James Carville and Mary Matalin spar over election, fawn over New ...

Mary Matalin and James Carville star in new commercials for Mitsubishi Electric Cooling & Heating. (Photo by Mitsubishi Electric Cooling @ Heating)

"James take it over from here because I'm going to start crying," Matalin said.

James Carville came to the University of New Orleans on Thursday night equipped with a practiced one-liner for Democrats to savor after President Obama's dramatic victory this week: "Never have so few spent so much and accomplished so little." And it drew the warm laughter it was supposed to from the crowd of several hundred who gathered to watch the pugnacious Cajun spar congenially with wife and dueling partner Mary Matalin at UNO's University Center Ballroom.

The two famously oppositional election operatives-turned-television pundits sat under the stage lights on a mock living room set for an election debriefing with Gambit chairman and columnist Clancy DuBos, part of a series of events to welcome new UNO President Peter Fos.

Carville's punch line referred to the relatively small circle of billionaires who poured cash into the new "super PACS" whose attacks ads filled TV screens this political season. And he marveled at how the Obama camp's get-out-the-vote effort seemed to have landed more of a dent at the polls.

"The ground game is going to be worthy of a lot of study," Carville said. "The Obama people had a very sophisticated, very new, very nuanced ground game," and it appears to have "produced a lot more than all the TV ads."

Carville also noted what seems to be the increasingly accurate election-day projections furnished by aggregated survey data, nodding to forecasters Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger, and Mark Blumenthal, the Huffington Post polling editor. The pollsters, he said, have "never, ever been more than a percentage point off in any presidential election since 2000."

Matalin countered by arguing that Obama, despite the win, "is the first president in history who received fewer electoral votes and a smaller margin than the first time around. ... Now what does that mean? What that means is, there's no mandate."

In the U.S. Senate, she said, where Democrats picked up two seats, it was more a case of the Republicans losing than the Democrats winning. "We had -- I just don't have another word for this -- W-T-F candidates," she said, pointing in particular to Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican who stumbled badly during the campaign with his comments about "legitimate rape."

Seasoned political analysis aside, the real show was Carville and Matalin themselves, whose colorful commentary has kept them in the media spotlight 20 years after either of them ran their last domestic political campaign.

Their cranky antics at each other's expense provided most of the laughs Thursday night. He compared her tenacity to a Japanese soldier who wouldn't come out of his foxhole on Iwo Jima until years after Word War II had ended. She aped his dramatic hand gestures when the microphone went haywire, and looked quizzically at the audience when he began absentmindedly and unreservedly scratching under his armpit in the middle of a response.

"We don't talk on election night and we haven't really talked since," she said.

To close the evening out, they reflected warmly on New Orleans, where they relocated from Washington just a few years after Hurricane Katrina. (DuBose noted earlier that they had both donated their regular speaking fee back to the university.)?

Cheering the city's post-storm comeback, Matalin said, "James take it over from here because I'm going to start crying. I just find this the most compelling, heartening, optimistic model for the country."

Carville, unmistakably the Louisiana native, noted that in other parts of the country, people are obsessed with their "quality of life," where in New Orleans, "we're obsessed with our way of life."

"We have our own food, we have our own music, we have our own funerals, we have our own social structures, we have our own architecture, we have our own body of literature," he said. "No one ever went to an Ohio restaurant to listen to Oregon music."?

Source: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/11/james_carville_and_mary_matali_2.html

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