Carville--Now And Then

On the right, you see James Carville in his better days. I always found him to be somewhat lizard-like, but his transformation has been amazing. On the left you see Mr. Carville today, post-Obama election, post-BP oil spill. He is not a happy camper, and it appears to be affecting him phsyically as well as verbally.

Previously, Carville's nastiest vitriol was aimed at conservatives, Republicans, and women who preserve their stained dresses. Today, as a Louisianan, his sights are set on one Barack Obama and the anticapitalist eco-freaks in his administration. The same man who previously worked so hard to elect Barack Obama (after Hillary was out of the race) has now been mugged by the reality we conservatives knew all along--Barack Obama is form without substance and a "leader" who can talk about his predecessor's failure to react to a crisis, but now makes Bush look like the picture-perfect leader.

This might not all be so striking if it weren't for the fact that both crises occurred in the same part of the country. And in both cases, Carville came out swinging to attack the president he felt wasn't helping his chosen home state of Louisiana. The Democrats have long uttered the mantra "all politics is local." But we rarely get to see a highly-partisan political operative dissemble entirely for that very reason.

Bush was Carville's target during hurricane Katrina, even though he knew full well that Bush did everything possible both before and during the crisis to protect New Orleans and the gulf region within his Constitutional authority. Carville knew full well that the negligence of the New Orleans mayor and the boo-hooing governor of Louisiana were major roadblocks to Bush action. Until the governor stopped boo-hooing, declared an official emergency, and called the President to help, anything Bush did would have been an extra-constitutional invasion of a sovereign state by the central government.

Now the shoe is on Carville's other foot, and it's apparently a very painful fit (if the volume of his screeching is any indication). On CNN's Anderson Cooper show, Carville moaned: "People here have been so let down. The levies . . . the federal government let us down . . . Now the government comes in. . . and say 'just blanket stop everything out there.' It's killing the economy here." Sorry, Mr. Carville, but you and your Clintonites set this up when they took up the anti-oil drilling position on your watch. We couldn't even be allowed to drill on dry land, in a remote, mosquito-infested piece of Alaska. What did you expect to happen when your fellow-travelers had a big excuse for a moratorium in deep gulf waters?

It's also interesting that Carville is in high dudgeon largely about the economic impact of the administration decision to stop all drilling for a minimum of 90 days. Guess he didn't notice that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had predicted the victory of the eco-freaks, though Jindal seemed to be a great deal more concerned with the human and wildlife tragedy that was unfolding. And unlike both Obama and Carville, Jindal is actually doing everything within his power to avert further disaster, while the Democrats are too busy talking about it and trying to make political hay out of it. Unlike his predecessor who waited for days after Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans, Jindal not only exercised his emergency powers at the earliest opportunity, but he took a risk in declaring an additional emergency as hurricane-force winds approached the spill site and the Louisiana shore.

The economic impact of Obama inaction at the beginning and foolish action now is horrendous, and Carville is right in pointing it out in no uncertain terms. He is joined by fellow Democratic US Senator from Louisiana Mary Landrieu and Democratic House Member Gene Green of Houston, Texas. Though they are all concerned with the human and ecological disaster, all see the moratorium as throwing salt on the wound by doing serious damage to the gulf economies at a time when money and jobs are most needed. Louisiana State University estimates that the moratorium will damage the four gulf states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi to the tune of $2.1 billion.

At the end of the Anderson Cooper interview, Carville was nearly hysterical. His last statement was: "They don't have the foggiest idea about life here, they don't have the foggiest notion of what's going on. The federal government is about to kill us." This may come as a surprise to a political operative like Carville, but those of us who never held government jobs and have never been Washington insiders could have told him that. For decades, we have watched the distant central government in DC systematically destroy federalism and ruin the economy in complete disregard for the human toll. I guess it all depends on whose ox is being gored.