Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 13, 1995                   TAG: 9502140027
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KENNETH SINGLETARY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

FROM WASHINGTON, WITH LOVE

Her sense of civility evaporates. They spend the rest of the afternoon at each other's throats.

There's another scene at the end of their book, a bestseller when it came out last fall, in which Matalin is consoling herself with red wine on the night in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected president. The phone rings, it's Carville, and as Matalin writes, "I was indescribably, and from the bottom of my heart, as rude as I've ever been to anyone in my life. And meant every word."

Whoever said cats and dogs, or in this case, donkeys and elephants, don't mix? Isn't love, Washington style, sweet?

Carville and Matalin bring their act to Blacksburg for a free Valentine's Day speech Tuesday at Virginia Tech's Burruss Hall at 7:30 p.m. There's no telling what kind of fireworks might erupt.

Inside the Beltway, Carville and Matalin, of course, need no introduction. They are close to legendary. In the hinterlands, it may be different.

For the uninitiated: He is the peripatetic gunslinger, traveling from campaign to campaign, lately riding a string of wins, though the first three election efforts on which he worked came up short, including Dick Davis' try for the Senate in Virginia in the early 1980s.

He pulled a rabbit out of his hat in 1986 when he guided Bob Casey's gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania from 47 points back early on to an election victory.

In 1991, also in Pennsylvania, Carville showed his savvy by focusing Harris Wofford's Senate campaign on health care, a topic, it turned out, voters wanted to hear about. Wofford won convincingly.

When he arrived at the Clinton campaign in December 1991, as chief strategist, Carville was the wise and respected veteran, though his eccentricities preceded him, too. (He admits he superstitiously did not change his underwear for 10 days straight during the Wofford run, though, for the record, he claims he washed them every day.)

In "The War Room," a behind-the-scenes documentary about Clinton's run for the presidency, Carville gives an impromptu, spirit-raising speech to the assembled campaign workers. What he said may have been predictable and obvious - about how the campaign on which they were embarking may turn out to be the Democrats' last, best chance to regain the White House for a generation. What is notable is that it was he, not Clinton, and not boy wonder George Stephanopoulos, who gave the talk.

And it was Carville who helped keep the campaign afloat when it took three successive broadside hits - about Clinton's alleged philandering, draft-dodging and pot-smoking - any one of which would have sunk most other campaigns.

Matalin's rise to fame and power was equally meteoric, and perhaps unlikely. She is the former blue-collar hippie girl from Chicagoland who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, but later experienced some sort of epiphany that brought her into the Republican fold.

She found her way to Washington, D.C., and worked her way up the GOP food chain, eventually becoming the late Lee Atwater's protege.

Matalin also shows up in "The War Room," and between that film and the couple's book, you begin to get an impression about these people.

They are not of the Dom Perignon crowd, expecting to breathe rarefied air wherever they go. They are among the best at what they do because, while they have an aesthetic sense that is useful in speech and commercial writing, they are willing to get their hands dirty, and they have a drive that would leave most people gasping.

Thus, in the movie, we see Carville and gang on speaker phone with Mandy Grunwald, the campaign's communication director, creating a commercial in a matter of minutes, with each word in the script just right. We see Matalin walk up to a group of reporters on an airport Tarmac, give them the daily spin, and walk away without a glance.

Carville, 42, and Matalin, 41, understand the value of talking for a political professional. Though they were not available to be interviewed for this story, they know a huge part of contemporary campaigns is dealing with reporters, of returning phone calls, of making sure journalists, dim bulbs sometimes, have heard the daily message.

Writing in the New Yorker last fall, Michael Kinsley faults Carville and Matalin, who are now married, for fanning love's embers when their political differences are so acute. Such hanky-panky trivializes politics, he writes, separating it from real life and liberating it "to be that much more cynical, nasty, and dishonest."

And the cutesy manner in Carville and Matalin cast themselves as "Washington's Sweethearts" is spin, too, Kinsley is quick to spot.

Still, he seems to concede, their spin may be as good as it gets.

James Carville and Mary Matalin, "All's Fair: Love, War & Running for President": Tuesday, 7:30 p.m., Burruss Hall, Virginia Tech. 231-5397; TDD, 231-3749.