(2025-01-03) The Political Geniuses Have An Idea Do The Thing They Fought Against For A Decade

The Political Geniuses Have an Idea: Do the Thing They Fought Against for a Decade. Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville published a piece in the New York Times on Thursday about why he thinks Kamala Harris lost the presidential election and what Democrats should do next. His take: In order to win back voters who are dissatisfied with the status quo, the party needs to get more “populist” on economics.

Carville’s analysis lines up with that of former White House chief of staff and mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, who wrote last month in the Washington Post that the Dems have squandered years of opportunities to leverage “populist anger” and convey to voters that the party was on their side vis-à-vis “elites” from, for instance, Wall Street

So why did Democrats nominate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in succession instead of going in a more populist direction? David Brooks, Carville, and Emanuel—in these pieces and in other forums—tend to put the blame on woke, self-obsessed elites in “universities,” “affluent suburbs,” and “hipster urban cores,” to use Brooks’ words.

Which is interesting, because there was an economic populist in the past two competitive Democratic presidential primaries...were David Brooks, James Carville, and Rahm Emanuel, at the time, putting in work to boost Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—and economic populism in general?

Well, none of them were on Sanders’ side in 2016, but that’s not entirely surprising, because at the time he was a relatively unknown long-shot candidate. But how about in 2020, after he’d spent four years building a national base of support behind his attacks on [Bernie Sanders accent] “millionaires and billionaires” and a populist economic program of universal access to health care and education?

To listen to Carville’s present-day advocacy of populism, though, you wouldn’t have any idea that in 2020 he called Sanders “an ideologue” and “a communist,” denounced his plan for making postsecondary education free, and said that nominating him for president would be a disaster for the party’s chances downballot.

During his time in the White House, meanwhile, Emanuel worked to convince Barack Obama to nominate someone besides Warren to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2020, he conducted a press tour to try to undermine Sanders, denouncing the Vermont senator and his supporters for “making pledges that will never, ever be realized in people’s lives.”