Bipartisan elitist theater

There isn't much else to say about the Carville and Matalin celebrity gawkfest at Loyola last night.  It's difficult to imagine what these two fame creatures could offer at this point in their careers besides the same old establishment-humping crap they've grown wealthy selling together for decades.  I didn't attend. Every single media person in New Orleans did, though, so it's not hard to find coverage.  Here is Gambit's write-up.

In case you needed confirmation that these are two of the world's worst humans, though, I refer you to Matalin's invocation of "All Lives Matter" in response to a question about Confederate monuments. Also Carville referred to a cynical synergistic marketing campaign between a restaurant and a snack food company as evidence of the existence of God.

One item of note was the first question of the evening which happened to come from Governor John Bel Edwards.  Gambit relays that here.

Gov. John Bel Edwards, seated in the audience with Loyola President the Rev. Kevin Wildes, got the first question, asking the couple, "What made Washington such a hard place to get things done, and do you think that may be heading to Baton Rouge?" Both Matalin and Carville said they didn't think D.C.-style gridlock would happen here, despite having a Democratic governor and a Republican-strong legislature. "We're in such a situation, both fiscally and environmentally, that we better hang together or we're going to hang separately," Carville said.

Please ignore Carville's boring and cliched answer. It's worth remarking that Edwards has made concern over this "Washington style gridlock" bogeyman a calling card of late. As we noted last week, Edwards likes to complain about this phenomenon but he never gets around to talking about its most probable source in the expansion of national PACs and lobbying organizations into the hyper-local level of campaign funding.

I suspect this is because Edwards is cultivating the mystery of "nationalized partisanship" as a strawman opponent while at the same time not making an enemy of the money power that actually fuels the political dynamic he has chosen to describe in those terms. So it makes sense that he showed up to toss this question to Carville/Matalin. Who better to help him perpetuate this distortion than the celebrity couple who have profited the most from it?