There is a small group of liberals who believe the Democratic Party has gone too far left. It’s important to realize that these liberals don’t necessarily disagree with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren on many issues. But they think that the policy prescriptions being offered would likely kill the patient — and the party.
These are politicians who want to win elections. And they’re not stupid. They know what a Bernie Sanders nomination means at the ballot box: unmitigated disaster. So they are speaking out now to try and stop Sanders before his momentum carries him all the way to victory at the convention.
James Carville is one of those liberal realists. And he is none too thrilled with the ever-leftward tilt of the Democratic Party.
“We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about and we won,” he said in a Vox interview published on Friday. “And now it’s like we’re losing our damn minds. Someone’s got to step their game up here.”
Carville added that he considered himself a “liberal” rather than a centrist — but Democrats went too far even for him.
“They’ve tacked off the damn radar screen,” he said when asked if the party moved too far left.
His comments came just after another interview in which he said he was “scared to death” after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., netted a large portion of the vote in Iowa’s caucuses.
How to explain those Democrats supporting Sanders? Mass hysteria? Too many of them don’t care whether they win or lose? Or, are they so confident of winning (“no one I know is voting for Trump”) that they can’t fathom that anyone would actually vote against their man?
Carville uses the Democrats’ support for “free” college tuition as an example:
“Democrats talking about free college tuition or debt forgiveness. I’m not here to debate the idea. What I can tell you is that people all over this country worked their way through school, sent their kids to school, paid off student loans. They don’t want to hear this s–t. And you saw Warren confronted by an angry voter over this. It’s just not a winning message,” he said.
The angry voter had questions that Warren was unprepared to answer.
“My daughter is in school. I saved all my money just to pay student loans. Can I have my money back?”@ewarren: “Of course not”
“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”pic.twitter.com/EXoU2ci2Wt
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 23, 2020
Carville thinks that even if Sanders catches lightning in a bottle and wins the presidency, he won’t get anything done because “there’s no chance in hell we’ll ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public …So long as McConnell runs the Senate, it’s game over.” He added that Sanders will “just be sitting up there screaming in the microphone about the revolution.”
And Carville had some choice words for the “urbanist” viewpoint that dominates the national media. A New York Times editorial staff member said some horrendously derogatory things about Carville’s alma mater, Louisiana State University, which just won the college football championship.
Do the Warren/Sanders "free public college" proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?
— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) January 14, 2020
Carville let him have it:
“You know how f—–g patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but that’s not the point. It’s the go–amn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and there’s not a single person he knows that doesn’t pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. He’s so f—–g smart.”
“[Binyamin] Appelbaum doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset,” he said. “We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.”
Carville is spot-on right, but no one in the Democratic Party is listening.
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