Leave it to James “It’s the Economy, Stupid” Carville to bluntly diagnose what’s wrong with Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Carville was a campaign strategist for Democrats, most famously for Bill Clinton’s presidential run in 1992. He became best associated with the aforementioned catchphrase for the Clinton campaign (which was technically just “the economy, stupid,” but details, details) and still provides frank advice to his party.
Like, in this case, that the presumptive Democratic nominee should stop listening to “dead-a** wrong” Democrats on “the progressive left.”
According to Fox News, Carville said on a Thursday episode of his podcast that he wished “she’d tell them all to go f*** themselves.”
“Understand this, and I’m going to say this as clearly as I can: Anybody that has ever listened to anything that the progressive left has ever said has lived to profoundly regret it,” Carville said.
“Literally on every issue, they’re dead-a** wrong.”
He harkened back to a speech — which could be one in a series of speeches, really — Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren made in autumn of 2019 which essentially halted momentum her campaign was gathering by promising to back Medicare-for-All.
“Ask Elizabeth Warren and Medicare-for-All. She blew her campaign up with one speech, all right?” he said.
“I’d love to read a good article on who really was the strategic idiot behind her 2020 presidential campaign, because they were real f****** idiots, all right?” he added.
Will Kamala Harris lose?
“And why is the border an issue? Because Biden listened to these people early in his term,” Carville continued.
“They weren’t just wrong; they were catastrophically wrong. Understand that.”
Unfortunately, the problem with this is that Kamala Harris isn’t going to tell the progressive left to all to go do a physical impossibility to themselves. That’s because she’s one of them.
Just ask GovTrack, the organization that rated her the most liberal senator in the upper chamber during her time there.
Or ask the people running Dave McCormick’s Senate campaign in Pennsylvania. They were the first to tie the Democratic candidate in that swing state, incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, to Harris’ far-left positions during the 2020 campaign:
Bob Casey just endorsed the most liberal nominee in U.S. history. pic.twitter.com/J0V6W7CUlh
— Dave McCormick (@DaveMcCormickPA) July 23, 2024
How is Harris going to be able to distance herself from herself?
She’s certainly trying, speaking in the vague “unburdened by the past” platitudes that have been part and parcel of her time as vice president. That still doesn’t mean that the rebranding will succeed.
After all, Donald Trump himself is running a different version of the McCormick ad, and between now and Election Day, you can expect pretty much every Republican in a close race to be doing the same, assuming their opposition gets in line behind Harris.
Once Americans sees that, they’re going to realize she’s one of the people who, as Carville so eloquently puts it, are “dead-a** wrong” on everything.
