(CN) - Breitbart News CEO and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon is not a man who inspires mixed emotions. He is, to Republicans and Democrats, among the most polarizing figures in contemporary politics.
To GOP traditionalists, he's a bomb-thrower intent on nothing less than unseating the status quo. Democrats, meanwhile see him a white supremacist-embracing misogynist, the current Darth Vader of American politics.
But aside from broadsides aimed at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, that wasn't the man on display as he spoke at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, this past weekend, or in McComb County, Michigan, or Manchester, New Hampshire, last week.
No, the Steve Bannon who addressed the Citadel Republican Society and those other GOP audiences was nothing less than the consummate political strategist -- and one who repeatedly confessed that his best ideas, those he says propelled Donald Trump into the White House, were largely borrowed from Democrats.
Indeed, watching and listening to Bannon first-hand and in close quarters, one of the very first thoughts I had was, "Oh my God, He's James Carville 2.0." And I failed to disabuse myself of that notion even days later.
What was clear from his recollections of the 2016 campaign was that he maintained a laser focus on the details and mechanics of the contest throughout, and that he still relishes the opportunity to tweak an opponent mercilessly.
He was at turns biting, humorous, and surprisingly humble in a very Southern kind of way.
Perhaps their shared Southern ties heightened the connection between Bannon and Carville in my mind, but I think there is more to it than that.
Bannon's repeated jabs at Hillary Clinton, McConnell and the "opposition party," as he frequently calls the press, were not so different from the sarcasm Carville thrust at President George H.W. Bush and billionaire Independent candidate Ross Perot during the 1992 campaign.
The similarities extend to the views they expressed toward the press. To Bannon, reporters from The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times are little more than extensions of the Democratic National Committee. But his critiques -- mostly aimed at the ongoing probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election -- are also reminiscent of Carville circa 1992, when he lashed the press for its reporting on candidate Bill Clinton's "bimbo eruptions" after Gennifer Flowers came forward to say she'd had a long-term affair with the then-Arkansas governor.
There's yet another parallel between Bannon's approach to Carville's handling of the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992: both were forced to wage heroic efforts to keep their candidate on message and tempers in check when gaffs and scandals threatened to derail their presidential hopes.
In Charleston, Bannon recalled telling Trump to ignore the outside distractions.
"We are just going focus, focus, focus on [Clinton]. She is the tribune for a corrupt and incompetent elite … and you are the agent of change," he said.
Carville took much the same approach in taking on President Bush in the 1992 general election. Bush, the Clinton campaign said, was out-of-touch with the average American and therefore unequipped to address his problems.
And he maintained the focus of the Clinton campaign by hammering home a simple mantra, "It's the economy stupid."