James Carville Savages Democrats: 'This "Too Cool for School" S*** Doesn't Work, And We Have to Stop It'

By Jack Cowhick May 12, 2021 at 5:49pm

One prominent Democrat is slamming his own party for its obsession with being “woke.”

James Carville, a Democratic political consultant and co-host of the “Politics War Room” podcast, told left-leaning media outlet Vox for an article published last month he believes the party may “squander their political advantage” against the GOP.

Carville has worked as a political consultant in the United States since the 1970s and is perhaps most well known for the role he played on Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign.

Now, he’s sounding the alarm.

According to Carville, one thing President Joe Biden ought to be praised for is his avoidance of what he calls “faculty lounge” politics — that is, the use of new, woke terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color. Using such language, Carville said, “signals that you’re trying to talk around” members of minority communities.

“We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them,” Carville said.

“This ‘too cool for school’ s*** doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.”

Carville continued, “There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it ain’t the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats.”

“That’s what this whole d*** thing is about.”

Will the left ever abandon its woke culture?

When asked whether he had an issue with “wokeness,” Carville said, “Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it.”

But, according to the longtime Democratic consultant, very few Democrats will bring the issue up in public “because they’ll get clobbered or canceled.” Regardless, though, he believes his party needs to start speaking like its voters.

“I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish,” Carville said. “We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade.”

Carville continued, explaining that Democrats “have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.”

“Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that’s probably the worst thing that you can say about her,” he said.

“Now,” Carville added, “take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it.

“And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene.”

Moreover, Carville said he believes “faculty lounge” politics are having real impacts on Democrats’ election performance.

“If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. It’s certainly not a political environment I’m destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate,” he said.

“And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bulls*** is a big part of it.”

Carville even downplayed Democratic victories in the White House and in Congress, telling Vox, “We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are.

“And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.”

But, all isn’t lost, according to the political consultant.

When asked what he would suggest that Biden do, he said, “I’d have him pick up a phone.”

“I’d have someone in the White House pick up the phone. And when someone in the party starts this jargon s***, I’d call them and say, ‘We’re only a vote away. Our approval rating is 60 percent. We got a chance to pick up seats in 2022, and if you did this, it would be very helpful to us.'”

He also believes the party “can’t be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin.”

As if it needed to be said at all, Carville speaking out against his own party is noteworthy at the very least. At risk of being “clobbered or canceled,” he called out the ridiculous woke culture that has taken over almost every facet of the Democratic Party.

While most conservatives likely do not want to see the Democratic Party pull away from its losing tactics, the end of the left’s “faculty lounge” politics would certainly be a sight for sore eyes.

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