Pacific Views

Carville Speaks

It's good to watch C-SPAN. There's long stretches of unrelenting tedium which deserve a channel flip, but fairly often the periodic check in pays off. Like hearing James Carville give a brief speech to a DC area audience based on his book, "Had Enough: ..."

He spent the time talking about how important it was for Democrats to fight back, and how. For one, he said that although they were wrong, Republicans are highly effective. They mobilize people, and they talk about big issues. The NRA, for instance, doesn't insist that candidates be photographed posing with AK-47s. They just turn out the vote. We lose when we sound like a collective of interest groups.

And it seemed the point he wanted most to get across was that there was no reason for Democrats to apologize about anything. Certainly not about winning two World Wars, ending the Great Depression, and presiding over a period of unprecedented prosperity. That we needed to stop conceding that the other side had a point, and remember that we win to the degree that we fight back.

And then he started taking questions. Someone asked him how the Democrats could take back the south. And after having talked about how it was that a 50-50 electorate could produce a 90-10 result, he said that Democrats only needed to do better there. But even that was beside the point.

Carville said that the party's "aura of weakness is offensive." No one will trust people to defend America who can't defend themselves. He said that if he had the power, he'd ban our candidates from cocktail parties in the Beltway before elections. To prevent them from giving a damn whether or not [very proximal paraphrase] the third assistant to the junior editor of the Washington Post had been seen to roll her eyes. DeLay is successful precisely because he doesn't care what the papers think.

And that's something to chew on for a bit.

Posted by natasha at December 15, 2003 12:49 AM | TrackBack