Democratic strategist James Carville warned his party that they stand to lose a lot if they try to “listen to everybody.”
During a podcast interview Friday on Politico’s Playbook Deep Dive, Carville suggested that it was “a shortcoming of Democratic politics that everybody has a seat at the table and everybody can be heard.”
“I would always tell people in campaigns: If you want a democracy after the election, you have to have an autocracy before the election,” Carville said. “When I hear people say, ‘We’ve got have an inclusive and we’ve got to listen to everybody,’ no you don’t.”
The political pundit’s roughly 40-minute conversation focused on warning Democrats not to cave to interest groups ahead of Election Day. Carville argued that Democratic presidential candidates in the past, such as Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, lost their bids for office in part because they aligned with activists.
“Democrats just wanted to feel good about themselves, and we were more tolerant, we were more educated, we had a broader view,” Carville reflected.
Carville called the strategy “a stupid f***ing argument,” as he urged Democratic Party leaders to wait on pushing progressive agendas until after the election.
In this week's Deep Dive, Ryan Lizza sat down with longtime Democratic strategist James Carville to discuss his strong belief that “campaigns are not decided by editorial page writers” but by “salesmen and hucksters.”
— POLITICO Playbook (@playbookdc) September 27, 2024
More in this week's episode: https://t.co/v3QJpGJCSK
Responding to pressure Vice President Kamala Harris has faced to support progressive policies such as the Green New Deal, Carville recommended she not cave to activists’ demands ahead of November.
“Hey, look, if you want to … after we win, you know, come see the people, and we’ll talk about a Cabinet position, maybe, or we’ll talk about how we do legislation, or where you are on the thing, but for right now, tell your people this is the best way you have it,” he said.
Later on during the podcast, Carville said that while LGBT groups were “well-motivated,” they were “naive” and were trying to “rush the future.”
“You know, they want to get on with 50 years from now, today, and you know, the Supreme Court can do a lot of damage in the next 50 years if we don’t win the election,” he said.
“Don’t push an activist agenda during the middle of a campaign, push winning the election,” he urged.
While he expressed confidence in Harris’s ability to win the election, Carville sounded the alarm that Democrats’ move to use progressive, inclusionary language is out of touch with voters across the country.
“The term ‘communities of color’ is actually, it’s irritating, and I’ll tell you why, because the assumption by overeducated whites is everybody who is not white is the same, and that’s just bulls***,” he said. “Suppose I went … I had three guys, and I said, ‘Hey, fellas, how are things in the community of color?’ … [they would say] ‘What’s the son of a b**** talking about.'”
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Carville added the term “L, B, G, Q, T, plus, or something” to his list of worries “because it assumes that everybody that’s not a heterosexual is alike, which is decidedly not true.”
“I tell the identity community, or whatever they want to call themselves — I want the same things you want, but if you want to accomplish, you know a more inclusive place … why wouldn’t you communicate that in the language that people use every day?” he asked.