Carville, Matalin discuss politics

Grant Suire, a 13-year-old Crowley eighth-grader, asked veteran political experts James Carville and Mary Matalin for their advice to young people looking to get involved in politics.
“You have to be able to stand losing,” Matlin said at Thursday’s One Acadiana luncheon at the Cajundome Convention Center.
Carville said, “If you get interested in politics, the first thing you have to realize ... you are going to have some disappointing days and nights.”
But Carville added, “We need young people like you to be willing to come in and accept these challenges.”
And Matalin said a starting point is to volunteer in a campaign.
Suire’s question was one many topics the famous married odd couple of politics talked about for about an hour to the regional chamber of commerce.
Carville is the political genius behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 winning campaign for president and Matalin is a longtime Republican insider.
Matalin recently switched her party affiliation from Republican to Libertarian.
Carville predicted a win for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Matalin predicted a victory for Republican Donald Trump.
Trump is the result of a failed party, she said. Trump’s message is not about policy, but, “What do you have to lose?”
Trump’s message rings truer than Clinton who says she is experienced and an agent of change, stances Matalin called schizophrenic.
“You want a two-party system. Now we have a one party system. The big government party and the little bit less big government party,” she said.
Carville said Clinton’s experience, which includes serving as a senator and secretary of state, matters.
Voters should be looking for someone with the judgement to handle crises, which are as yet unknown.
Matalin also spoke about the political crisis that occurred after Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky surfaced.
“He’s your best friend. He made you lie,” she said of Carville’s defense of Clinton.
The she recalled her husband’s explaining, “Sugah, sugah, if I did something that stupid to a girl that young I would lie too.”
Carville said, “There is a long chinese proverb that if you stand by the river long enough you watch the carcasses of your enemies float by.”
He reeled off the names of Speakers Bob Livingston, Dennis Hastert and special prosecutor Ken Starr, all foes of Bill Clinton.
“There is absolutely no government policy that is all bad and all good,” Carville said. “Everything constitutes a trade-off.”
Barack Obama won the popular vote, but only won a third of the counties in America, Carville said in explaining that Democrats live mostly in cities and Republicans everywhere else.
“There is much less contact with people of the other party,” he said. Some party believers “literally hate the other one” and that is undermining the fabric of the country, he said.
Carville, who teaches political science at Tulane University in New Orleans, said he asks his students to defend positions they do not agree with.
Both made a pitch for Louisiana to take the lead in coastal restoration research.
“According to the Pentagon, the biggest security problem the United States faces is subsidence and the rising sea level,” Carville said.
Coastal restoration in Louisiana will cost billions and billions of dollars and people demanding that it happen, he said after the luncheon.
But he added, “This is really not going to cost us money at the end of the day. We are going to actually make money. It is going to be good for us and we’ve got to get people to think of things not as expenditures, but as investments.”