Democrats have a problem, says James Carville, and it’s not Joe Biden. It’s not even Donald Trump and his MAGA hordes, not really. “Democrats of certain kinds, they really feel good about losing,” said the longtime political strategist on Sunday during a panel as part of The Ankler and Pure Non-Fiction’s latest Documentary Spotlight event. “Fuck losing.”
Carville has no time for progressive virtue signaling and demands for “100 percent purity” that only distract from the objective: winning. “If you want to feel good and smug about yourself, that’s fine,” he said. “But without power, what difference does it make?”
Carville shared the stage with filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer (Where’s My Roy Cohn?, The Reagans), who’s been following the 79-year-old Ragin’ Cajun as he crisscrosses the country in an effort to get Biden re-elected.
“I was taught earlier in my career, your job is not to predict elections, it’s to affect elections — and we got to try to win this thing,” Carville said. “I don’t think it was the niftiest idea I ever heard” for Biden to run again, he added. “But here we are . . . And we’re up against a wall.”
Carville’s advice to the Biden campaign: “Take the attack to the next level. Don’t argue with them, just flood the zone, and you’ve got to be more direct.”
Specifically, he would drive home the message that the Republican party is “getting ready to take your birth control away.” Carville was the only national Democrat who went to Kansas in 2022, Tyrnauer pointed out, when the state had a constitutional amendment on abortion on the ballot. The measure, which would’ve allowed the state to restrict or even ban the procedure, lost 60-40.
“What Kansas did at some level is show that we had some power behind this issue,” Carville explained. “We haven’t lost an election since Dobbs,” the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
In their conversation moderated by Pure Non-Fiction’s Thom Powers, Carville and Tyrnauer recalled the lessons of the seminal 1993 doc The War Room. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ film chronicled the Bill Clinton campaign and its multiple crises, from Gennifer Flowers’ revelation of her affair with the candidate to the release of a letter Clinton wrote to avoid the Vietnam draft.
Clinton sat for an interview with Tyrnauer about Carville’s role in his campaign’s survival. “James with Clinton and George Stephanopoulos invented a strategy to, as President Clinton told me, ‘turn into the fire,’” said Tyrnauer. “He taught Democrats how to win.”
Carville has “been an insurgent in this cycle,” the filmmaker added, calling for Biden to drop out, calling for an open convention. “He’s pissed people off right, left and center.”
But the Biden campaign needs a James Carville, Tyrnauer argued, “to tell them how to turn into the fire and actually give as good as they’re getting.”
Carville also wants the campaign to meet American voters where they are. “Quit arguing with people that the economy is good, and start telling people what you’re going to do to help ’em get through what it is that they’re faced with,” he said. “People think that corporate greed is driving this inflation, and they’re convinced of that. Well, give the public what they want. Say we’re going to have antitrust laws — these airlines, these insurance companies, they’re all rigging prices, and you are the person that’s on the short end of the stick. As opposed to telling people, ‘Your life is great,’ tell ’em how you’re going to make their life better.”
Framing is the job, Carville added, even in a splintered media age. “We’ve had all kinds of new ways to communicate, but at the end of the day, it’s what you’re communicating and how you frame that communication that gets to people. Let somebody else figure out how to get more hits on social media, how to do this and that. Real political people ought to be thinking about How do we frame this thing, and what it is that we bring home? Let 185 IQ people figure out how to get it out there. Let the 110 IQ people say, ‘No, you’re getting too goddamn complicated.’”
As Tyrnauer pointed out, Carville actually makes the most of multiple platforms — as a prolific talking head on cable news but also via podcasts, including his own, Politics War Room. “It’s all done from the road out of a suitcase,” Tyrnauer added, “which is well stocked with LSU regalia and a few travel bottles of Maker’s Mark.”
Tyrnauer plans to complete and release his documentary by the fall, ahead of the election. “The director and I have a mind meld that winning is the key to this whole thing,” says Carville, who’s also betting the doc will engage aspiring politicos to enter the arena he loves. “I hope when somebody sees this film and it comes out, [they think] those guys had a pretty good time. Okay? It is not a hair shirt, alright?”
His suggestion for the film’s title: “It Used to Be Fun, and It Can Be Fun Again.”
