James Carville - Political and Media Work

Political and Media Work

After 1992 Carville stopped working on domestic campaigns, stating that he would bring unneeded publicity. He then worked on a number of foreign campaigns, including those of Tony Blair – then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – during the 2001 general election; Ehud Barak of Israel's Labor Party (at the suggestion of Clinton, who had grown frustrated with Benjamin Netanyahu's intransigence in the peace process) in the 1999 Knesset election; and the Liberal Party of Canada. In 2002, Carville worked as a Greenberg Carville Shrum (GCS) strategist to help American-educated Bolivian Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada win the presidency in Bolivia, which was portrayed in the documentary Our Brand Is Crisis.

In 2004, he was brought in for last-minute consulting on Senator John Kerry's Presidential campaign, but he did not play a major role.

In 2005, Carville taught a semester of the course "Topics in American Politics" at Northern Virginia Community College. Among the guests he had come speak to the class were Al Hunt, Mark Halperin, Senator George Allen, George Stephanopoulos, Karl Strubel, Stan Greenberg, Tony Blankley, representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America, James Fallows.

In 2006, Carville switched gears from politics to sports and became a host on a sports show called 60/20 Sports on XM Satellite Radio with Luke Russert, son of NBC journalist Tim Russert. The show is an in-depth look at the culture of sports based on the ages of the two hosts (60 and 20). After the Democrats' victory in the 2006 midterm election, Carville criticized Howard Dean as Democratic National Committee Chair, calling for his ouster, as he believed Dean had not spent enough money. In late November 2006, Carville proposed a truce of sorts.

Carville is the executive producer of the 2006 film All the King's Men, starring Sean Penn and Anthony Hopkins, which is loosely based on the life of Louisiana Governor Huey Long.

Carville had believed that Al Gore, whom he helped put in the White House as vice president in 1992, would run for president in 2008. This prediction did not come true.

On March 4, 2009, Politico reported that Carville, Paul Begala, and Rahm Emanuel were the architects of the Democratic Party's strategy to cast conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh as the face of the Republican Party. Carville was particularly critical of Limbaugh for saying he wanted Barack Obama to "fail."

Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani hired Carville as a campaign advisor in July 2009. Carville said that the 2009 Afghan presidential election is "probably the most important election held in the world in a long time," and he called his new job "probably the most interesting project I have ever worked in my life." Carville, whose work for Ghani is pro bono, when asked about similarities between politics in Afghanistan and politics in Louisiana, responded:

Yeah, I felt a little bit at home, to be honest with you.

In 2010, Carville worked as senior advisor for the campaign of Colombian presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos.

He is acting as advisor for Daniel Scioli (Governor of Buenos Aires) re-election campaign.