Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville has a way of cutting through the BS.
Working with Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential run, he famously told campaign staffers, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
So political pundits turned to him after the Democrats’ disastrous Election Day.
“What went wrong is just stupid wokeness,” Carville told Judy Woodruff on “PBS Newshour” on Wednesday.
“All right, don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that,” Carville said.
“It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on the Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” he said. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”
Carville pointed out that Republican Glenn Youngkin, who knocked out longtime Clinton fundraiser Terry McAuliffe to win the gubernatorial election in Virginia, didn’t target President Joe Biden, even as McAuliffe repeatedly tried to tie Youngkin to former President Donald Trump. Instead, Youngkin stuck to local issues.
The strategist said Democrats are too focused on woke language. “We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries and change laws,” Carville said. “These faculty lounge people that sit around mulling about I don’t know what. They’re not working.”
Carville also mocked the leftist protests in Seattle, including the creation of an anti-police “autonomous zone.” When voters went to the polls on Tuesday, local outlets project that they elected a Republican as Seattle city attorney.
“Autonomous zone? Who could even think of something that stupid?!” he said.
Carville has repeatedly ripped Democrats about moving too far left, noting that most Americans are close to the middle. “And I got news for you, you’re hurting the party, you’re hurting the very people that you want to help!” Carville said.
His analysis was similar to those by political analysts Van Jones and David Axelrod on CNN, who said Democrats lost big on Election Day because they are out of touch with mainstream America and, worse, are “annoying.”
“I think that the Democrats are coming across in ways that we don’t recognize that are annoying and offensive, and seem out of touch in ways that I don’t think show up in our feeds, when we’re looking at our kind of echo chamber,” Jones said, pretending to scroll through his phone. “And I think that this is a message here.”
Axelrod agreed, saying Democrats have been dictating to voters what they should believe.
“The messages tend to be moralizing. It’s like, ‘We are going to tell you; we will tell you what is right.’ And no connection to people who work with their hands, people who work with their backs, rural voters, so that’s part of the problem,” he said.
Story cited here.
