Longtime Democrat cheerleader James Carville had strong words for his pessimistic friends on the left: “[Q]uit being a whiny party.”
Carville joined Chuck Todd on Sunday for NBC’s “Meet the Press” to discuss the difficult start that Joe Biden has had to his presidency. Carville immediately pushed back against Todd’s negative narrative about a lack of Democrat accomplishments on COVID, Build Back Better, and voting rights: “You gloat, and you promote….[Y]ou run on what you’ve got. You don’t run on what you didn’t get. And the stuff you’ve got is pretty good.”
“You talk about the fact that – we pretend to care about child poverty, although no columnist that I read in the paper ever talks about it. It’s the lowest child poverty rate we’ve had in history,” Carville observed. “We claim that we care about hourly workers. Hourly workers today have more leverage at any time they’ve ever had in my 77 years of existence on this planet, right? You talk about, we want jobs — 6.4 million jobs, more jobs than any president ever created in the first term.”
Todd pressed Carville for ways to get the message out to discouraged progressive voters; Carville insisted that people should focus on important things and not on “some word in a dictionary.”
(Video: NBC News)
He has been warning Democrat leadership for a year now about the dangers of going “woke,” calling the strategy “a big ‘problem’ that everyone is aware of” as far back as April of last year. Over the summer, he repeated his belief that, “people [are] way more interested in their lives, and how to improve them, than they are in somebody else’s pronoun or something.” And once again in November he chided the base, saying, “What went wrong [in Virginia and New Jersey] was this stupid wokeness….[Y]ou’re hurting the party. You’re hurting the very people you want to help.”
Carville wants to focus the messaging on the gains of the past year, gains that he believes Democrat voters can see personally and should be proud of.
“I care that somebody, an hourly worker is not sitting there working away at $7.25 an hour. And I see these signs all over, even in Louisiana and south Mississippi, $700 signing bonus. Those are, those are real accomplishments. And it’s something that you can run on,” he argued.
He asserted that with new infrastructure spending in the works, children “are going to ride on better roads, have better broadband, cross better bridges. I mean, this is something we ought to be really proud of as Americans and we ought to talk about it, we ought to brag about it, we ought to tell people about it.”
Carville admitted that the last week was tough for the administration.
“You know, you had a bad week, but you had a good year. People going — people at the end of the day, are going to judge you on your, your year and not your week.” he contended.
He ended his time with Todd on a positive note, stressing again the importance of touting what he sees as the victories from the year versus the more visible setbacks and not allowing the base to become discouraged: “If we do those kinds of things, we’ll end up with a better outcome, I promise you.”
Not everyone agreed with this declaration:
Carville always annoys some people, because he tells them “you can’t have everything, here’s how you can get the best result”. And they respond “nooooo, we want everything!”
— Catt-A (@Catt_A) January 17, 2022
The irony in Carville’s statement amazes me. I always found him to be one of the loudest whiners in the Democratic Party. https://t.co/b8quo30w0G
— Robert Heffernan (@RobertHeffern19) January 17, 2022
@chucktodd Doesn’t Carville know you’re one of those whiners he’s talking about. And all those signs offering $700 bonuses he’s talking about has nothing to do with the great job Biden is doing, it has to do with people who would rather sit home and get money from the government.
— JohnBiz (@JohnBiz17) January 17, 2022
James Carville “Just quit being a whiny party and get out there and fight and tell people what you did.”
We left Americans behind in Afghanistan, we opened the border for millions of Illegals, we told teachers to teach Critical Race Theory, and Closed the Oil Pipeline. Satisfied? pic.twitter.com/O1TSnrBOtW— papamaga (@papaneeed1) January 17, 2022
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