Whining Means Nothing, Stupid: Why James Carville is Bad for Democrats and America
If “Winning is Everything, Stupid,” then James Carville Has Been Nothing for Years
I’m blaming a lot of what’s going on lately with James Carville.
You know the guy. The infamous Democratic advisor who is credited with winning Bill Clinton his election. The man who’s got a soundbite for everything and seems beloved by the media. They call him The Ragin Cajun, even though he’s given a bit less “Ragin Cajun” than “senile grandpa from Courage the Cowardly Dog” in recent years.
James Carville’s got a lot to say about how “winning’s everything, stupid,” despite not having won ANYTHING in decades, and the truth is… he’s actually a massive hypocrite and, in some ways, actively dangerous for democracy.
Take, for instance, his recent idea to “sue” DNC vice chair and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, while calling him a “contemptible little twerp.” Ad hominem aside, Courage’s Grandpa was mad at David for his twofold plan to try to get older Democrats to stop running for re-election to make way for younger blood - even potentially supporting younger Democrats to primary the oldheads in office.
When we consider the continued victories of young members of Congress - your AOCs, your Maxwell Frosts, a Marie Perez here, a Greg Casar there - Carville at best looks out of touch, and at worst is living up to what Tucker Carlson once called him: “a fraud, but openly so, in the most honest and genuine way.” This is nothing new for Carville; as Hogg said in response to CNN, "Carville believes in a politics of being timid, of hiding. I believe in fighting. We can't simply just hide, as Carville repeatedly promotes, not to mention the fact that, frankly, he has not won an election since before I was born."
“When were you born?” Jake Tapper asked him.
“2000.”
Ouch. But he’s not wrong.
WINNING IS EVERYTHING, STUPID
For everybody who grew up in a certain era, James Carville was a hero. Or at least, we were told that he was. He had a quip for everything. He was the type of guy who would run gubernatorial campaigns that smeared the opponents as “dope smoking hippies” - and it actually worked. He single-handedly created the Clinton model of winning elections. “It’s the economy, stupid.” There’s even the string of victories Carville had his hands in overseas, with victories under his belt in Brazil, Israel, Honduras
Don’t worry about his guys in Ecuador and Bolivia both having to seek exile following their elections, though. Don’t worry about watching the 2005 documentary Our Brand is Crisis, which follows Carville and company as they elect a man in Bolivia who is in completely over his head, only for him to eventually resign, seek exile in America, and then be held liable in a civil trial for a number of civilian deaths during the Gas War. Winning is everything, stupid, and after helping elect Bill Clinton TWICE, Carville was going to keep on winning!
Like, remember in 2004 when we had President John Kerry? Or 2008, when President Hillary Clinton beat the hell out of Obama - the candidate “most likely to explode or implode?” The candidate Carville once told to take a toke on the mayor of Toronto’s crack pipe”? Oh man, the Michael Bennet years in 2020 were TRANSCENDENT. “JOHN KENNEDY RECLONED,” Carville boasted, and I agreeeeeeeeokay, I can’t even commit to that joke - I mean no disrespect right now to Michael Bennet, I’m sure he’s a nice man, but I simply do not remember who he is and HE WAS THE PERSON JAMES CARVILLE BACKED IN 2020 - a man who placed 10th in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, who received a total of 168 votes total in the Iowa caucus - a number that eventually, per the rules of the Iowa caucus, corrected to zero votes.
The truth is, Carville seems to believe the problem is less with his own lack of read on the room and more so to do with his belief that the Democratic Party has become the party of “too many preachy females.”
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females … ‘Don’t drink beer, don’t watch football, don’t eat hamburgers, this is not good for you,'” he told Maureen Dowd at the New York Times. “The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.'...If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?”
I’m so glad you said something, Eustace, please - PLEASE - will someone think of the men?!
Look, there have been a LOT of folks opining that Democrats are veering too far away from young men, and there’s certainly a bit of validity to that - just not in the way Carville is positioning it. Women went to Biden 55% to Trump’s 44% in 2020, and were very MUCH a deciding factor in that election. Remember: Trump ALSO RAN IN THAT ELECTION. The message is, and always was, what Carville is decrying.
THE FIFTY STATE STRATEGY
But I guess what bothers me the most about Carville’s place in American politics is that he has been wrong, like, LOUDLY wrong - for a very long time. Back in 2013, Elizabeth Daigneau at Governing did an analysis on one of the most innovative sets of tactics ever deployed by the Democrats: Howard Dean’s fifty state strategy.
For those of you who either weren’t old enough back then or need a refresher, ex-governor of Vermont Howard Dean, a man who could have been president but had a funny scream or something, became the head of the DNC. His main strategy, the fifty state strategy, bucked tradition and sought to allocate resources to get people elected in all fifty states during his tenure (2005-2009) rather than just a select few battleground states. Folks like Rahm Emanuel and Carville bestie Paul Begala criticized the idea, with Paul Begala calling it "hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."
Here’s the thing, though. Daigneau compared the fifty-state strategy from 05-09 with the DNC’s strategy from 09-13 without Dean and found some pretty interesting stats. For instance, Democrats had net gains of 39 in State House seats, three U.S. house seats, 1 U.S. Senate seat, and saw a MASSIVE increase in votes for the Democratic presidential nominee across most states. However, Democrats DID have a Net loss of two State Senate seats and one governorship.
The numbers seem pretty small at first glance, but what Daigneau found was that without the fifty state strategy, Democrats lost 249 State House seats, 84 State Senate seats, four Governors (a 50% loss), TWO-THIRDS of attorneys general, nearly twenty U.S. House seats (40%!!!!), three U.S. Senate seats, and a decline in support for Obama from 2008. Daigneau puts it best when she says,
“Altogether, these post-2009 declines are, to put it bluntly, pretty catastrophic.”
Dean himself abandoned the 50 state strategy post-DNC, but it was an innovative strategy that made modest, but substantial gains for the party in areas they historically DO NOT WIN IN.
So of course Eustace Bagge had some shit to say about it.
Carville went on the warpath against Howard Dean. You can click the link above for more info, or you can click this adorable Kids Encyclopedia link (wait, why is there a Kids Encyclopedia entry for James freaking Carville????), but the gist is that Carville called Dean "Rumsfeldian in [his] incompetence," and demanded Dean be kicked out of the freaking DNC. As the Kids Encyclopedia summarizes it, “[He] claimed that, with a conventional strategy of piling money solely into close races, Democrats could have picked up as many as 50 House seats, roughly 20 more than they won that year.”
As we just read, that’s not only not true, but WILDLY untrue to the point that it would 100% make the cut on one of those Twitter “Aged Like Milk” accounts. Howard Dean’s strategy did GOOD. James Carville’s (un-elected ramblings) did not. This wasn’t a one-off occurrence, either.
Look at Carville, per the New York Times, in *checks notes* FEBRUARY 2025. In an op-ed, this silly little cartoon character wrote, “With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.”
That’s right: in response to one of the most aggressive attempt to dismantle the government ever, alongside one of the most aggressive anti-immigration agendas ever, ALONGSIDE THE SINGLE MOST FRIGHTENING DISRUPTION OF CIVIL RIGHTS FOR TRANS FOLKS IN AMERICA, James Carville suggested we do… nothing. Just let it happen. It’ll all implode on itself, he said. Not a privileged statement from a crotchety old bastard at all, just “wise wisdom” for the Democrats.
Now’s probably as good a time as any to pivot not only to why Carville is stupid, but he allegedly contributes to evil, too.
THE ALL-SEEING EYE:
On April 16, 2025, Joseph Cox released a bombshell report for 404 Media that ICE had signed a $30 million deal with Palantir. This may not seem immediately ABOUT James Carville, but bare with me for a second. Palantir is an AI company named after those “seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings that spied on folks around Middle-earth. As cute as the reference is, it serves an even more insidious purpose for a few reasons.
Palantir uses artificial intelligence to data mine unsuspecting folks around the world
And it was a company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire Republican super-donor and strange fellow who has had his mitts in everything from electing ghouls like Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and Donald Trump, to trying to reshape women’s lifestyle magazines in a more conservative direction while literally owning an evil period tracker app that gives really fucked up advice to women in need of contraceptives
This means that a Peter Thiel founded data mining venture is now helping ICE
The deal has Palantir creating “software add-ons” to better track people deporting themselves, as well as any immigrants who have overstayed their visas. Rosemarie Ho, for Business Insider, discovered a contract that “said the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System — or ImmigrationOS — will minimize "time and resource expenditure" for selecting and apprehending immigrants based on ICE enforcement priorities.”
What Palantir is bringing to the table will undoubtedly make the world a worse place. When you look at the results of past Palantir projects, such as their “predictive policing” model in New Orleans from 2012-2018, you’ll see a lot of people claim violent crime went “way down” in New Orleans during that time, with some sources claiming murders dipped twenty-five percent before reversing course. Much of the program remains shrouded in secrecy due to it being an alleged “philanthropic venture,” but what we do know is that what Palantir developed is a generative tool that identifies people considered to be at high risk of committing crimes or having crimes committed against them. Following bombshell reports at The Verge and Nola.com looking into the specifics, NOPD quietly cut ties with Palantir.
A study by Youngsub Lee, Ben Bradford, and Krisztian Posch for the Justice Evaluation Journal even looked into predictive policing back in 2024 and found that there is a LOT of room for error in the model. “If the data is mishandled during processing, or if it reflects the biases often present in current policing activities and practices, then algorithm-guided policing is also likely to be biased,” they write, also adding that algorithmic policing widens the gap between the public and their trust in the police.
Furthermore, when it comes to the NOPD program, especially shrouded in secrecy as it was, was an ethical nightmare. As Mustapha Jid from Dublin City University wrote in an analysis of the ethics of the program,
“The program was implemented by using personal data for mass surveillance without public knowledge or consent, which is a violation of the public's right to privacy. Second, the program could lead to algorithmic bias and discrimination, as it could disproportionately target certain groups of people. Third, the program had no defined mechanisms for transparency nor accountability. Therefore, it could be used to overreach and erode civil liberties.”
Imagine all of these concerns, and then hand them over to ICE, and you have what sounds like a modern catastrophe in the making.
And of course, James Carville is tied pretty explicitly to the New Orleans experiment that kicked all of this off.
If you clicked either of those links from 2018 earlier, you might already know that James Carville is actually responsible for the secretive NOPD predictive policing program. It’s not exactly clear when Carville became a paid advisor for Palantir, with his connections to the company dating back at least to 2011, but in his role as an advisor for Palantir, Carville, according to The Verge, takes FULL CREDIT for the program.
“I am the sole driver of that project. It was entirely my idea,” Carville told The Verge, while adding that he and Palantir CEO Alex Karp had the meeting in person with the mayor of New Orleans.
Now, am I saying James Carville is responsible for predictive policing getting in the hands of ICE?
No. Absolutely not.
There’s absolutely no evidence of that.
What I am saying is that a company he, at least as of 2024, is a paid advisor for a company that once provided similar technology to the city of New Orleans, and once implied in a profile on Palantir CEO Alex Karp that the partnership between Palantir and New Orleans would have persisted were it not for “left-wing conspiracy theories.”
Here’s the thing. Carville really only exists in modern electoral politics to provide rage bait headlines for rags like the New York Post and Fox News. He’s an irrelevant dinosaur that has consistently tried to push the party further and further to the right, all while making every wrong decision loudly and chumming it up with companies like Palantir.
It’s time for us to move on from him, because remember: he hasn’t helped us win an election in decades.
And winning is everything, stupid.
Certified old guy here - I'm with David Hogg. He is right. I can't get enough of AOC, Crocket, Stansbury, and the younger (and refreshingly female) voices in Congress. It turns out that Bernie was right all along (I voted against him every time, sorry), and this younger generation gets it.
Jeez, this was funny. I knew that guy bugged me for some reason but was unaware of the backstory. I’m an old head that just remembers him and that weird ass marriage he had to that pretty Republican lady. 🤷♂️