“Wok­e­ness is a prob­lem and we all know it”

James Carville on the state of Demo­c­ra­t­ic politics.

I called James Carville hop­ing to get his thoughts on Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office.

He oblig­ed — then, one ques­tion in, brushed aside the exer­cise to talk instead about why the Democ­rats might be poised to squan­der their polit­i­cal advan­tage against a dam­aged GOP.

His fail­ure to coop­er­ate may have been for the best since the first 100 days rit­u­al can some­times lead to dull, duti­ful analy­sis. What Carville offered up instead was a blunt cri­tique of his own par­ty even after a suc­cess­ful 2020 elec­tion cycle — a sequel of sorts to his ful­mi­na­tions dur­ing last year’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries. The long­time Demo­c­ra­t­ic strate­gist is most­ly pleased with Biden, but it’s where much of the par­ty seems to be going that has him worried.

“Wok­e­ness is a prob­lem,” he told me, “and we all know it.” Accord­ing to Carville, Democ­rats are in pow­er for now, but they also only­nar­row­ly defeat­ed Don­ald Trump, “a world-his­tor­i­cal buf­foon,” and they lost con­gres­sion­al seats and failed to pick up state leg­is­la­tures. The rea­son is sim­ple: They’ve got a “mes­sag­ing problem.”

A light­ly edit­ed tran­script of our con­ver­sa­tion fol­lows:

https://​www​.vox​.com/​2​2​3​3​8​4​1​7​/​j​a​m​e​s​-​c​a​r​v​i​l​l​e​-​d​e​m​o​c​r​a​t​i​c​-​p​a​r​t​y​-​b​i​d​e​n​-​1​0​0​-​d​ays

Source: vox​.com