I'm a fairly plugged in political observer, which is to say there are certainly things that slip my notice. But what in the hell is James Carville talking about?Carville: "I’m a supportive, ardent Democrat. But the English faculty at Amherst has too much power in this party. They really do. And they come up with all of these different things...Biden gets a congratulations: he stays out of that."
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 28, 2021
Watch it all:https://t.co/JNiCbCjU1O pic.twitter.com/2HCQ3WTyeh
A janitor at Smith College? The English faculty at Amherst? What? Who? I haven’t a clue what he means, and I’m critical of all the navel-gazing that happens on the internet, where most commentary is about how a tweet is going to affect an election. True, people are getting insanely stupid ideas from Facebook, et al., but those people are a vocal minority whose influence is ebbing as Trump rants about the Oscars telecast and spends his time planning to flee Florida for the summer (didn’t he move there?). What Carville is ranting about is somewhere beyond the fringes of even QAnon.
It’s not only Biden who’s staying out of whatever it is Carville is upset about. I think even AOC is not associating herself with whatever Carville’s talking about.
And then there’s his agreement with Kristol that the Democrats somehow play into the criticisms of the GOP. American politics has always been based on misrepresenting the postures of the opposing party. The only new thing is how the GOP has weaponized lies since the Gingrich era. But the success of that approach reached its apotheosis under Trump, and the only reason Biden is “staying out of it” is because those attacks have proven ineffective at the national level. They still work, to some degree, at the state level, but that’s always been true, and it has more to do with state politics than national politics.
The question is: is the FoxNews/OAN/GOP kind of thinking alive and well at the local level? Or is it going to be shaken out there, too? FoxNews recently ran a graphic that presented Gov. Absent as a “trailblazer.” Well, maybe to FoxNews, but not to anybody in Texas. The Lege is ignoring him, he’s absolutely leaderless on the issue that concerns most Texans now (electricity and whether we’ll have enough of it this summer), and the entire GOP is determinedly ignoring the availability of federal funds to help those with no health insurance. After Covid and business shutdowns and even business failures, I think that’s going to bubble up as more of an issue than cries of “socialism!” can tamp down.
I think, in other words, Biden is the tip of the spear of change. We would do well to remember LBJ came out of Texas, and wasn’t ever that far removed from Texas politics or culture, despite how “liberal” he was. That strain of Texas politics could be recovered, and may well be.
And if it is, it will have nothing to do with the English faculty at Amherst college that nobody’s heard of.
Yuo.I might be wrong, but I don't think the top story of today is the Democratic Party's problem with what James Fcking Carville think is "wokeness."#MorningJoe
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) April 29, 2021
I'd entitle a piece about this, "It's the 2020s, stupid".
ReplyDeleteI think James Carville is stuck in the 1990s. I don't pay that much attention to him, it might be useful to look at his predictions and concerns over the past quarter of a century to see how much of what he said turned out to be relevant or at all important. I wonder how worried about what he thinks David Axelrod is as compared to most Democrats or independents who will vote for Democrats.
That is a better title. Wish I'd thought of it.
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