“The only person that ever stumbles is a guy moving forward. You don’t stumble backwards; you stumble forward, and you never stumble when you’re stationary. So don’t worry about stumbling. Keep pushing it forward.”
― James Carville
“Punditry is like weather forecasting: the winds can shift without warning. I remember when nobody would bet a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder that Bill Clinton would win the White House.”
― James Carville
“If a statesman is one who looks to the next generation and a politician one who looks to the next election, a political consultant must be one who looks to the next tracking poll.”
― James Carville
“When I was wrong about the 2002 elections, I dumped a garbage can on my head. When my John Kerry prediction didn’t pan out in 2004, I smashed an egg on my face.”
― James Carville
“My favorite Saturday, outside any Saturday that Louisiana State University plays football, is the Kentucky Derby.”
― James Carville
“Some comments are within bounds, while some are not. But by whining about every little barb, candidates are trying to win the election through a war of staff resignation attrition, and Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between what is fair game and what is not.”
― James Carville
“I like being on the side of healthcare consumer.”
― James Carville
“I had a remarkably happy childhood; whatever scars I have are self-inflicted.”
― James Carville
“Sometimes the right thing gets done for the wrong reason and sometimes, unfortunately, the wrong thing gets done for the right reason.”
― James Carville
“I point out the Democratic party won two world wars and beat the depression, cut out the poverty by two thirds, and was responsible for the same sustained prosperity that we’ve had in the United States. What the hell do we have to apologize for?”
― James Carville
“As with mosquitoes, horseflies, and most bloodsucking parasites, Kenneth Starr was spawned in stagnant water.”
― James Carville
“I’ve had enough of the blowhards on cable TV and the self-righteous anger I hear from people whose only accomplishment in life is their ability to turn the dial on an AM radio.”
― James Carville
“Like a lot of people, I pray for a sick relative or that kind of thing, but I don’t pray to make my next flight connection at the airport. I find prayers before sports contests to be insensitive and kind of demeaning, at least when someone prays to beat the other team or something like that.”
― James Carville
“I have people ask me if I’m going to convince my daughters to be Democrats, and I say, ‘I have yet to convince my daughters to close a door.’ I don’t how in the world I would ever convince them to be in a political affiliation.”
― James Carville
“Romney is an accomodationist technocrat who is an ideological pretzel of a man.”
― James Carville
“I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn’t describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I’m extremely fortunate.”
― James Carville
“I always wanted to be a sports broadcaster.”
― James Carville
“Honestly, I enjoy nothing more than two Republicans going after each other.”
― James Carville
“No one will ever accuse James Carville of taking himself seriously.”
― James Carville
“Ideologies aren’t all that important. What’s important is psychology.”
― James Carville
“I was against gay marriage until I realized I didn’t have to get one.”
― James Carville
“I think the Democratic Party has the chronic problem of appearing to be weak, of not standing and fighting for what it believes in, not fighting for its own.”
― James Carville
“You know there’s nothing a Hill Democrat would rather do than criticize another Democrat. It is their favorite activity. Then they can read about how honorable they are in an Op-Ed piece, how bipartisan.”
― James Carville
“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.”
― James Carville
“I made the argument that every growing demographic in this country – nonwhite voters, younger people – is trending Democratic. It’s a ticking time bomb for the GOP. That’s why I felt safe in saying that ‘Republicans have no hope of making serious inroads into Democratic advantages in 2010 or likely 2012 or 2014 and so on.’”
― James Carville
“Politics is a rough and tumble business, and yet there seems to be an effort by the commentariat to sanitise American politics to some type of high-level Victorian debating society.”
― James Carville
“My high school job was putting insulation in attics – in Louisiana in the summer. It must have been 95 degrees every day, and the insulation used to get all over me. It was not fun. But I didn’t know any different. It wasn’t like I was spending summers on Cape Cod.”
― James Carville
“During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.”
― James Carville
“I grew up in a French-dominated Catholic part of the country. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school. I have a cousin who is a priest – it’s part of my DNA. It’s kind of hard to separate me from the church, to try to say where one starts and the other stops.”
― James Carville
“You have to have sharp elbows if you want to change something.”
― James Carville
“I think Ralph Nader is the biggest liar in American politics when he said it didn’t matter who was president.”
― James Carville
“The only thing I’m running for is the state line.”
― James Carville
“When you become famous, being famous becomes your profession.”
― James Carville
“But I’d rather not predict. I’d rather affect.”
― James Carville
“We should not run away from religious teachings. We should run to them.”
― James Carville
“If you didn’t have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?”
― James Carville
“The teachings of the Church line up more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.”
― James Carville
“If you want to be angry at Gore, be angry at him for not fighting harder in Florida.”
― James Carville
“I think that America will not trust a party to defend America that isn’t willing to defend itself.”
― James Carville
“Every day Catholics prove that you can be a good Catholic and a good Democrat and have a different position from the Church on abortion.”
― James Carville
“Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there’s no telling what you will find.”
― James Carville
“Most of the stuff I’ve ever said is pretty insignificant and, by and large, has been said off the cuff and without much thought to the potential consequences.”
― James Carville
“I’ve worked on enough campaigns to know that the most aggrieved candidate rarely emerges victorious.”
― James Carville
“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.”
― James Carville
“I know a bit about selling books, and you need a good title – a catchy concoction with a little Cajun spice, something that will make folks stop in the aisles, turn away from the Grisham novels and the latest crazy diet fad, and pick up your masterpiece.”
― James Carville
“In 1992, the most treasured voter was a voter that would sort of swing back and forth, one that might vote for Republican for president, Democrat for governor. The voter that didn’t have that strong of a partisan ID. These were the voters that we targeted.”
― James Carville
“When you run for president, and become president, they just rip you apart. Every facade of privacy that you have is gone. I think everybody believes that, to some extent, you can maintain privacy. And I think in the end, everybody gets proven wrong.”
― James Carville
“Bill Clinton is a person who causes a lot of passion both ways about people, and there’s certainly a lot of turmoil if you look back at the eight years. But there was a lot of good, too.”
― James Carville
“When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library. I thought that was fine. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn’t say anything.”
― James Carville
“I actually thought Pope Paul VI was the most tragic figure in the modern church, like Lyndon Johnson was a very tragic figure in politics in some ways.”
― James Carville
“I always find it offensive when people say God showers riches on you if you’re good.”
― James Carville
“Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong, and, if necessary, hit back.”
― James Carville
“It’s better to be married to someone who hates your politics than someone who hates your momma.”
― James Carville
“There are many Republicans who hardly even know a Democrat. And there are just as many, if not more, Democrats who don’t know a Republican.”
― James Carville
“Democrats cluster in cities, and Republicans don’t.”
― James Carville
“I knew that manual labor wasn’t the career for me.”
― James Carville
“I love young people. I identify with them. It never was a goal of mine to grow up.”
― James Carville
“I grew up in Carville, Louisiana.”
― James Carville
“I’m a ‘just the facts, ma’am’ kind of guy.”
― James Carville
“The American psyche has not recovered, and likely will not ever fully recover, from the profound and relentless incompetence of George W. Bush’s disastrous, multitrillion-dollar war.”
― James Carville
“The thing I love about politics and sports is that there is an end goal – winning – and there are indeed winners and losers.”
― James Carville
“Conservatives literally view it as a kind of a weakness to talk to people other than their own. Nothing would bore me more than to sit around talking and listening to a bunch of liberals all day.”
― James Carville
“If you want to believe that the government’s coming for our guns or that being gay is a choice and a sin or that ObamaCare signals the end of civilization or that cutting taxes for rich people is the path to a better America, that’s your choice. I’m never going to believe in any of that.”
― James Carville
“Back when I went to Louisiana State University a million years ago, we got the Baton Rouge paper. But if you wanted to read ‘The New York Times’ or ‘The Wall Street Journal,’ you had to go to the reading room of the student union, and you got the edition several days after it had been published, and you had to read it on a wooden stick.”
― James Carville
“With the all-volunteer military, we, as a society, have become disconnected from our armed forces. And our military, like almost everything else in our country, has been outsourced.”
― James Carville
“Over the course of history, governments, political regimes, and leaders have done some stupid things despite all arguments to the contrary, at times even against their own self-interest.”
― James Carville
“My mother, Ms. Nippy Carville, was a woman of many talents.”
― James Carville
“It is literally painful to watch Rick Perry as a candidate.”
― James Carville
“The case could be made that Rick Perry is the worst debater to ever run for president.”
― James Carville
“Mitt Romney is to presidential campaigns as the Delta House grade point average was to Faber College – the worst in history.”
― James Carville
“It is undeniably the duty of the opposition party to field a credible slate of candidates for the nation’s highest office.”
― James Carville
“One of my favorite aspects of basketball is good passing.”
― James Carville
“Democratic strategists and operatives should not design a strategy based off today’s conditions. They should be setting a strategy for where the trajectory of polling is headed.”
― James Carville
“When one has retired from the ranks of American domestic political consulting, as I have, you are not really allowed to just quit. You become emeritus, of counsel, senior status, and God knows what.”
― James Carville
“I have always respected how Bobby Bowden would go out and challenge any opponent, and he produced some legendary games against the University of Miami and Notre Dame.”
― James Carville
“I have always loved the college atmosphere – sometimes too much, which is why I spent so long at LSU.”
― James Carville
“It’s our heritage: we Democrats, we dream a lot.”
― James Carville
“Democrats, myself included, tend to respect and value expertise and find that people who have established a record of accuracy and developed a model that’s proven to be beneficial over time should be people accorded great deference when they opine on a topic that they have demonstrated past mastery over.”
― James Carville
“What has always made the Clintons great politicians and better people is their unyielding commitment to expanding the middle class for everyone.”
― James Carville
“After all of my years in politics, I’ve learned that sometimes things that are said are true, and other things that are said are less than true.”
― James Carville
“I tell my students that the single most powerful thing that we have in this country – something that literally harbors no dissent and no questioning – is the all-powerful elite narrative.”
― James Carville
“When I was sixteen, I borrowed a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from the mobile library. Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me.”
― James Carville
“Some of these people think the universe is five thousand years old, and they say it with a straight face. If somebody had an explanation saying why they thought the earth was five thousand years old, there’s only two possible explanations: you’re really stupid, or you’re really cynical and trying to get really stupid people’s votes.”
― James Carville
“My populism doesn’t extend to my choice of hotels.”
― James Carville
“Right-wingers don’t want public education to succeed.”
― James Carville
“My blood’s not red or blue – it’s brown.”
― James Carville
“Cajuns eat Italian on Sundays.”
― James Carville
“We say there are people who have worked in campaigns who say that they have lost some – and we call those folks operatives, managers, strategists, consultants; and then there are people who work in campaigns and say that they have never lost, and we call them liars.”
― James Carville
“The thing to remember about Obama is he doesn’t care if you like him or I like him or somebody else does. He literally would rather do homework with his kids than be around other politicians. Does this make him unpopular at times? Yes. Does it make him ineffective? Most certainly not.”
― James Carville
“As Mike Tyson says, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. The one thing we know about American presidential politics is you’re going to get hit in the mouth.”
― James Carville
“The 1980 Republican presidential contest might have been as good a roster of candidates as ever fielded by any party.”
― James Carville
“When you dehumanize a group, there’s lasting consequences because they know that they’re being dehumanized.”
― James Carville
“To be a contrarian, you’ve got to be a contrarian against your own people.”
― James Carville
“Campaigns are about adjustments.”
― James Carville
“Momentum has always counted for something, not everything, but it’s always perceived as being something that matters in American politics.”
― James Carville
“Politics has become the great spectator sport of the United States.”
― James Carville
“When I was growing up, I always had the dream of being an analyst for a minor league baseball team or something like that.”
― James Carville
“My dad was actually a college boxer at L.S.U. and a good one, too. He was the captain of the boxing team.”
― James Carville
“When I was a little bitty boy, I was a fan of boxing. But in Louisiana, it’s football, football, football, and then everything else.”
― James Carville
“When I was a kid and L.S.U. lost, you didn’t read the papers until, like, Thursday.”
― James Carville
“This idea that somehow or another, every idea on its face, because it’s an idea, has some validity is ludicrous.”
― James Carville
“I’ve had enough of giving millionaires like Dick Cheney and myself tax breaks and giving America’s kids a mountain of debt.”
― James Carville
“I’m not sure the people who are voting for Trump want to be pulled together with the people who are voting for Clinton and vice versa.”
― James Carville
“We don’t know each other. Democrats don’t know Republicans, Republicans don’t know Democrats.”
― James Carville
“I love to walk into places and have what I think is, like, the prettiest, smartest wife in town. I kind of enjoy that.”
― James Carville
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