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By Newsweek Editors
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JAMES CARVILLE CAN'T wait to turn on the VCR. "I had so much fun doing this," he says, rummaging his scruffy Capitol Hill office looking for the remote. On screen, he's seated behind a desk talking politics, sporting his old rugby shirt from "The War Room," the documentary about the '92 Clinton campaign. But this time, it's the sneakers, stupid. For Nike, Carville is spinning the tongue-in-cheek presidential candidacy of the Seattle Mariners' Ken Griffey Jr. in a series of spots that will run through the baseball and political seasons. "If you can hit an Orel Hershiser slider," says Carville, "there's no reason you can't hit welfare reform."
Some operatives with White House connections grow rich selling access. Carville has become a millionaire not by running campaigns--he doesn't do that anymore--but by peddling Carville. He's already at work on an update of his new (ghostwritten) book, "We're Right, They're Wrong," a best-selling defense of activist government liberally laced with recipes and GOP-bashing. Carville, who made his name sneering at the rich, is now one of them. (NEWSWEEK made its own contribution when it excerpted his memoir of the '92 campaign.) With his Cajun-flavored populism, he's become the Democratic equivalent of Rush Limbaugh.
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Carville's calendar is swollen with $15,000-a-pop lecture dates, many of them with corporate executives who'd be pleased to send Bill Clinton back to Arkansas. Later this year, he'll appear as a prosecutor in "The People vs. Larry Flynt," the Milos Forman film starring Woody Harrelson as the Hustler magazine publisher All of this is underwriting a life Carville could have scarcely imagined a few years ago, when he was struggling to pay his bills. Now he and his wife, GOP pundit Mary Matalin, and their infant daughter spend weekends at their Shenandoah Valley retreat, complete with wine cellar.
Carville is unmoved by.the suggestion that his rush for the bucks is hypocritical. "I believe it's possible to sleep in a Ritz Carlton and hope people have an opportunity to be as comfortable as you are," he says. Matalin thinks a combination of late parenthood (he became a father at 50) and the death of his own father at 56 is pushing him to secure their daughter's financial future. "We're both pretty morbid in our thinking about not being around," says Matalin, whose mother died young.
Carville doesn't want to go back to the trenches for Clinton. He concedes that celebrity has dulled his fighting edge. "I'm not as hungry as I was," he says. Nor is there much love lost between Carville and Clinton's reigning guru, Dick Morris. Earlier this year, Morris blamed an alleged cabal of Carville, Matalin and George Stephanopoulos for leaking an anti-Morris story. (Morris had been pushing a budget deal by slipping White House polling data to Dole that indicated both parties would benefit from a settlement.) But Clinton still talks strategy with Carville by phone about once a week. Later this month, the two will sit down to talk about a part-time campaign role that would include attack-dog TV appearances and debate prep in the fall. Carville will keep his hand in--both out of loyalty and to protect his investment in the Clinton era.
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