There is probably no political operative more fun to watch than James Carville, talking in his twang, using normal-people words, and saying things that others lack the guts to say. The baseball cap and sweatshirt don’t hurt either. No fancy-pants outfit for Jimbo to lend him credibility. Nosirreebob. But as fun and likeable as he may be, does that make him right?
I’ve been going over this in my head for the past two months, all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the questions about Joe Biden’s re-election decisions and what kind of Democrat or message might have worked against Donald Trump. I keep coming back to the same thing. We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid.
To give credit where credit is due, Carville came up with “It’s the economy, stupid,” as Bill Clinton’s winning slogan back when he turned Pappy Bush into a one-termer. Of course, times were different then, and the impudence of the Ragin’ Cajun was quite the novelty. But Carville is now an oldster of 80 years, an elder statesman of politics, and entitled to quip as he pleases.
Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back. Perception is everything in politics, and a lot of Americans perceive us as out to lunch on the economy — not feeling their pain, or else caring too much about other things instead.
To win back the economic narrative, we must focus on revving up a transformed messaging machine for the new political paradigm we now find ourselves living in. It’s about finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive. Repetitive. Memorable. And entirely focused on the issues that affect Americans’ everyday lives.
This is where you see the political operative coming out in Old Man Carville. He’s focused on the messaging machine, the one that wins the economic narrative. But what of the message? What of the narrative? Is this about pretending to care about the economy or caring about the economy? Is this about spinning the same old agenda or changing the agenda?
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.
Is that what Americans want, a “bold, progressive economic agenda”? Will the Democrats be able to trick Americans into wanting it if they dress it in economic sheep’s clothing? Will American’s be put off if the Democrats try to force their agenda, the one just rejected by the election of the man you wouldn’t let near your daughter, and the Republicans knee-jerk refuse to go along?
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.
So do the same as before, but with a new spin? I like Carville, and generally enjoy hearing him piss all over the political establishment’s cornflakes. But like Joe Biden and Donald Trump, he too has gotten old. While he may be right about the economy being the foremost concern of most Americans, the problem isn’t the messaging, but the message.
We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else.
Too late, Jim. It’s not the messaging, but the message.
“Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue”
I thought that “most abortions are for convenience” was a talking point of the right, not of the left. But apparently Carville hasn’t gotten that memo.
“Let’s start by forcing them to oppose…”
Poison. The tactic of turning nuanced issues into culture wars for the purpose of generating binary opposition rather than consensus is socially toxic and politically unsustainable.
Seems like a poison that the electorate is willingly consuming. Trump’s message “Illegals, Illegals, Illegals” and Harris’ “Threat to democracy” The former won!
“To win back the economic narrative, we must focus on revving up a transformed messaging machine for the new political paradigm we now find ourselves living in.”
Not “we ran bad candidates,” or “the economy truly did suck;” but “our messaging sucked.” Why does it seem that is always the complaint of modern political losing campaigns? Carville is as blind as the others. Why can’t they just admit our candidate sucked; the economy truly was bad, and/or we lied; or we just don’t seem to know what we were doing? But then that requires honest introspection, and “professional political operatives” do not have that.
The party’s central problem is that it is obsessed with an abstract ideology that is irrelevant to voters down at the wage-earner level of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
When Jill Sixpack gets home from work tired and turns on the evening news, she sees these imbeciles maundering about churning out more transpeople, letting in more illegals, passing out race-based benefits, whacking some fetuses and restricting her right to have firearms for self-defense. It’s not simply that none of that shit helps pay for gas and groceries, but that it reflects a complete disconnect from the daily concerns that are of central importance to the average citizen.
Carville might be right that, in politics, everything is about perception. The problem is that he thinks that means everything is about spin. It’s not. Sooner or later, people inevitably perceive what is right in front of their eyes, and there’s no way of stopping them. So at some point, no matter how clever your messaging, you have to address substance.
With respect to the economy, I think the situation was rather opposite. Inflation was down, unemployment was down, wages were up, the stock market was through the roof. The economy had recovered from the COVID epidemic better than all the other advanced economies, and not by just a little. They KNEW voters who voted based on the economy would vote blue.
But they didn’t. Don’t know why, but most people don’t KNOW about the economy, they FEEL about the economy, and facts about the economy are a hard sell. “Yes, groceries got expensive, and no, grocery prices are not going down. But the problem is not that prices are high, it’s that your employer hasn’t given you a big raise.”
And the other guy was there with the big lie.
“Inflation was down, unemployment was down, wages were up, the stock market was through the roof.”
These are DNC talking points, and they sound great. The problem occurs when people turn off the TV and try to buy something. You can sit around listening to TV pundits, or reading government statistics that say wages are going up, or you can look at your paycheck. Likewise, you can listen to people telling you that inflation is down, or you can check the prices at the grocery store.
No, the situation was not the opposite. This is the difference between knowing the propaganda numbers and knowing the economy as people experience it firsthand. Inflation is down? Not down to pre-pandemic levels, and even that number is squirelly because it leaves out things like food and energy – ostensibly because of “volatility” but ordinary people have noticed the official measures leave out what they actually spend huge swaths of their income on.
Unemployment down? If you mean more people are working two jobs to get by, yes. But most job growth went to immigrants, employment for US-born workers has just recently recovered to pre-pandemic levels. The stock market means little to the working class, which mostly don’t even have 401Ks, and those that do won’t be able to touch them for many years, and won’t know whether those numbers mean anything until someone hands them actual cash (or tells them the money is gone). And to the extent the rest of the developed world fared worse, we should also note that most of the developed world took a much “bluer” approach to governance than the United States, so why would we go harder at a strategy that served everyone else so poorly?
Any inflation measurement that leaves out food and energy is meaningless.
“It’s the economy stupid” only works when the other guy tanked the economy. Under Biden and Harris everything got more expensive and no amount of saying the economy is booming changes what voters were paying at gas pump and grocery checkout. Also in the thirty plus years since Carville and Clinton rode that slogan to victory the media landscape has become far more hostile to spin.
Between fumbling interviews, incoherent policies and “joy” Harris was so unpalatable even Democrats voted against her. All the messaging in the world won’t help shove ideology and degrowth down the electorate’s throat.
The Democrats only hope is to run a popular candidate in 2028, and ignore Trump entirely
There’s a saying in surgery about some unfixable problems: ‘You can’t shine shit.’ So too here, that some economic problems are so dire that no amount of messaging can salvage them. But bad messaging can make things worse—and that needs to be fixed.
Telling people, ‘The rate of inflation is slowing down,’ for example, is bad messaging. The rate of inflation is essentially the second derivative of price versus time and most people are not doing calculus at the grocery store. Yet they can absolutely sense when prices are high (just as they can without any math sense acceleration, also a second derivative). This disconnect demands plain, relatable messaging. So maybe JC can twang something like this: ‘When your F-150 is speeding down the road in the wrong direction, the first step is to ease off the gas pedal and stop going faster. Next, you hit the brakes to slow down. And finally, you turn the truck around and start driving in the right direction. We’ve taken the first step, but we still got to get this baby home.’
And since shit cannot be shined, it may have been too much to expect such deft messaging from the prior candidates, but sure as a lizard gonna jump out of the alligator gumbo (or whatever they say in carville land), the next candidate sure better do it better
The inflation rate is the _first_ derivative of price, not the second. Nice start, doc.
Late to the party, but w/ all due respect to Mssrs. Carville and Greenfield, it is the messaging.
In a less politically correct time, the late Dan Jenkins observed, “If people can’t understand what you’re saying, you couldn’t sell welfare in Harlem!’.
If the issue was the economy, Harris should have won. The US rebounded better from the Covid pandemic, despite Il Douche’s astonishing ineptitude in addressing this issue, better than almost any advanced economy. The Fed has done a great job (they’ve pretty much “stuck the landing”) and while Biden should be in an eldercare facility (along w/ Pelosi, McConnell and much of Congress) his administration deserves a great deal of credit for managing gov’t spending reasonably well.
Harris “screwed the pooch” on messaging. She should have opened every speech ridiculing Il Douche and then segued into a message on policy. As Mort Sahl observed, “Kennedy didn’t beat Nixon, ridicule beat Nixon”. Harris/ her people didn’t learn this lesson. The message should have been, “Elect a clown, expect a circus!” repeated at every opportunity.