LOS ANGELES.–Old-time Democrat strategist James Carville, 80, pretends that the Democrat Party no longer cares about identity politics in the most colossal wishful thinking in recent memory trying in his feeble way to change the Party that left him behind. Carville deserves credit at his age for seeking any media appearance that will have him, spewing the kind of smoke tolerated well in Democrats circles especially under the Trump presidency. Carville predicted 60-year-old former Vice President Kamala Harris would win all the battleground states in the 2024 election, marching right to the White House. Now, after losing the election, Carville has his own message to Democrats, that the Party can’t win playing identify politics. Well they won with Obama and Biden playing identity politics and they can win again playing the same game. But Carville now fixates on identity politics.
Carville’s past claim to fame involved crafting a strategy in 1992 to get former President Bill Clinton elected over incumbent President George H.W. Bush. Any superficial look at the 1992 election elections knows that Clinton would not have won had Texas oilman H. Ross Perot not taken 20% of the GOP vote away from Bush. Yet Carville’s the first to tell you it was his brilliant political strategy of “invest-and-grow” with a sluggish economy that won the 1992 election. “No one give a s—t anymore in a Democratic Party what gender you are, what race you are, what ethnicity you are. They just want to win . . . we’re not here to make history,” Carville said on Bill Hunt’s Politics War Room podcast April 10. Carville certainly isn’t talking about today’s Democrat Party that’s driven by race, gender and women’s rights, exactly what Kamala stood for in 2024.
Where does Carville think that the Party that passed him up as a crazy white guy has changed? Carville’s trying to change things but it won’t work with the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) leading the Party, currently on their anti-oligarch tour. But beyond attacks on billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the Democrat Party counts on its oligarchs to fund Democrat campaigns. Where does Carville think Kamala got $1.5 billion to squander in four months, an unprecedented extravagance for any party in U.S. history. Kamala’s campaign was about the first Black women to win the presidency, breaking the glass ceiling forever. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was beaten in 2016 by President Donald Trump, talked incessantly on the 2024 campaign trail about a Black women becoming president.
Carville thinks he can appear on obscure podcasts or radio shows with minimal audiences to spew his rubbish about how the Democrat Party can win again. “We’re here to make a win and whatever we have to do to win this f—king election, we’re going to that. And I think that any time that the Democratic Party has any other motive other than victory, it screws us up,” Carville told 82-year-old former journalist Al Hunt. Talking to Hunt is like preaching to the choir but Hunt, like himself, does not speak for today’s Democrat Party that’s run by Black activists, gender activists and women’s right activists. Carville sits on the outside looking in at a Party that long since passed him by. Carville represents bygone days when White men still ran the Democrat Party. Now the Party is controlled by activist factions consumed with identity politics and very little else.
Kamala was the perfect example of where the Democrat Party was headed in the present and in the future. Carville can talk about what he wants or what would be best in his mind to win back the White House and Congress but that’s not the way the Party works now. “How do we destroy the notion that it is someone’s ‘turn’ to be the nominee—Hillary, Kamala—rather than the Democrat with the best chance of winning?” asked Carville. Carville lived through former President Barack Obama passing over then Vice President Joe Biden in 2016, opting instead for former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was certainly confident she could be neophyte politician Donald Trump. “Remember, that a big, big hangover in Biden world that Obama decided that it was Hillary’s turn, not Biden’s turn, so he couldn’t run [in 2016]. Let me tell you what ‘turn” is. The turn is to win,” Carville said.
Carville doesn’t get that his preaching only drives the Democrat Party into more identity politics, because they don’t believe that identity politics hurt’s the Party in 2024. Unlike Carville, Democrat Party insiders blame Kamala’s loss on not having enough time when Biden dropped out to pull off the victory. When the 2026 Midterms roll around, does Carville think the Democrat Party is going to change its stripes to get candidates elected? When it comes to presidential elections, whoever wins the Democrat Party primaries becomes the nominee, not who Carville thinks would be the best candidate. Biden won this Party’s primaries by a landslide but Party bosses decided after his June 27, 2024 ABC News debate he wasn’t fit to run. Democrat Party isn’t going to change its identify of advocating for race, gender and women’s rights because an old White guy want something different.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
