Agreeing on support of Israel but very little else, political odd couple James Carville and Mary Matalin took turns amusing an audience of donors Nov. 2 at the United Jewish Appeal of MetroWest NJ annual dinner.

Carville, the Democratic operative, and Matalin, the Republican activist, who frequently voice their very disparate views on television talk shows, helped the UJA Campaign raise $1.4 million at an evening at the Sheraton Parsippany called “METROmagic.” The combined value of the gifts to date for all who attended exceeded $3.6 million.

Also adding star-power to the event was Yelena Raif, the 2005 Miss Israel. Raif, born in Ukraine, left there four years ago to study at Tel Aviv University.

She told the audience that she was encouraged by a political science professor to enter the Miss Israel contest, which she won in 2005 before finishing sixth in the Miss Universe competition in Bangkok.

Moments after reaching the podium, Matalin — a former assistant to both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — took aim at her husband: “I do not listen to him on the radio. I do not watch him on television. I do not read his books. I haven’t read his half of the book we wrote together,” a work entitled All’s Fair: Love, War and Running for President.

She called Carville “an incredibly interesting person. Politics makes strange bedfellows, but in James’ case politics has nothing to do with it — he just makes a strange bedfellow.”

Matalin noted that her husband has appeared in nine films, beginning with The People vs. Larry Flint in 1996. Its director, Milos Foreman, “cast him without any acting experience other than working in the Clinton administration,” after he managed the Arkansas governor’s successful campaign for the White House in 1992.

She said her “personal favorite out of all the things that have been said about my husband was ‘he looks as if he had been sired out of the love scene from Deliverance.’”

Commenting on the frequently asked question of how two people with such radically different political views can coexist happily as a married couple, Matalin said, “We do it the way everybody else does it in any marriage and it goes by one rule, which is: I’m out of estrogen and I have a gun.”

But she said she was “sure we’re not the only couple that drives three blocks to cast votes that cancel each other out.”

And yet their marriage is not all discord. “There are few things that James and I agree on, but one of them is our support for Israel,” she said.

Turning to current events, Matalin said that “Bush has the highest low point of any second term president.” She said the administration was recovering from an “undeniably bad patch” by “economic growth numbers that came out exceed[ing] expectations, the cost of Katrina was less than expected, the deficit was lower than what was expected, the Harriet Miers debacle is over, and Judge Samuel Alito is a stellar, stellar, incredible nominee” who has brought our fracturing party back together again.”

And, she added, “Bush’s numbers are down and the Democrats’ numbers are down.”

She described the indictment of Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, “a good friend of both of ours,” as a case of “lying about a crime that wasn’t committed.” Matalin said it was “really bad politics” for Democrats to reopen an investigation into the intelligence data the Bush administration cited as reasons for going to war in Iraq.

Introducing her husband, the Republican activist repeated a prophecy from her mother: “You will never be happy with a man, unless he is smarter than you are; and I did not get married until I was 40, having finally found Mr. Brilliant.”

‘Oh, he’s lying’

Taking off his suit jacket, loosening his tie, and rolling up his sleeves as he approached the podium, Carville launched into a talk that was much more stand-up comedy act than political analysis.

He joked that political feuds with his wife can spill over from the public world of television to the private sector.

One Sunday, after they had crossed ideological swords on Meet the Press, Carville said Matalin was particularly annoyed at something he had said on the air. When the couple’s pickup truck was stopped for speeding en route to their Virginia home and Carville was given a ticket for driving 20 miles an hour above the 65-mile speed limit, he told a Virginia state trooper, “Every cracker, geek, hick, and redneck out here was driving even faster than I was.”

At that point, he said, “My wife looks over and says, ‘Oh, he’s lying. He works for the Clinton administration and all they ever do is lie. He was going faster than 85.’”

Carville said when he opened his door on Halloween night there were kids outside dressed as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Even after he gave them candy, they didn’t leave his doorstep. “I opened the door and I said, ‘Kids, why the hell haven’t y’all left?’”

Their answer: ‘We don’t have an exit strategy.’”

Carville also earned laughs when he recalled how he helped manage Ehud Barak’s 1999 campaign to become Israel’s prime minister. Carville said he was asked by CNN interviewer Larry King about “any profound thoughts” he could share about Israeli politics. “I said, ‘You’ve really got to carry the all-important Jewish vote. You’ve got to campaign hard in the Jewish community.’”

Taking aim at the White House, Carville said that at a meeting in Paris, Bush criticized President Jacques Chirac by saying, “You know, the problem with you French is you don’t have a word for entrepreneur.”

Turning serious as he ended his talk, he said in January of 1999, after Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Representatives when “people felt strongly on both sides,” he was confronted by a hostile Republican questioner after a speech he had given in Florida.

The woman wanted to know what he would tell his young daughters and how he could defend the president’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

“One day your children are going to come and ask you and I want to know what you are going to tell them,” she asked.

“I said under my breath, ‘You rude wench.’ But you know what? One day they will ask me, and when they do, I’ll look them in the eye and say, ‘Girls, there was a time in your daddy’s life where he had a good friend who did a bad thing. You know what? I’m going to forget the bad thing and stick with my good friend.’”

The evening, cochaired by Barbara and Daniel Drench of Mountain Lakes, Marjorie and Norman Feinstein of North Caldwell, and Robyn and Scott Krieger of Livingston, was aimed at raising funds for social service projects in MetroWest, Israel, and Jewish communities throughout the world.