JAMES CARVILLE IS A CREEP -- AND IS AS ELITIST AS THE DEMOCRATS HE CRITICIZES

Maureen Dowd appears to be charmed by a squirm-inducing story James Carville told her about a celebration in one of the classes he used to teach:

A few years ago, when James Carville was teaching at Louisiana State University, he heard that one of his students had gotten into the school of her dreams to work on an advanced degree. He wanted to toast her.

“I get a $25 champagne and four plastic flutes,” he recalled, “and I said to the students: ‘All right. You are not going to get out of James Carville’s class unless you know how to properly open a bottle of champagne.’

“I said: ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You don’t pop it like you see in the movies or you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out. You take the foil off. Now you’re going to take a dishcloth, and you’re going to execute the classic counterclockwise movement. The bottle is going to go one way; the cork is going to go the other way. You just ease it out, and the sound that you are looking for is the sigh of a satisfied woman.’

“The next Tuesday, the dean comes into my office and he said: ‘I’m closing the door. We need to have a talk.’”

A female student had complained about the sighing line.

He wanted to mutter to the dean, “Her boyfriend has never heard that sound,” but he simply said, “OK, I’ll endeavor to do better.”

Carville is 79. It's creepy for an old man to say this to a class full of people young enough to be his grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren.

Also -- and yes, I know I'm compounding the cringe -- what Carville said is wrong.

I use this method to open champagne bottles, and the corks always (quietly) pop, which is ... um, probably not a sound you want to hear in the boudoir. This sommelier knows how to avoid the pop altogether, but this isn't the sound of ecstasy either:



"A nice gentle sigh of happiness," the sommelier says. For a bottle of champagne, maybe. Not for a person.

Later in Dowd's column, she reminds us of Carville's anti-"elitist" posturing. You know how this goes:

Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”

In Dowd's column, Carville compounds this by gendering it. Even if you don't think the champagne story is misogynist, this is:

Lately, he has been obsessed with Biden bleeding Black male voters.

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’ ..."

But none of this ever shows up in the polls. Last month, Gallup asked voters to name "the most important problem facing this country today." Here's a list of every problem mentioned:

I don't see "woke stuff" on that list.

A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released earlier this month asked respondents to name "the most important issues facing the country today." Respondents could name more than one issue. "Political correctness/cancel culture" was tied for 16th place, well behind immigration (36%), price increases/inflation (33%), the economy and jobs (24%), crime and drugs (17%), guns (17%), and a host of other issues.

Also, Carville's obsession with terms like "Latinx" proves that he's just as much of an elitist as the people he criticizes. For most Americans, this term is a non-issue -- polling in 2020 suggested that only about a quarter of Hispanics were aware the term existed. No one seems to have polled the rest of us, but I'd bet that the percentages of white and Black voters who recognize the term are minuscule. Yet we've had story after story after story about the Democrats' alleged Latinx problem, always in the elite media. Being concerned about this is "faculty lounge" thinking.

I won't deny that Donald Trump's macho bluster appeals to some voters, of all ethnic groups, precisely because he's perceived as more masculine than Joe Biden (and, obviously, Hillary Clinton in 2016). But Democrats won the "Who is more manly?" war in 1992 and 1996, and again in 2008 and 2012 -- and Democrats also won the popular vote with a female candidate in 2016 and a candidate Maureen Dowd (and others) incessantly tried to feminize in 2000. And Democrats are winning a lot of races in which Trump isn't on the ballot.

Trump's chest-thumping has its appeal, but he's just one Republican, and I can't see anyone else like him on the horizon for the GOP. (His son and namesake, who could easily be the party's 2028 nominee, can't pull it off.) So while I think the Democratic Party has some long-term problems, I don't think this is one of them.