(May 27) National Democratic leaders really should listen to legendary Democratic strategist James Carville and then go a step beyond. They should find a way to push President Joe Biden off the party’s ticket for 2024.
Start with Carville. He was at it again over the weekend, blasting his party’s political tone-deafness. It’s a message he has pushed for several years now. Beginning at the 6:15 mark of an interview with the Politicon podcast, Carville said that “Democrat messaging is full of s***. … Don’t talk about f***ing Gaza and student loans. That’s so out [there].”
Citing polls showing both of those issues far, far down the list of voters’ concerns, Carville then said: “Why are we forgiving student loans for people that go to Harvard? Which — according to [marketing professor] Scott Galloway, quite accurately, is nothing but a hedge fund that has classrooms — well, they got a $52 billion f***ing surplus! Why are taxpayers going to bail these people out?! Why don’t you come out for a proposal to tax every university endowment over $5 billion and use that money to give their former students relief?”
Carville’s message was that Democrats should be talking about the “cost of living” and about issues related to the Supreme Court. Combine that with his several years of complaining about “wokeness” taking over the Democratic Party, and what Carville is consistently saying is that Democrats need to start sounding populist messages rather than appealing to leftist elites.
While Carville’s latest rant did not include calls to remove Biden from the ticket (and indeed, he long has said he thinks well of Biden), he has said repeatedly in recent years that Biden shows political weakness nationally. But he has said that “right below the presidential level,” the Democratic Party is quite “talented.” To New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in March, he listed the following names: “Mitch Landrieu, Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock, Gretchen Whitmer, Gina Raimondo, Roy Cooper.” (Follow the links for more about each.)…. [The full column is at this link.]
