James Carville is trying his best to put a spit shine on Joe Biden's 2024 presidential campaign, but even the Ragin' Cajun' can't ignore what happened or, more accurately, what didn't happen over the weekend.
The longtime Democrat political operative who, along with Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos, shepherded the 1992 Bill Clinton presidential campaign, says Biden's staff telegraphed an unwelcome message to the country when he failed to answer the bell for one of most coveted TV spots in media. It was an especially egregious misstep in an election year.
How does a candidate turn down free media in front of tens of millions of potential voters? By hiding in his basement.
Carville told CNN host Michael Smerconish that the White House blowing off the Super Bowl interview, which was initiated and popularized by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, was a missed opportunity for anyone not named Joe Biden.
Carville considered the stakes of this lost opportunity. "It's the biggest television audience—not even close—and you get a chance to do a 20-25 minute interview on that day, and you don't do it, that's a kind of sign that the staff or yourself don't have that much confidence in you," said the man who helped craft the message in 1992 that Bill Clinton was "The Comeback Kid" after he lost the New Hampshire primary.
While he was on the campaign trail, it was found out that Clinton, the accused sexual assaulter, was having an affair with a former TV anchor and erstwhile chanteuse, Gennifer Flowers. In other words, for Clinton World it was business as usual with all manner of "Bimbo Disruptions." The media fell in line, and he still won the election.
Back then the National Organization for Women beclowned itself by supporting the philandering sociopath throughout his presidency — and laughed along when Carville described one of Clinton's sex assault victims as the product of dragging a dollar bill through a trailer park. Now the media run a never-ending screen for Democrats.
Carville grudgingly said of Team Biden, "Now they have made the choice that they want to go through with this [run for office]."
"He is old. I, I know how it is because I'm almost as old as he is and, and, it's never going to get better," Carville continued. "Today is the youngest you'll ever be for the rest of your life."
In other words, lower your expectations.
Expect Biden's basement campaign HQ 2.0, where we'll be subjected to Zoom meetings with union members desperately trying to sound excited about this stiff, meanderings, wrong turns, and more reruns of cringey Eva Longoria infomercials.
"There's no other way to read this--he's not going to do debates," Carville told the beaming Smerconish, who displayed his most penetrating Marshall Applewhite-like intensity.
The CNN host asked if it was too late to sub in another candidate.
In a sense it's never too late. [If] you had a nominee and the nominee dropped dead last week of October, you've got to have some mechanism to have a replacement. It'd be late to do it without a lot of chaos but you could [unintelligible Carville mumblings] Lyndon Johnson dropped out in March of 1968 and we had a nominee, so it never too late, but the later it gets, the more confusing the process gets...get into the DNC picking some candidates or state party chairs.
In other words, America could be stuck with a man who looks, walks, and acts as if he's already embalmed.
Carville tried to put a good spin on the Hur report by reading from the pre-approved song sheet of the left, calling the DOJ attorney an extreme Republican. He tried to spin Biden possessing Afghanistan documents by saying Biden had been concerned about getting out of Afghanistan for decades. He even gave Biden an atta boy for pulling up stakes in Afghanistan and leaving people behind in what looked like a treasonous act of cowardice.
Expect more of that revisionist history throughout the campaign. But don't expect Joe.
