James Carville is beginning to sound like Lamont Cranston's evil twin. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, but he has no intention of using any old Tibetan mind-clouding methods to make himself invisible while tackling it. This is one up front, in-your-face Shadow, and if he is practicing a sort of verbal incantation, he's certainly doing it in public, out loud, and with a sort of deadpan folksiness that takes no edge off his words.

"You know something?" begins his new book, And the Horse He Rode In On: The People v. Kenneth Starr, with the sort of companionable frankness of a guy buying you your second beer. "I don't like Ken Starr. I don't like one damn thing about him. I don't like his politics. I don't like his sanctimony. I don't like his self-piety. I don't like the people he runs with. I don't like his suck-up, spit-down view of the world, how he kisses up to the powerful and abuses the life out of regular people. I don't like his private legal clients. I don't like . . ." well, you get the idea. And if you don't get it right off, Carville will make sure you get it a page or two farther along.

Impossibly impolitic and irresistibly quotable, James Carville is the President's most unabashed, adamant, and flamboyant advocate. His intentional lack of polish may be an anomaly in the political consultant-cum-talking head circles (and may in fact be as much pose as some people's polish), but it plays to the hilt outside the Beltway, as Washingtonians say. And Carville's hot-off-the-presses tract, with its last-minute appendix addressing the release of President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony, is as much an indictment of the anti-Clinton forces as it is a rallying cry for his supporters.

"I'm trying to get the Democrats fired up, so they'll get out there and vote," says Carville. "The press is so anti-Clinton: Where can the people who like the President go?" Horse is written in the same conversational style, a mix of straight stuff and a little commentary along the way, that he used in his last book, We're Right, They're Wrong, which like Horse trumpeted the economic and social victories of the Clinton administration. It's also a mix of demonstrable fact and reprinted legal criticism with partisan argument. After all, as Carville cheerfully admits, "People don't look to me for objectivity. A lot of the straight stuff is already out there, so it's sort of lists, talking points," Carville says. "My readers really want to have the information; I see them all the time with my book, and the pages are dog-eared and stuff is underlined. But they like a little sizzle with their steak, too, so I have to give them some of that." And once you get beyond that thigh-smacking style, it's a horse of a different color: furious, yes, somewhat redundant and occasionally ingenuous, but also deeply disturbing in its litany of conflicts, constitutional breaches, and at best ill-considered actions he lays at the door of Starr's office. (The publicly-funded ones, that is, not his private law firm's.) It may not win him any Mr. Congeniality titles from the Republican leadership, but then, as Carville would undoubtedly say, a man is known as much by his enemies as by his friends.

Besides, Carville, the most famous Clinton advisor who has neither been impersonated by Michael J. Fox nor sucked toes in the Jefferson Hotel (well, actually, I didn't ask about that), already has a list of sobriquets to treasure. From the relatively benign Ragin' Cajun jokes (he is in fact a native Louisianan) and marital Mad Dog jibes of the early '90s (Carville is famously married to the equally blunt-spoken former Bush campaign maven and staunch Republican Mary Matalin), his critics have long since passed to Clinton hatchet man, henchman, spinner and the snider political op, Washingtonspeak for hired gun. Even the usually straitlaced New York Times, which seems to dread Carville as some type of Sherman's revenge, denounces his scorched earth approach.

But no one can accuse Carville of backstabbing, ambushing, or entrapping his prey. This army announces its campaign plan in advance. He is Cpl. 'Cueball' Carville rollin' back into battle, as he put it on Meet the Press.

Much of Horse came right out of Carville's files. Carville has been stewing over Starr since he was first appointed as independent counsel in April, 1994; he wrote a letter to the White House urging that he be allowed to take on the man he already saw as unacceptably partisan, to warn the American people about who Ken Starr really was, but was persuaded to sit it out. Carville takes aim as well at the national media pack Carville thinks has given the baying Starr his head in return for a daily ration of scraps, i.e., news bites. One of the funniest (well, in a grim way) sections of the book just quotes one newspaper or news magazine story after another that as weeks and months passed each announced that Starr's investigation had reached a critical stage. He has a telling nickname for the journalists, editorialists, reporters, columnists and sycophants of the Washington establishment: JERKS.

On the other hand, Carville stands by the handshake rule your word should be your bond and is ungrudging in acknowledging the fair players among the press (in particular, the late Ann Devroy, a Washington Post reporter who agreed not to release the copy of that April 1994 letter secret when Carville asked to withdraw it).

Interviews and quotable jokes notwithstanding, Carville has more serious pre-2000 campaigning to do. "There are some books you want to do, and some books you have to do," he says. "This is a book I had to do, but now there's a book I really want to do." Tentatively titled Five Smooth Stones, he describes it as a more optimistic take on progressive policies, one in which he hopes to return to the politics of ideas rather than individuals. That's the sort of politics, in case you think he's going soft, in which you prove your enemies are merely fools, not criminals.

Incidentally, Carville has not interest in filling any elected office himself. "I couldn't stand the kind of scrutiny everyone comes under these days," he says flatly and for him, seriously. Then, "The only thing I'm running for is the state line. "

SIDEBAR
One reason Carville immediately sniffed at Starr's heels was that he had already met him or rather, been accosted by him. In what may be the single strangest episode in Carville's book, he tells of waiting for Matalin, whose flight was late, in an airline club at Washington National Airport in October, 1993. An intense, bespectacled man sidled up to Carville, and when Carville nodded at him, thinking perhaps they had met during the 1992 campaign, this guy started spouting an unsolicited and shameful tirade against the President. "Your boy's getting rolled," the man said with evident glee. Carville shrugged him off as just another hate radio fan, and forgot about him until ten months later, when a TV clip announcing Starr's appointment revealed him to be the weirdo from the airport.

Eve Zibart wishes to make clear that opinions expressed in this interview do not reflect those of any of the publications she writes for except perhaps this one.

It has the subtitle Politics in the Clinton Years. Trouble is, in the week since first arranging to talk with newspaper columnist Molly Ivins about You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, politics and Clinton both have done a wild 360, and neither Ivins nor anybody else knows if the truck stops here . . . or keeps on spinning.

Brash, funny, sharp-penned, and liberal, Ivins has never been happy defending Clinton. "If left to my own devices, I’d spend all my time pointing out that he’s weaker than bus-station chili," she writes. "But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied." Besides, Ivins adds, "No one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal."

Now she tells me that in light of Clinton’s recent troubles, she’s rewritten the book’s introduction. "Remember that metaphor that the Republicans keep trying to hang Clinton but the rope keeps breaking? It may be that this rope isn’t going to break. I thought I should go back and acknowledge that."

It’s not the only tough-minded acknowledgment Ivins makes in this vastly entertaining collection. In a piece called "What I Did to Morris Udall," she remembers an unfair profile she wrote about Representative Udall during his 1976 presidential bid, and concludes, "My continuing regret is that what I wrote was accurate, but it wasn’t true. I was trying too hard to be a major-league, hard-hitting journalist that I let the real story go hang itself."

Why don’t her colleagues seem to share her regard for truth and accuracy? "We are seeing the effect of the fractionization of the audience," Ivins says. "Because the audience can be divided into those who needlepoint and those who knit and those who like monster trucks and because they all have separate channels, we’re getting television that appeals to the lowest common denominator. I hold Rupert Murdoch largely responsible for that. But it’s also a function of the way technology and the market works: when you get tabloid television, it drives what we used to call the establishment media."

Often, says Ivins, both the media and politicians "assume that people are dumb. When you dumb down public discourse on the theory that people are just a bunch of boobs who don’t know anything, you do real harm to people. There are two mistakes made in politics. Usually they take a very complex subject and oversimplify it. Every now and again, they take something really simple and make it sound complicated. I don’t do that. Part of what I try to do is prove that this is fascinating stuff. It’s hilariously funny, full of high drama — and low drama — and it affects your life."

The pieces collected here pretty much prove Ivins right. Culled from the hundreds of articles and columns she has written over the past four years, they cover everything from the disastrous effects of Timothy McVeigh’s poor taste in literature to the need to teach Bob Dole to smile. For good measure Ivins also includes a couple of wildly funny pieces on Texas politics and the general weirdness of people in all parts of our great nation, as well as some touching "tributes to souls passing." Never dull, usually hard-hitting, and always vividly written, they leave no doubt why she gets fan letters from truck drivers — as well as political foes.

"My all-time favorite fan letters began: ‘Dear Miz Ivins, I’ve been reading you for ten years now and this is the first time I ever agreed with you,’" Ivins says, then adds, "Great! Keep reading and it might just happen again."

If there’s an overriding theme to You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, it is the need for campaign finance reform. "Money was always part of politics," Ivins says, "It’s just that in the last decade or so the amount has become staggering. I’m convinced this is the root of the rot in American politics. The quality and kind of legislation we’re seeing reflects increasingly how indebted politicians are to the people with money. It’s really fouled up democracy."

Ivins is someone who "actually likes politicians, which is so socially unacceptable these days that I’m looking for some other perversion — perhaps inter-species breeding — so that people might not look at me so askance." But politicians "spend half their lives kissing somebody’s rear end. It’s a dreadful situation for a public servant to have to be in. It is a little ironic that they won’t get off the dime and help themselves out, since they know what the penalties are."

One of those penalties is to feel the scorching heat of Ivins in high-dudgeon. But for all her sharp-tongued barbs, Ivins says, "I have never been able to permanently piss off a politician. It used to amaze me when I first started writing about the legislature for a small progressive publication called the Texas Monthly. I would regularly cuss legislators out and say things like they were egg-sucking child molesters who ran on all fours. I actually hoped to become a martyr for journalism. I couldn’t wait to be horsewhipped. But all that ever happened was that I would see them in the capitol the next day and they would cradle the article in their arms and croon ‘Isn’t that nice? You put my name in your paper.’ They were discouragingly civilized."

In conversation, so is Molly Ivins. She’s also a "congenital optimist" who thinks "we should be cheerful about the here and now on the principle that it can always get worse and then we will never have been cheerful at all."

But the true key to her success? "One of the things that probably makes me worth reading is that I stay the hell away from Washington, D.C. It’s a city where everybody says exactly what everybody else says. And I don’t have to spend more than ten minutes in Washington before I find myself saying exactly the same thing too."

So let the campaign begin: For the sake of journalism, for the sake of that odd endangered species — the American liberal — and for the good of the nation’s political funnybone, keep Molly Ivins the hell out of Washington, D.C., and deep in the heart of Texas instead.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey says there is a very practical reason for ending his new autobiography, When I Was a Young Man in 1970, when he is only 26 years old and a fresh (and reluctant) recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“When I finished the longer version, it was almost 300,000 words,” he explains by phone from his office at New School University in New York. His whole life “was too big for one book. So I had to cut it down to size.” After being critically wounded in Vietnam in 1969, Kerrey returned to his native Nebraska and gradually immersed himself in business and politics. He served as governor of Nebraska and then moved on to two terms in the U.S. Senate. In 2001, he was appointed to his current post as president of the New School.

While Kerrey doesn’t regard himself as having been a “lone wolf” in his youth, the stories he tells reveal a personality which, while not indifferent to family and friends, seems extraordinarily self-contained. “If you ask me what’s the most important thing in my lifetime,” he reflects, “it’s the friends that I have and the love they give me male and female. And if you ask me what’s at the top of the list in terms of relationships, it’s the love of my wife and my children. I don’t know why I didn’t put more emphasis on that in my book.” Kerrey recalls his boyhood years in Lincoln, Nebraska, as idyllic. He worked in his father’s prosperous lumber and coal yard, had a newspaper route, became fascinated with his church, glued himself to the emerging medium of television, strove at high school football and developed a taste for politics via his participation in his YMCA’s model legislature program.

In national politics, Kerrey became known as a liberal on social matters. But in his youth he voted for conservatives Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. He says his political outlook has grown mostly from personal discoveries. “I went to Eastern Europe to Berlin and Prague and Russia in 1989 and 1990, when the revolutions were still going on [and] right after the [Berlin] Wall came down. Those experiences were shocking to me [seeing] the destructiveness of Communism. I saw how it destroyed the will of human beings and their potential and reduced their capability.” In his book, Kerrey confesses that he remained basically a provincial during his years as a pharmacy major at the University of Nebraska. He says he knew and cared little about art, literature or the grand social and political issues of the day. When he graduated in 1965, the war in Vietnam was intensifying, and he realized he was a prime candidate for the draft. Instead of seeking a deferment from military service, he bowed to the inevitable and, in 1966, enlisted in the Navy, enrolling in Officers Candidate School. His descriptions of his training at Newport, Rhode Island, and later at Coronado, California, crystallize those strange and dissonant times when America discovered it was at war not only with a foreign enemy but also with itself.

Last year, one of the soldiers he commanded the night he was wounded accused Kerrey of deliberately killing old men, women and children in the battle. Kerrey addresses that accusation only obliquely in his memoir, noting, “I would not swear that my memory [of the event] is 100% accurate. It is merely the best I can remember today.” In his interview, though, he admits he was “quite surprised” at the venom directed toward him because of this charge. “My guess is that it would be a different reaction if the story were to be told today, or if it had been told on October 1, 2001 rather than on May 1, 2001.” As a college president, Kerrey says one of his missions is to make sure the New School has an impact on the “great public debates of the day.” Is his passion for those great debates strong enough to lure him back into politics? “I don’t consider that I’ve left politics,” he snaps. “I love politics. I think democracy is very hard. It’s fun and enormously important. I’m not sure I’ll ever come back in as a candidate. I think it’s unlikely. But you never know.”

Anyone who has watched on-air MSNBC and NBC News correspondent Steve Kornacki knows how much he revels in the many twists and turns of U.S. politics. Now Kornacki brings his insights and enthusiasm to his captivating new book, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, which tackles the question that both sides of the political aisle have been trying to answer: How did our country become so divided?

It’s amazing to think that the terms red and blue weren’t used consistently for Republican and Democratic states until the 2000 presidential election night. It feels like we’ve had those terms forever. You also write that “Blue America” was born during the 1996 presidential election, although “no one had a name for it yet, or knew if it would endure.” At what point did you settle on the book’s title?
Literally 20 years ago, if you told someone that you lived in a red state, they would have no idea what you meant. Maybe they’d think you were talking about communism or something. On election nights into the 1990s, the TV networks would randomly assign colors. Sometimes the Democrats would be blue and sometimes they’d be red. In 1984, David Brinkley on ABC opened their election coverage by telling viewers that the Republican states would be colored in red that night―because “red” and “Reagan” started with the same letter.

Back then, though, the color scheme often didn’t matter. We had landslide elections. But in 2000, it was the closest to a perfect tie we’ve ever had, and the divisions were so stark. It just so happened that every network was using the same colors that night, and the country was left for weeks after the election to stare at and contemplate that map as the Florida recount played out. At one point, David Letterman joked that he had a solution to the disputed election―Al Gore could be president of the blue states and George W. Bush could be president of the red ones. That’s what we had become and that’s the basic division that has endured ever since.

When did you start working on The Red and the Blue, and what compelled you to write it?
I’ve been saying that I worked on this so long that it sometimes feels like I started writing it back in the ’90s. My first idea came about nine years ago, and it was for a much more narrow and limited project looking at the rise of Bill Clinton and what might have been with Mario Cuomo. But almost as soon as I got into the research, I realized there was so much more to the era and a much bigger story to be told. I was looking back at election nights from the ’80s, when there were coast-to-coast landslides, and I was realizing how far we’ve come from that. No one is about to win 49 states these days, but back then it happened, and the ’90s were sort of the bridge between the two―the decade when the red and blue America were born and the divide we live with today was created.

You grew up watching most of the political drama that you describe. How did your perceptions change as you wrote?
I did follow a lot of [what I cover in the book] in my politics-obsessed youth, so I came into the research and writing knowing most of the key characters and plot points. What I hadn’t gotten in real time, though, were the backstories. Why were all of these people in the position to do the things they did in the 1990s? How did they get there? What forces had propelled them before? Pat Buchanan, whose ’90s presidential campaigns stressed themes that are almost identical to what Trump would embrace 20 years later, is someone I came away with a much better understanding of.

Did you have any research stumbling blocks? Or lingering questions you would like to ask the politicians and personalities involved?
He never addressed it with much depth before he passed away a few years ago, but I have wondered a lot about Mario Cuomo’s fateful decision not to board that New Hampshire-bound plane [in order to declare himself a presidential candidate] in December 1991. He would have instantly been the Democratic front-runner and would very possibly have knocked off Bill Clinton and won the presidency. I think I understand why he passed that up, but I would love to have asked him—and for him to have answered in a very straightforward and introspective way. (In other words, in a very non-Cuomo way.)

A character in Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Unsheltered, notes: “History is not good news or bad news, it’s just one big story unreeling.” You obviously adore the “big story unreeling.” How did you manage to digest so much information and turn it into such a compelling narrative?
All I can think of his how much I left out! The challenge for me in trying to convey what I think of as the political legacy of the ’90s was to pick my spots to go deep. The Gingrich-Clinton collision and the wars it unleashed are, to me, what forced Americans to take sides, leaving us a nation divided into red and blue camps. But I felt I needed to show readers what political lessons Americans had internalized before that collision—to understand why they acted the way they did. So, for example, there’s a lot in the book about Gingrich in the ’80s staging what amounted to guerilla attacks on the House floor, enraging Democrats. Gingrich then got flooded with adulation from the grassroots base, showing his fellow Republicans that this stuff worked.

Was it difficult finding time to write while you carried out your on-air duties at MSNBC? You must have found endless parallels between past and present as you carried out both tasks simultaneously.
Writing this book in 2016 and 2017 ended up being an escape for me. The second-to-second breaking news environment we live in turns every minute or fragmentary development into a Big Moment, even though most of them end up fizzling out fast and being forgotten within days or even hours. So it was fun to sequester myself in my office or in a Così restaurant, put my headphones on and just immerse myself in a different time. The characters I was researching and writing about started to feel as contemporary to me as the names in that day’s news―although, then again, a lot of the characters from the ’90s are still characters in today’s news.

Do you have any idea how politics might become less tribalized and more about the art of compromise? Do you see any signs of hope?
On some level, I think, as humans, we are hard-wired for tribalism. What’s happened is that over the last few decades, our media and politics have evolved in a way that is maximally conducive to this instinct. My hope is that if human nature helped to get us to this place, maybe we will collectively grow sick of it and that human nature will help us find a way out. There were a lot of strong populist undercurrents that were not being expressed in our politics and media a few decades ago. But they were there, and they were not going to go away. Now they’re getting aired, and one of the effects is to feed all of this instability and tribalism. But maybe a few decades from now we’ll be able to look back at this period and be able to say that it was nasty and divisive but also a necessary bridge to something better.

What is it like being an on-air personality in these days of increasingly tribalized media and “fake news” attacks?
I like to think that I occupy one of the few lanes in political media that can actually be a bridge between the two tribes. No matter which side you’re on, everyone has a stake in trying to understand why things are playing out the way they are. I try to use numbers and maps and historical context to tell that story and facilitate that conversation. I’ve found that there’s a lot I can talk about with both blue and red audiences without having to change the substance of what I’m saying.

What’s your favorite part of your TV job?
Election nights are my favorite, hands down. There’s just so much going on, so much information coming in, so many unexpected twists, especially when a race comes down to just a few votes in just a few precincts.

Your book is filled with so many fascinating anecdotes and quotes. One that seems particularly prescient comes from Jim Squires, who was Ross Perot’s spokesperson. Discussing the populist energy that Perot managed to lasso as a presidential candidate, Squires said, “The next time the man on the white horse comes in, he may not be so benign. He could be a real racial hater or a divider of people.” Were you startled to see that comment?
As soon as I saw that quote I jumped back and said to myself, “This has to be in the book!” One of the themes of the book is that the formula for what Trump pulled off in 2016 was essentially revealed through a few different characters and moments in the ’90s—and here was someone looking at the potential of a party-crashing populist billionaire and anticipating the exact thing that would later be said by critics about Trump.

Have you started thinking about ideas for another book?
The plan is to keep going and to look at what happened next: The America created by the ’90s and the George W. Bush era, when Bush came to office after a disputed election—settled only by a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling—and leads the country through 9/11 in a way that seemed to shatter all of these new divisions, only to watch them all resurface and intensify as he pushed the country to war and won a narrow re-election in a “battle of the bases” election that set a new template for how campaigns are won and lost.

Author photo by Anthony J. Scutro