Mary Matalin

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This is about the political professional. For the actress, see Marlee Matlin.

Mary Matalin

Born	Mary Joe Matalin August 19, 1953 (1953-08-19) (age 54) Calumet City, Illinois, United States
Residence	United States
Nationality	United States
Education	Western Illinois University
Occupation	Political consultant
Spouse	James Carville

Mary Joe Matalin (born August 19, 1953) is an American political strategist and consultant. She is known for her work with the Republican Party. She was an assistant to President George W. Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney until 2003. In April 2004, she published the book Letters to My Daughters. In March 2005, Matalin was chosen to run a new conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster. She is married to Democratic political consultant James Carville.

1 Early life
2 Career
3 Personal life
4 References
5 See also
6 Footnotes
7 External links

[edit] Early life

Matalin grew up in Calumet City, Illinois. She attended Thornton Fractional North High School and attended Western Illinois University. She was homecoming queen her junior year of high school.

[edit] 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. After 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. Leaving briefly to attend Hofstra University School of Law, Matalin dropped out after just one year, and in 1984 returned to the RNC. She rose quickly, as an aide to Rich Bond and Chief of Staff to RNC co-Chairperson Betty Heitman in 1985. A year later Matalin gained national notoriety when she joined the George H. W. Bush for President Campaign, working as both Deputy Political Director and Midwest Regional Political Director in the primaries. After the election, Matalin was appointed Chief of Staff to then RNC Chairman Lee Atwater. In that capacity, 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^[1]

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. Matalin 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. [1]

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, an internal White House task force convened in August 2002 (seven months before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq). WHIG was charged with the task of convincing the US public of the potential threat of Saddam Hussein's alleged violations of international law in his refusal to cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors.

Matalin resigned her responsibilities as of December 31, 2002.^[2] Although Matalin left the White House more than six months before the leak that triggered the Valerie Plame affair, she is reported to have testified before the grand jury of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald^{[citation needed]}. (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 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.

In April 2006, she was appointed Treasurer of Virginia Republican Senator George Allen's re-election committee. She worked on the presidential campaign of Fred Thompson until January 2008, when Thompson dropped out of the race.

[edit] Personal life

She is married to James Carville, a political strategist for candidates of the Democratic Party, who together have two young daughters, Matalin Mary "Matty" Carville and Emerson Normand "Emma" Carville. Both Matalin and Carville have gone on record saying that they don't talk politics at home. The best example of contention between 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 the best-selling book All's Fair: Love, War and Running for President with Carville and co-author Peter Knobler. In 2008, Carville and Matalin moved their family to New Orleans.^[3]