've always said it was silly for people who go over the top to resign in shame, so get off my case already." The trouble is that Samantha Power's remark was a personally uncomplimentary turn of phrase, which she immediately tried to take off the record, acknowledging that it should have been private rather than public; Ferraro, on the other hand, "said without saying" racist slurs in a public speech! These are not remotely equivalent things. As for Carville's "Judas" remark, I hope it's obvious which category it belongs in.
Finally, near the close of his op-ed, Carville lays out the underlying rationale for his arguments:
I believe that loyalty is a cardinal virtue. Nowhere in the world is loyalty so little revered and tittle-tattle so greatly venerated as in Washington. I was a little-known political consultant until Bill Clinton made me. When he came upon hard times, I felt it my duty -- whatever my personal misgivings -- to stick by him. At the very least, I would have stayed silent. And maybe that's my problem with what Bill Richardson did. Silence on his part would have spoken loudly enough.
So Carville openly admits to believing that purely personal loyalty to the one who "made" you trumps loyalty to what, in conscience, one feels will be right for the country. For Carville, personal pique trumps political principle. Adding insult to injury, by claiming that Bill Clinton "made" Bill Richardson, he argues that a U.S. Congressman was "nobody" until he gained the Clintons' almighty approval, and thus has no right to express an independent opinion in public.
Apologies for this overlong diary. After all, Carville's arrogance frankly speaks for itself.