Mary Matalin

Mary Joe Matalin (born September 19, 1953) is an American political strategist and consultant of Croatian origin. She is known for her work with the Republican Party. She was an assistant to George W. Bush and counselor to vice president Dick Cheney.

Matalin has been active in politics since college, starting at the grassroots level in local and statewide campaigns in her native Illinois. The Reagan Revolution brought her to Washington, DC where she served the Republican National Committee.

After a hiatus from Washington to attend Hofstra Law School, Mary returned to the RNC in 1984, to serve as national voter contact director for the Reagan-Bush Campaign. She held senior positions in the George H. W. Bush 1988 campaign and, upon President Bush's election, was appointed chief staff for the RNC.

In 1992, President Bush named her the deputy campaign manager for political operations. As deputy campaign manager, she was responsible for the overview and organization of all 50 state operations. As the on-board planner who traveled with President Bush throughout the 1992 campaign, she emerged as the vocal, and occasionally controversial, defender of the president and his policies.

She is married to James Carville, political strategist for the Democratic Party. Both Matalin and Carville have gone on record saying that they don't talk politics at home. The best example of contention among the two, aside from appearances on talk shows, is the 1992 movie The War Room. In the 1992 political campaign both Matalin and Carville were staffing opposite campaigns. Matalin wrote All's Fair: Love, War and Running for President with Carville.

Like Carville, she was a host of CNN's Crossfire political debate show, and in 1993, she hosted Equal Time, which aired on the CNBC business television channel.

Matalin, a colleague of Karl Rove, worked for Vice President Dick Cheney in the White House. She attended meetings of the White House Iraq Group, a secretive internal White House task force convened in August 2002 (nine months before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq). WHIG was charged with the task of educating the US public about the threat from Saddam Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction.

Matalin resigned her responsibilities as of 31 December 2002.[1] Although Matalin left the White House more than six months before the leak that triggered the Valerie Plame scandal, she is reported to have testified before the grand jury of Independent Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. (Notes and records of WHIG meetings were subpoenaed by Fitzgerald in January 2004.)

Matalin 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 life and fictional politicians. The show was directed by Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh and featured a cast of fictional and real characters working in the political sphere.

See also

• CIA leak grand jury investigation
• [K Street Video]

Quotes

• "We in the Republican party have never said to the press that Clinton's a philandering, pot-smoking draft-dodger."