James Carville, the legendary Democratic guru and former torpedo for the Clinton Crime Family, has a message for his party: Stop obsessing about West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, one of the last of the moderate Democrats, and stop wasting money on unwinnable races.
He also told Vox scribe Sean Illing that wacky progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (also known as Occasional-Cortex) have a tiny — very tiny — constituency.
Most Democrats are pretty much normal Americans like Manchin, he suggested. They aren’t unhinged demoniacs and broom-riding harpies who demand defunding police, slavery reparations, and partial-birth abortion.
I’ll Back Manchin
The occasion of the chin-wag with the leftist rag’s reporter was the latter’s indigestion caused by the failure of “Let’s Go Brandon” to accomplish anything.
“President Joe Biden’s agenda has stalled, Democrats are in disarray, and one villain looms especially large in the Democratic base’s mind: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.” Illing continued:
You can see where the critics are coming from. Manchin’s refusal to budge on issues like voting rights, his incoherent defense of the filibuster, and his opposition to programs like the child tax credit, which would so obviously help his constituents escape poverty, are hard to accept from this vantage.
Then again, he continued, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in the Mountain State like a rented mule — the former POTUS shellacked him by 39 points. Thus, maybe Democrats are lucky Manchin even has the seat.
So Illing dialed Carville.
Carville first explained that Sleepy Joe doesn’t have the majorities that predecessors Bill Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama did, which is why his best laid plans are dead in the water (at least except for The Great Replacement).
Biden faces a 50-50 Senate, so the party must look to winning a couple more Senate seats in November’s midterms. That’s one reason Carville will support Manchin:
Manchin is a Roman Catholic Democrat in a state in which not a single county has voted Democrat [for president] since 2008. I repeat: not a single county has voted Democrat since 2008.
Politics is about choices, and he’s up for reelection in 2024. If Manchin runs for reelection, I’ll do everything I can to help him because it’s either going to be Joe Manchin or Marsha Blackburn. It ain’t Joe Manchin or Ed Markey. You got to understand that. It’s really that damn simple.
Carville delivered the bad news that the leftist blogosphere, its torch-bearing Twitter mob, and their phalanx on Capitol Hill could, figuratively speaking, hold meetings in the back seat of a Volkswagen.
“Look, I’m a liberal Democrat. Always have been,” he said,
But some of these people bitching about Manchin can’t see political reality straight. Six percent of adults in this country identify as “progressive.” Only 11 or 12 percent of Democrats identify as progressive. So let’s just meet in the middle and say something like 7 or 8 percent of the country agrees with the progressive left. This ain’t a goddamn debate anymore. Someone like Manchin is closer to the mainstream than a lot of these people think, and pretending like he isn’t won’t help the cause.
But don’t Democratic party leaders know that? Illing asked. Don’t they know most American Democrats aren’t shrill, screeching crackpots? No, Carville answered, and where Democratic party hacks place their bets proves it.
“Just look at how Democrats organize and spend money,” he continued:
[South Carolina Democrat] Jaime Harrison raised over $100 million only to lose his Senate race to Lindsey Graham by 10 points. Amy McGrath runs for Senate in Kentucky and raises over $90 million only to get crushed by Mitch McConnell.
They were always going to lose those races, but Democrats keep doing this stupid sh*t. They’re too damn emotional. Democrats obsess over high-profile races they can’t win because that’s where all the attention is. We’re addicted to hopeless causes.
That emotionalism is directly tied to the number of women who pull the levers of power in the party. That aside, though, Carville also explained that the GOP is crushing the Democrats in the battle to spend money on important state races.
“What about the secretary of state in Wisconsin? Or the attorney general race in Michigan?” Democrats aren’t sending such candidates enough money, he said. Yet, on issues like voting rights and election integrity, “this is where the action is and this is where things will be decided”:
You know who is paying attention to these races? The Republican Party. Last I checked, Republicans raised $33 million for secretary of state races around the country. The Democrats had until recently raised $1 million. I think it’s now up to $4 million. That’s the story, right there. That’s the difference, right there. Bitching about a Democratic senator in West Virginia is missing the damn plot.
As for bisexual Arizona Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema, she thinks she’ll be the “next John McCain,” but she’ll lose a primary to hard-Left Representative Ruben Gallego.
“She’s not going to win a primary against Rep. Ruben Gallego, I’ll tell you that damn much,” Carville said. “And I will personally volunteer to help him fundraise because I think we can keep that seat if he runs.”
Republicans Are On-message
Illing asked about Carville’s opposition to woke leftism and his “begging Democrats to change the way they talk about issues like race and police reform in order to win the power you say they need.”
Democrats, Illing continued, are most decidedly not “foregrounding” wacky appeals for defunding police and Critical Race Theory, “yet it doesn’t seem to matter.” The GOP is crushing them. Americans are leaning Republican.
Carville returned to a hard truth: “Only 11 percent of the Democratic Party is progressive. It’s the smallest part of the party. But the problem is they make 70 percent of the noise.”
The leftist radical messages are still resonating in academia, newsrooms, and foundations; and open borders, defunding police, and emptying jails are “defining the party.”
“But I still believe that 2018 and 2020 showed that if you engage in the fundamentals of politics, you can win elections in the United States,” Carville said:
Democrats must keep pounding the most powerful message you have to the most people you can. Over and over again.
As both men confessed, the most powerful messages the party sends are from its unhinged, near-communist wing of angry radicals — and the leftist mainstream media amplifies those messages because its worthies agree with them; there’s no moderation for them.
The problem is, Democrats like Manchin and Sinema can’t be heard over their megaphone.
