Mary Matalin Biography
Mary Matalin is an American political consultant well known for her work with the Republican Party. Matalin has served under President Ronald Reagan.
She was campaign director for George H. W. Bush, was an assistant to President George W. Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney until 2003. She has been the chief editor of Threshold Editions, a conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster, since March 2005.
Matalin is married to Democratic political consultant James Carville. She appears in the award-winning documentary film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story and also played herself, opposite her husband, James Carville, John Slattery and Mary McCormack in the short-lived HBO series K Street. Matalin on May 5, 2016, announced she has changed her party registration to Libertarian.
Mary Matalin Age
Matalin was born on August 19, 1953. She is aged 66 years as of 2019.
Mary Matalin Net Worth
She has a net worth of 5 million US dollars.
Mary Matalin Husband and Daughters
Matalin on November 25, 1993 (Thanksgiving Day), married James Carville, a political strategist for candidates of the Democratic Party. The couple was married in New Orleans. She and Carville have two daughters, Matalin Mary “Matty” Carville and Emerson Normand “Emma” Carville. The two Matalin and Carville have gone on record saying that they do not talk politics at home.
The best example of contention between the two, aside from appearances on talk shows, is the 1993 movie The War Room. During the 1992 political campaign, Matalin and Carville were staffing opposing campaigns. She wrote the best-selling book All’s Fair: Love, War and Running for President with Carville and co-author Peter Knobler. She published the book Letters to My Daughters in April 2004.
Carville and Matalin in 2008 moved their family to New Orleans. The Times-Picayune carried a joint op-ed “Point of View” by Mary Matalin and James Carville on April 26, 2009, on their reasons for settling in New Orleans. Matalin and Carville are profiled in the Politics chapter of the book The Compatibility Matrix.
Mary Matalin Early Life
She grew up in the Chicago suburb of Burnham, Illinois, the daughter of Eileen (née Emerson), who ran beauty salons and Steven Matalin, a steel mill worker. Matalin’s paternal grandparents were Croatian immigrants and her mother was of Irish descent. She originally intended to follow her mother into the beauty salon profession, and briefly considered becoming a model.
Matalin attended Thornton Fractional North High School and attended Western Illinois University for college and Hofstra University School of Law, where she was enrolled for one year before dropping out.
Mary Matalin Career
Her first campaign was Illinois Lieutenant Governor Dave O’Neal’s bid for the U.S. Senate in 1980, a race O’Neal lost to Alan Dixon. Upon O’Neal’s loss, Matalin began her career with the Republican National Committee, where she would remain for nearly two decades as a key Republican strategist. She left briefly to attend Hofstra University School of Law, Matalin dropped out after just one year, and in 1984 returned to the RNC.
Matalin rose quickly, as an aide to Richard Bond and Chief of Staff to RNC co-Chairperson Betty Heitman in 1985. One year later, Matalin gained national attention when she joined George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, working as both Deputy Political Director and Midwest Regional Political Director in the primaries. Upon the election, Matalin was appointed Chief of Staff to then RNC Chairman Lee Atwater.
The capacity she was in, she would in effect run the RNC for nearly a year, as Atwater his health declining due to an inoperable brain tumor spent 170 days in the hospital between his diagnosis in early March 1990 and eventual death on March 29, 1991. Matalin in 1992 served as the deputy campaign manager for political operations on Bush’s reelection campaign. She ironically served in this role while dating her future husband, James Carville, who was chief strategist for the Clinton campaign.
Matalin was a host of CNN’s Crossfire political debate show, and in 1993, she co-hosted Equal Time, which aired on the CNBC business television channel. She was also the host of her own talk radio show in the 1990s, The Mary Matalin Show, which was carried on the CBS Radio Network. Matalin is currently on the nationally syndicated radio program Both Sides Now w/ Huffington & Matalin, hosted by Mark J. Green and aired weekends on 120 stations.
She, a colleague of Karl Rove, worked for Vice President Dick Cheney in the White House. She resigned from her responsibilities as of December 31, 2002. Mary also appeared alongside her husband James Carville in HBO’s 2003 television show K Street where she and her husband played versions of themselves as they lobbied real and fictional politicians. That show was directed by Academy Award-winner Steven Soderbergh and featured a cast of fictional and real characters working in the political sphere.
Matalin in March 2005 was hired as chief editor of a new conservative publishing imprint, Threshold Editions, for CBS-owned Simon & Schuster. This division on August 1, 2008, released The Obama Nation, written by Jerome Corsi, who co-authored Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. More notable titles published by Threshold Editions include Dick Cheney’s In My Time, Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence and a number of Glenn Beck books including Cowards and Broke.
She was appointed Treasurer of Virginia Republican Senator George Allen’s re-election committee in April 2006. Matalin worked on the presidential campaign of Fred Thompson until January 2008, when Thompson dropped out of the race. Matalin in 2008 joined the Board of Directors at George Washington University’s Cheney Cardiovascular Institute.
She also serves on numerous other boards including The Water Institute of the Gulf (TWIG), Conscience Cause, The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO) and the Tulane President’s Council. She appears in the 2008 award-winning documentary on Lee Atwater, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. Speaking about Lee, she says, “They had to kill the messenger because they couldn’t kill the message.
They had to turn him into the Boogie Man. Satan incarnate.” Matalin returned to CNN as a political contributor on April 26, 2009, joining her husband, James Carville on a special “First 100 Days” edition of State of the Union with John King. Matalin and husband James Carville in 2010 were named co-chairs of Super Bowl XLVII Host Committee, held in 2013 in New Orleans.
Matalin and husband Carville began appearing together in “Cocktail Party” commercials for Maker’s Mark Kentucky Straight Bourbon in 2012. She believes that farm animals should be treated humanely, so she teamed up with PETA to produce a video in 2013, encouraging Indiana lawmakers to vote against “ag-gag” bills that would ban unapproved videotaping on farms and businesses.
Conservative Newsmax magazine named Matalin among the “25 most influential women in the GOP” in August 2013. Matalin on May 5, 2016, announced she has changed her party registration to Libertarian, as that party represents her “Jeffersonian, Madisonian constitutional principles” better than the Republican Party after the GOP lost two successive presidential elections and was “falling apart.”
While maintaining the change was not because of Donald Trump becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, she criticized Trump for “his high schoolboy antics with women.” Matalin endorsed Austin Petersen for president in May 2016. However in March 2018, she told reporter Nicholas Ballasy that President Donald Trump is “a great overall president, like, he did what he said he was going to do and he is doing things he never imagined he would have to, so that’s really hard to do with a staff that was not quite seasoned it’s just sheer force of will and force of personality.
I think he’s doing great. He’s doing really great. I can die happy now. I was really worried about it.” Matalin was named PETA’s “Person of the Year” in December 2016. The organization cited her willingness to fight for the humane treatment of monkeys and farm animals, and “for setting a tremendous example of compassion that all Americans can follow.”
Mary Matalin James Carville
Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have watched politics unfold in excruciating detail. From the Mueller report to the Kavanaugh hearings to the ACA debates, each by-the-minute update garners an impassioned response from some corner of the electorate.
“Politics is infested into every corner of our lives,” Republican political consultant Mary Matalin said in a discussion with James Carville, her spouse and Democratic counterpart, during an executive roundtable at the Becker’s Hospital Review 10th Annual Meeting in Chicago. The discussion was sponsored by Prism Healthcare Partners and moderated by Prism COO Brad Fetters.
While occasional moments offer a comedic break from our hyper-focus on politics — think “covfefe” — by and large, Americans are riding a sociopolitical emotional rollercoaster.
“We are in a period of American politics where intensity is driving everything,” said Mr. Carville. On the bright side, this means Americans are showing up to the polls more than they have been in years: The 2018 election generated the highest level of voter turnout for a midterm since 1914.
But Ms. Matalin tempered this: “This intensity — which is in some ways, but not completely, transfer-ring into voter turnout — is a product, not of choice and excitement, but anger,” she said. She felt this anger could lead to voters making short-sighted decisions in 2020 based simply on who can beat the other party’s candidate.
In a fast-paced and far-reaching discussion, the political duo delved further to discuss what Americans are so angry about, how we got to this point and where we can go from here.
Pulse check on party politics
The intensity of the moment has affected the political parties differently. Some Democrats are growing more extreme, while Republicans are paralyzed.
Democrats appear to be flirting with socialism, much to Mr. Carville’s dismay. He bemoaned the constant media coverage of Democratic Socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who he believes are espousing unrealistic policies.
“The Democrats decided before 2018 that what we needed was serious grounded candidates who run on serious grounded platforms,” Mr. Carville said. “As soon as the election was over, we just forgot what we were doing, and everybody is talking about crap that doesn’t matter.”
While Democratic Socialists capture headlines, Mr. Carville believes the Democratic Party is still more pragmatic than the media portrays. He cited the Democratic primaries in 2016 when a liberal won against a leftist in 50 of 53 instances. “Over a period of time, hopefully, the party rights itself. Most of these people speaking are not Democrats. Bernie is not a Democrat,” Mr. Carville said.
Meanwhile, Ms. Matalin feels Republicans have lost their mojo. “[Republicans] went through our transition and sort of stabilized. Now we’re just wimpy…wimpy versions of what we could be,” she said. Republicans don’t want to lose control in Congress, which translates into not getting a lot done. Ironically, failing to make measurable changes, particularly in healthcare, caused them to lose seats in 2018, she said.
Mary Matalin Twitter
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