He then set his sights on the New York Times itself, in particular, Binyamin Appelbaum, the bearded Bond villain who grilled Pete Buttigieg over Canadian bread prices and became an instant meme:
‘I want to give you an example of the problem here. A few weeks ago, Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics writer for the New York Times, posted a snarky tweet about how LSU canceled classes for the National Championship game. And then he said, do the “Warren/Sanders free public college proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?” You know how fucking patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but that’s not the point. It’s the goddamn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and there’s not a single person he knows that doesn’t pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. He’s so fucking smart. Appelbaum doesn’t speak for the Democratic party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset. We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.’
Carville was almost immediately excoriated by hoards of online Chapo-Bernie bros, but something tells me that the guy who got that Arkansas hillbilly elected president after 12 years of Republican rule knows a bit more about how to win elections and capture hearts. He is absolutely right about the cultural state of his party and its supportive media, as evidenced by Don Lemon, Rick Wilson and Wajahat Ali on CNN poking the yokels outside of New York City. Carville is right to call his party to task for pushing the woke issue of the day on Twitter instead of discussing real problems real people are facing.
The problem for James Carville, though, is he’s also to blame for the state of the party. He fostered a reputation for years as an underhanded and ruthless political operative; a sort of Roger Stone or Steve Bannon of the left. This is the same James Carville who defended Bill Clinton with the famous line about dragging a dollar bill through a trailer park — a reference to Paula Jones filing suit against Clinton which ultimately led to a special prosecutor and impeachment. Carville was a staunch ‘defend at all costs’ Clintonista that helped weaponize a media narrative against accusers such as Jones, and victims such as Monica Lewinsky.
Carville himself occupies a warm spot on the straight line of history that can be traced from the Clinton presidency to the Trump presidency, and much of how Trump was defended over the course of his impeachment by his party and his base is taken straight from the Clinton playbook. He’s a key figure in the coarsening of American politics, and a reason why the tribes fight to the death online over the conch on Twitter on a daily basis.
In 2016, Carville acted as a volunteer surrogate for Hillary Clinton, rebuffing everything from the Clinton Foundation’s shady associations to Hillary spilling classified information from an unsecured private server.