The Body-Positive Woman Has Yet to Sing for Democrats

Ragin’ Cajun James Carville is in the pages of the New York Times with a plan to save the Democrats from Joe Biden and, in his famously caustic way, makes no bones about it.

The first line, “Mark my words: Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race. Whether he is ready to admit it or not,” suggests that the bareheaded Dem consultant and former Clinton operative knows something that the public does not about what’s happening behind the scenes, or, alternatively, communicates the lengths to which key Democrats will go to prise the Bidens’ grip from the threshold of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

However, whenever the president’s resignation from the 2024 race is tendered, Carville reckons there’s a way to prevent a smoke-filled-room approach that would irritate the Left’s democratic populists:

I want to see the Democratic Party hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They may not represent every faction under our party’s big tent. But they care as much about our democracy as our nation’s first president, they understand what it takes to be president, and they know how to win.

Town halls — high-stakes job interviews for the toughest job in the world — would surely attract television and cable partners and generate record numbers of viewers. Think the Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands. The young, the old and everyone in between will tune in to see history being made in real time.

How will potential nominees be chosen to participate in the town halls? There is no answer here that will satisfy everyone, but hard choices must be made, given the tight timetable, and I think leaning on the input of former presidents makes good sense. So I would advise Presidents 42 and 44 to select eight leading contenders out of the pool of those who choose to run, with Ms. Harris most definitely getting a well-earned invite.

You can read the rest here.

Two quibbles. First, Carville overestimates Obama’s and Clinton’s popularity. While older liberals loved Obama in ways that one can only describe as semi-erotic deification, the younger generations (Millennials and Gen-Z) have no memory of Clinton — and harbor much less patience for sexual impropriety — while seeing Obama as an imperialistic droner.

Second, Carville does a manful job of attempting to work around the Kamala problem. Her immutable characteristics are desired by the party, however, and she’s already been picked as Biden’s successor. Any effort, even one in the name of an open competition on level ground, will rightly be seen by Democrats as a ploy. Carville knows Kamala is a loser — he’s just not allowed to say so. Instead, he jigs around the issue while heaping empty praise on a liability he hopes to sucker into surrendering her advantage. Really, Kamala is now Biden’s best chance at being remembered fondly by the left-wing historians that compile the “Best Presidents” list . . . the man who gallantly stepped aside to ensure that the U.S. finally got a “Black woman president” (even if he thinks himself already such a lady).

What Carville envisions is either already in motion, an absolute coup of political pressure and maneuvering, or a dream cooked up in Bayou by a man who desperately wants to win but has the losingest hand he’s seen since McGovern.