The Carville Prescription

In his daily poll for January 4, 2025, Philadelphia-based CNN talk show hostMixhael Smerconish asks "Do you agree with James Carville that Kamala Harris lost for one simple reason: the economy?" The question probably was written by Smerconish's producer, who is in the habit of asking unclear, ambiguous, or misleading questions.

This question, prompted by Carville's 1/4/25 op-ed in The New York Times, falls into either the second or third categories. Acknowledging error in being convinced that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump, Carville remarks "We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is, and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted byy anything else."

Carville may be as famous for his stock phrase "it's the economy, stupid" as he is for having been one of the two primary campaign strategists for Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign, which spawned the expression.

  nbsp;

However, the advice of the Ragin' Cajun for his Democratic Party did not pertain primarily to the price of eggs or of gas. Carville, who has slammed the Party for concentrating on "woke,"argues in his op-ed

While Democrats have next to no chance of passing a bold, progressive economic agenda in the next four years, what we can do is force Republicans to oppose us. We must be on the offensive with a wildly popular and populist economic agenda they cannot be for.

Let’s start by forcing them to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue and force them to block our attempts to codify it into law. And let’s take back the immigration issue by making it an economic issue and force the G.O.P. to deny bipartisan reform that expedites entry for high-performing talent and for those who will bring business into our nation. This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.

Amen and amen. Add to it consumer regulation (put into a sexier package) and raising Social Security benefits. However, Carville adds

To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast.

How authentic you are on the ecobomy? In August during the campaign, Donald Trump promised "promises will come down. You just watch. They'll come down, and they'll come down fast. Not only with insurance, with everything." Having now been elected, he says of grocery prices "It's hard to bring them down once they're up. You know, it's very hard."  Not very authentic but very effective, and the candidate was elected.

This is not an anomaly. On March 26, 1992, the "I feel your pain" was born as Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton- the most famous of Carville clients- told an AIDS activist 

I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally, you're no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment.

It's hard to believe Bill Clinton ever felt anyone's pain except his own but voters bought it, He was elected and four years later was re-elected. "Strong and wrong beats weak and right" asserted Clinton, who understood the strategic importance of faking self-confidence.

As President, Clintom succeeded Ronald Wilson Reagan who, like the former Arkansas governor, won his re-election bid. In that latter race, in 1984, Reagan was re-elected on the theme of "It's Morning in America"-  with an economy weaker than the one Americans enjoyed in this, the last year of the Biden presidency.

               

But voters bought it. They bought it because Ronald Reagan prior to his political career was a professional actor. He didn't lose his acting skills, riding them to the California statehouse and later two elected terms as President of the USA.

Obviously, Donald J. Trump, despite his obvious unfitness for the office, has now been elected twice to the presidency. He was a bad businessman and terrible president but an excellent actor on The Apprentice. 

And so it is:two professional actors and the chaming and cunning "SlickWillie," each of them elected and re-elected. They were elected not because they were "authentic" on the economy but because they appeared authentic.

James Carville's emphasis on performing well on a podcast is interesting and at least legitimate, and the impact of social media generally is not going away. Touting the importance of economic populism also is a counter-weight to the obsession with race plaguing the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, it needs to be recognized that for authenticity in presidential elections, perception trumps reality.

Share |