James Carville goes bonkers against rising radical-left Democrats

For those who can’t stand to listen to him, Real Clear Politics has the transcript here.

Carville’s interesting because he often has reasonable things to say, mixed in with infuriating partisanship. In this case, he understands half the story about why his party is imploding — and not the other half, either because he won’t admit it, or he doesn’t know.

His central thesis is that Democrats lose elections to Republicans when leftwing lunatics enter the races and challenge the establishment Clintonian Democrats favored by the DNC. 

Carville views the Clinton era as the golden age of America, and claims that recent electoral outcomes began with Al Gore’s 2000 presidential loss of the election to George W. Bush in an admittedly close race, which, of course, he thinks was stolen by Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, who didn’t rule Gore’s way in his selective and continuous recounting calls. The villain in that race was third-party candidate Ralph Nader, who drew a slice of what he viewed as Gore’s votes.

The villainy got worse, and the pattern more pronounced when Bernie Sanders entered the 2016 and 2020 races for president, another unelectable who siphoned votes from the DNC’s favored candidates. I am not sure what he was getting at in his criticism of the 2024 loss, but he seems to think the ousting of Joe Biden for more left-leaning Kamala Harris was in this same vein of swapping out a bland establishmentarian for an extremist, or else views the minor third-party candidacies of Cornel West and Marianne Williamson as the reason Harris lost.

Well, no. His thesis is half right, but he gets only half the story.

What he misses is that the electorate has had it up to here with the leftward slide of the Democrats of all stripes. During the Obama presidency, Obama was openly against gay marriage until Joe Biden announced he was all for it, opening the floodgates to the social extremism of the Democrats. After that. we saw establishment Democrats supporting huge fully intact men walking into little girls’ bathrooms swinging their junk, and muscular males three times the size of female athletes taking all the prizes and scholarships in women’s sports. This wasn’t the crazy left we are talking about, this was the establishment left.

Under the Obama presidency, we saw our U.S. Navy sailors captured at sea and humiliated by Iran’s filthy mullahs, and an emerging democracy movement led by women in Iran go ignored until it withered away. We saw Osama bin Laden’s rotten corpse fully dressed for burial at sea and given a Islamically respectful ceremony, photos of his miserable corpse denied to the public for viewing, even though they saw firsthand his murder orgy, rubble, and ruin and their taxes paid for his erasure from face of the Earth. We saw an American ambassador dragged through the streets of Benghazi, with little response and an ocean of lies about a video upsetting a group of religiously excitable Muslims, which was complete nonsense, and terrorists giggled on their bulletin boards. 

We saw taxes rise, illegals roll in, and NGOs grow fat and powerful. We lost our right to health care choice and now must pay health care premiums the size of house payments on top of the soaring bills themselves. And under Joe Biden, the Democrat establishment got even worse.

That was the Democrat establishment, leaning hard into the radical left craziness, which opened the gates to even crazier Democrats from the DSA, starting with AOC, and then New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

But there was a second factor Carville misses. Not only did the establishment Democrats slide further left, like a bus without breaks going downhill, establishment Democrats rigged and cheated candidates such as Bernie Sanders out of the Democrat nomination, what with their superdelegates and diversion of party resources to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, which they later admitted and supposedly apologized for doing. In doing this, it wasn’t about the candidates, it was about stiffing their own voters. In cheating them, they could only get madder — and the Nadars and Sanderses multiplied. 

Basically, Carville is complaining about the party he built. Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for third party and insurgent candidates, everyone knows they are going to rig it the way they want and Democrat voters don’t matter. 

Now he’s ranting and raving because the crazies are getting stronger. Maybe if Democrats changed their behavior, running mainstream candidates like Sen. John Fetterman instead of demonizing leaders like him, and adopted less extreme positions themselves, while at the same time, being fair to all sides, including the nuts, they wouldn’t have this problem.

But that’s too much to fit into a snakehead who views winning at any cost (very evident in his rant) as the only good. Eat it up, Carville, you made this sloppy stew.