Psychology always trumps ideology. Well, at least according to James Carville. The squinty, chrome-domed architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign is always good for a memorable quote, but some of the Ragin’ Cajun’s more recent antics have left political observers wondering whether or not the cantankerous analyst, author, and political talk-show regular is still relevant. No sooner had the Democrats retaken the House and the Senate by running hard against President Bush and the conservative agenda than Carville was publicly fretting that the party’s left flank would be its undoing. He brought down the wrath of the left’s vociferous online community by forcefully suggesting that Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, whose “50 State Strategy” played a certain, if not entirely quantifiable, role in the Dem’s first decisive victory since 9/11, should be immediately replaced by Harold Ford Jr., the triangulating conservative Democrat from Tennessee who ran a textbook 1992 campaign and lost his Senate campaign to moderate Republican Bob Corker. The conservative, anti-Dean rhetoric caused some on the winning side to wonder if Carville had become so deeply entrenched in Beltway groupthink that he was no longer the man who once famously claimed that “Republicans will always take on people in the interest of power,” while “good Democrats will never fear to take on the power in the interests of people.”
On Thursday, March 29th, at 7 p.m., the Rhodes College Lecture Board brings the always colorful and ever controversial Carville to the McCallum Ballroom in the Bryan Campus Life Center on the Rhodes College campus.
James Carville at rhodes college, Thursday, March 29th. Tickets are $20 at the door, $10 for students. Rhodes students get in free.