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I called James Carville hoping to get his thoughts on President Joe Bidens first 100 days in office.

He obliged then, one question in, brushed aside the exercise to talk instead about why the Democrats might be poised to squander their political advantage against a damaged GOP.

His failure to cooperate may have been for the best since the first 100 days ritual can sometimes lead to dull, dutiful analysis. What Carville offered up instead was a blunt critique of his own party even after a successful 2020 election cycle a sequel of sorts to his fulminations during last years Democratic primaries. The longtime Democratic strategist is mostly pleased with Biden, but its where much of the party seems to be going that has him worried.

Wokeness is a problem, he told me, and we all know it. According to Carville, Democrats are in power for now, but they also only narrowly defeated Donald Trump, a world-historical buffoon, and they lost congressional seats and failed to pick up state legislatures. The reason is simple: Theyve got a messaging problem.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

What do you make of Bidens first 100 days?

Honestly, if were just talking about Biden, its very difficult to find something to complain about. And to me his biggest attribute is that hes not into faculty lounge politics.

Faculty lounge politics?

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like Latinx that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like communities of color. I dont know anyone who speaks like that. I dont know anyone who lives in a community of color. I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in ... neighborhoods.

Theres nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that youre talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense its not.

Is the problem the language or the fact that there are lots of voters who just dont want to hear about race and racial injustice?

We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What Im saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language thats unrecognizable to most people including most Black people, by the way because it signals that youre trying to talk around them. This too cool for school shit doesnt work, and we have to stop it.

There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it aint the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. Thats a fact. Thats not changing. Thats what this whole damn thing is about.

Sounds like you got a problem with wokeness, James.

Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. Its hard to talk to anybody today and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party who doesnt say this. But they dont want to say it out loud.

Why not?

Because theyll get clobbered or canceled. And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we dont have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.

I always tell people that weve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish. We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It aint complicated. Thats how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.

What does that mean?

Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Shes obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But thats probably the worst thing that you can say about her.

Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. Shes absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. Thats the problem in a nutshell. And its ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.

I hear versions of this argument about language and perception all the time, James. Its an old problem. Whats the solution?

Thats why Im doing this interview. Lots of smart people are going to read it, and hopefully they can figure out that which I cant. But if youre asking me, I think its because large parts of the country view us as an urban, coastal, arrogant party, and a lot gets passed through that filter. Thats a real thing. I dont give a damn what anyone thinks about it its a real phenomenon, and its damaging to the party brand.

Part of the issue is that Republicans are going to paint the Dems as cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists no matter what they say or do. So, yeah, I agree that Democrats should be smart and not say dumb, alienating things, but Im also not sure how much control they have over how theyre perceived by half the country, especially when that half lives in an alternate media reality.

Right, but we cant say, Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so lets just run as out-and-out socialists. Thats not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isnt the smartest thing to do because almost fucking no one wants to do that.

Heres the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. Thats the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.

So they just have to lose by less thats all.

So what do you want the Democrats to do differently besides not having people peddle politically toxic ideas like abolishing the police? How do they change the conversation so that Republicans arent defining them by their least popular expressions?

Youre a strategist, James. I want to know what youd advise them to do. You dont have any complaints about Biden because hes getting stuff done. Hes putting money in peoples pockets. But the Democratic Party is a big coalition and youre always going to have people promoting unpopular ideas, right? Whereas the Republican Party is more homogenous, and that lends itself to a tighter, more controlled message.

Tell me this: How is it we have all this talk about Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and we dont talk about Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in Congress? If Hastert was a Democrat who we knew had a history of molesting kids and was actually sent to prison in 2016, hed still be on Fox News every fucking night. The Republicans would never shut the hell up about it.

So when Jim Jordan was pulling all these stunts with Anthony Fauci [Fauci was speaking at a congressional hearing about ending coronavirus precautions], why didnt someone jump in and say, Let me tell you something, Jim, if Fauci knew what you knew, if he knew that a doctor was molesting young people, he wouldve gone to the medical board yesterday. So you can go ahead and shut the fuck up. [Ed. note: Jordan denies knowing about the allegations of abuse when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University.] I love that Congresswoman Maxine Waters told Jordan to shut your mouth, but thats what I really wish a Democrat would say, and I wish theyd keep saying it over and over again.

Can I step back for a second and give you an example of the broader problem?

Sure.

Look at Florida. You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent. Has anyone in the Democratic Party said maybe theres nothing wrong with the state of Florida? Maybe the problem is the kind of campaigns were running?

If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. Its certainly not a political environment Im destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the US Senate. And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bullshit is a big part of it.

If youre a Democrat, you could look at the state of play and say, Were winning. We won the White House. We won Congress. We have power. It aint perfect, but it aint a disaster either.

We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didnt pick up state legislatures. So lets not have an argument about whether or not were off-key in our messaging. We are. And were off because theres too much jargon and theres too much esoterica and it turns people off.

Not to beat a dead horse, but Democrats and Republicans are dealing with very different constituencies. Democrats have a big tent, they have to win different kinds of voters and that means making different kinds of appeals. Republicans can get away with shit that Democrats cannot.

Yeah, thats a problem. We can only do what we can do. People always say to me, Why dont Democrats just lie like Republicans? Because if they did, our voters wouldnt stand for it. But Im not saying we need to lie like they do. Im saying, why not go after Gaetz and Jordan and link them to Hastert and the Republican Party over and over and over again? We have to take these small opportunities to define ourselves and the other side every damn time. And we dont do it. We just dont do it.

Republicans arent just more comfortable lying, theyre more comfortable with slogans and sound bites, and thats partly why theyre more effective at defining themselves and the Democrats.

Let me give you my favorite example of metropolitan, overeducated arrogance. Take the climate problem. Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Wheres the identifiable song? Wheres the bumper sticker? Wheres the slogan? Wheres the flag? Wheres the logo?

We dont have it because with faculty politics what you do is appeal to reason. You dont need the sloganeering and sound bites. Thats for simple people. All you need are those timetables and temperature charts, and from that, everyone will just get it.

Thats not how the world works; thats not how people work. And Republicans are way more disciplined about taking a thing and branding it. Elites will roll their eyes at that, but Id ask, Hows that working out for you? Most people agree with us on health care and minimum wage and Roe v. Wade and even on the climate.

So why cant we leverage that?

What would you have Biden do to counter some of these messaging problems?

Id have him pick up a phone. Id have someone in the White House pick up the phone. And when someone in the party starts this jargon shit, Id call them and say, Were only a vote away. Our approval rating is 60 percent. We got a chance to pick up seats in 2022, and if you did this, it would be very helpful to us.

Are you sure those calls arent happening already?

Maybe they are, but they need to be more effective. And we need more of them.

Theres a philosophy on the left right now, which says the Democrats should pass everything they possibly can, no matter the costs, and trust that the voters will reward them on the back end.

Where do you land on that?

First of all, the Democratic Party cant be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin. Thats the fact. We dont have the votes. But Ill say this, two of the most consequential political events in recent memory happened on the same day in January: the insurrection at the US Capitol and the Democrats winning those two seats in Georgia. Cant overstate that.

But the Democrats cant fuck it up. They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They cant sit back and wait for it to happen.

Hell, just imagine if it was a bunch of nonwhite people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it. Every political debate would be about that. The Republicans would bludgeon the Democrats with it forever.

So whatever you think Republicans would do to us in that scenario, thats exactly what the hell we need to do them.

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James Carville thinks the Democratic Party has a wokeness problem - Vox.com

As the nationwide debate over reopening schools raged, teachers' unions gave overwhelmingly to Democratic political candidates.

Two of the nation's largest teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, gave almost entirely to Democratic candidates versus Republican candidates, according to Open Secrets. In 2020, at the same time that parents were fighting for schools to reopen, 98.29percent of political donations from AFT went to Democratic candidates while just 0.26percent went to Republicans. NEA, similarly, gave 95.17 percent of its donations to Democrats while just 2.21 percent went to Republicans.

"For those wondering why Senate Democrats would prioritize teachers unions over the well-being of students, the answer is simple: Follow the money," the National Republican Senatorial Commitee said in a statement on Wednesday. "The nations two largest teachers unions were funneling mountains of cash to Democrat campaign organizations and candidates all while these same organizations fought to keep schools closed."

CA TEACHER CAUGHT BERATING STUDENTS IN LEAKED ZOOM OVER PUSH FOR IN-PERSON LEARNING: 'COME AT ME'

In a statement to Fox News, American Federation of Teachers spokesperson Oriana Korin slammed Republicans for not supporting President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan, which included billions of dollarsfor schools. The plas was roundly criticized by Republicans, however, for including items they said had nothing to do with responding to Coronavirus.

"So AFTs frontline educators, school staff, nurses and other workers have no doubts about whos on their side when it comes to safe, equitable in-person reopening, which is something weve been working on since the start of this pandemic," Korin said.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Jonathan Zachreson, who helps the lead the group Reopen California Schools, spoke with Fox News about teachers' unions "control" over embattled California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who now faces a recall election later this year.

"We also have a situation where unions have a lot of control over our governor and pretty much every step of the way has conceeded to what the unions wanted."

IS EDUCATION SECRETARY CARDONA FIGHTING HARD ENOUGH TO REOPEN SCHOOLS?

"Unions are absolutely not following the science" when it comes to reopening schools, Zachreson said, citing educators' insistence on maintaining six feet of distance in classrooms instead of three feet, which the CDC has now recommended.

Zachreson slammed the American Rescue Plan, which Korin referenced, since the legislation did not tie money for schools toreopening.

"That should have been a contingency but it wasn't," Zachreson told Fox News.

The National Education Association did not return a request for comment in time for publication.

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Democrats bankrolled by teachers unions while schools stayed closed, 'Follow the money' - Fox News

Instead of making the most of our FDR and LBJ moment, we are in danger of inexplicably putting an expiration date on our own legacy, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said on the House floor last week, in a speech focused on the child tax credit.

Did FDR put an expiration date on Social Security? Did Lyndon Johnson put an expiration date on Medicare? Torres said. Why should we put an expiration date on the Social Security and Medicare of our own time?

At the same time, while Biden and his plans remain popular now, that can change once more details are released and Republicans have more time to wage a campaign against them as they did with President Barack Obama's efforts to expand health-care coverage a decade ago.

That public support has yet to pass the test of time, the opposition onslaught, said Bruce Stokes, a former director at the Pew Research Center who is now with the German Marshall Fund. And we know from the [Affordable Care Act] and other things that thats effective.

A shift in public opinion is what many Republicans are counting on to derail the president's agenda. With midterm elections in 2022 already looming, GOP lawmakers and party strategists are embarking on an intense public messaging campaign against the infrastructure package and the tax hikes being used to fund it a move they hope will disrupt the united Democratic front.

One path forward for Republicans is to sow discord among Democrats, said Joe Hack, a former chief of staff to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) who joined the Daschle Group, a lobbying firm, earlier this month.

"You just need one Democrat to get upset about a provision, and you've got a problem," he said.

Even if Democrats are able to get some aspects of their infrastructure package through this year, they could be setting themselves up for a walloping in the midterms, said former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.). "That's going to really stifle President Biden and anything he's trying to accomplish."

Still, to many Democrats, the effects of Bidens steps so far are already here to stay, no matter whether the programs themselves are currently slated to expire. Beyond shifting public opinion to support government intervention, his relief plan is on track to accelerate the economic recovery and could help the U.S. see levels of growth this year as high as 8 percent, by some estimates, the most in decades.

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Part of the fabric: Democrats say Bidens sweeping changes will be hard to undo - POLITICO

Democrats struck a chord with voters in the 2020 elections by campaigning on the need for the wealthiest Americans to pay higher taxes. Now the party is flirting with a major change in tax policy that would allow the wealthiest Americans to pay lower taxes.

A bloc of House Democrats, mostly from the New York area, are loudly withholding support for a broad package of tax increases to fund President Bidens infrastructure plan unless it also includes a tax cut: an unlimited deduction for state and local tax payments, or SALT.

In the narrowly divided House, it takes only a handful of Democrats to derail the presidents agenda by making common cause with do-nothing Republicans. In an open letter last week addressed to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, 17 of the 19 Democrats who represent New York threatened to do exactly that, writing that they reserve the right to vote against any tax increase that does not include a full repeal of the $10,000 limit on the SALT deduction, enacted in 2017.

A number of Democrats from other states, including New Jersey and California, have taken a similar stand. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey held a news conference last week behind a lectern emblazoned with the logo No SALT, no dice.

Proponents of an unlimited SALT deduction say they are seeking to help middle-class taxpayers. If so, they should go back to the drawing board. The top 20 percent of American households, ranked by income, would receive 96 percent of the benefits of the change, according to a detailed analysis by the widely respected Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The primary beneficiaries would be an even smaller group of the very wealthiest Americans. The 1 percent of households with the highest incomes would receive 54 percent of the benefit, on average paying about $36,000 less per year in federal income taxes.

A tax cut with such a skewed distribution of benefits ought to be unacceptable to any politician genuinely concerned about the rise of economic inequality.

The federal government lets Americans reduce their taxable income either by a standard amount or by the amount spent on such categories as SALT, interest on mortgage loans and charitable contributions. The 2017 law imposed a $10,000 limit on the deductibility of SALT and a separate limit on mortgage interest deductions.

The SALT deduction cap is unfair. The deduction is often described as a federal subsidy for state and local governments because the federal government effectively is paying for a portion of each dollar in state and local taxes. Capping the deduction has the effect of providing a smaller subsidy, per dollar, to jurisdictions that collect more money in taxes.

New Yorkers, who pay higher taxes than most Americans, get more extensive and higher quality public services. Residents of other states choose lower taxes and less government. Federal tax policy should provide consistent support for either choice.

This board historically has opposed the elimination of the federal subsidy. But the rise of economic inequality has increased our focus on the distribution of taxation and led us to a different conclusion: Instead of eliminating the SALT deduction cap, Congress should eliminate the deduction.

The SALT deduction is an inefficient subsidy. The primary beneficiaries are the wealthy people who get a tax break. It would make more sense to collect those dollars from the wealthy and then to provide direct federal financial support to state and local governments.

Proponents of an unlimited SALT deduction have worked hard to portray the cap as a burden on a broad portion of the population. This is wrong in two important respects. First, the existence of the SALT deduction is the primary inequity. It shifts the distribution of taxation off the shoulders of the wealthy and onto the shoulders of the majority who do not make enough money to itemize tax deductions. The bigger the deduction, the greater the inequity.

Second, lifting the cap would primarily benefit the very wealthy. The Tax Policy Center estimates that 16 percent of households making between $100,000 and $200,000 annually would benefit from an unlimited SALT deduction, but that the average benefit would be just $130. Almost everyone making more than a million dollars a year would benefit on average by more than $44,000.

The Biden administration has avoided taking a stand on the issue beyond indicating that proponents of a SALT deduction restoration would need to find a way to offset the lost revenue, estimated at almost $90 billion in 2021 alone. But it makes little sense to find another way of raising taxes on the rich so that the money can be returned to the same people.

Mr. Gottheimer, for example, proposed last week that the cost of the SALT plan could be offset by increased Internal Revenue Service enforcement to collect what people owe already. Is he seriously suggesting that his support for enforcement of the nations tax laws is contingent on a tax cut? The necessity of stronger tax enforcement is clear, but it ought to be pursued on the merits, and the government surely can find better uses for the money it collects.

Most members of this editorial board are paying more in federal taxes because of the SALT deduction cap. In a narrow financial sense, we would benefit from its repeal. But we believe in the broader benefits of progressive taxation, and in the necessity of concrete steps toward creating a more equal society. Members of Congress who have espoused those principles repeatedly now have an important opportunity to demonstrate their sincerity.

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Opinion | Why Are Democrats Pushing a Tax Cut for the Wealthy? - The New York Times

Topline results and crosstabs for the poll can be found at http://www.umass.edu/poll

AMHERST, Mass. As federal law enforcement officials continue to announce charges and arrests related to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, a new nationwide University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB poll released today finds that while a plurality of Americans hold former President Trump responsible for the violence and destruction that day, Republicans are more likely to pin the blame for the days events on Democrats.

The new poll of 1,000 respondents conducted April 21-23 found that Trump is viewed as most responsible for the violence at the Capitol, with 45% deeming the former president liable for the hours-long siege of the seat of American government. Trump is blamed by 79% of Democrats and one-third (32%) of independents, as well as solid pluralities or majorities of all races, ages, genders and income and education levels.

The Republicans who responded in the poll have an entirely different view, however. Nearly a third (31%) of Republicans blame the Democratic Party for the violence at the Capitol. Antifa the informal anti-fascist political activist group was blamed by over one-fifth (22%) of Republicans, while 16% blamed the U.S. Capitol Police, who have reported that over 70 officers were injured in the siege.

A little over 100 days since the shocking events that resulted in five deaths, scores of injured police officers, millions of dollars of damage to the U.S. Capitol and the temporary delay in the certification of the presidential election, close to 6-in-10 Americans describe the event as a riot, says Tatishe Nteta, associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll. Partisanship isa lens by which we see the political world, however, and unsurprisingly partisanship plays a central role in the ways that Americans describe the events that took place on January 6th.

Democrats are more likely to employ words such as insurrection, riot and coup, while Republicans describe the events in a more positive light, with 70% using the word protest.

Republicans also use different terms than the rest of the population to describe the participants in the days events. Overall, respondents used terms such as mob, rioters, white nationalists, insurrectionists, and terrorists. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Republicans described them as protestors.

In the early hours of January 6th, a number of conservative media outlets labeled the participants as patriots, Nteta says.This characterization has seemed to stick as a shocking 35% of Republicans describe the participants as patriots.

The racial differences between how voters understand the January 6th events cannot be understated,says Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and associate director of the poll. About half of whites appeared to legitimate the activities by calling them protests compared to just a third of voters who belong to non-white racial groups. Instead, majorities of African Americans and Latinos called the participants white nationalists and rioters.

Alexander Theodoridis, associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst and associate director of the poll, observed, If there was any lingering doubt that Americans see the world through red or blue colored lenses, evaluations of the shocking events at the United States Capitol on January 6 should putit to rest. We all watched the same events, but we somehow saw very different things depending on our party identity.

Four months after the event, a wide majority of Americans want the authorities to continue seeking justice against those who stormed the Capitol that day, according to the poll.

With the assistance of the public, hundreds of participants in the events of January 6th have been arrested and close to two-thirds (65%) of the public supports continuing the efforts to identify, arrest and charge those responsible for damaging the U.S. Capitol building, Nteta says.

One-third of Republicans and 36% of Trump voters polled said that they opposed the ongoing efforts of federal law enforcement agencies to hold the Capitol invaders responsible, however.

Methodology

This University of Massachusetts Amherst / WCVB Poll of 1,000 respondents nationwide was conducted April 21-23 by YouGov. YouGov interviewed 1,151 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 1,000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race and education. The frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) one-year sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements, using the person weights on the public use file.

The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, and region. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.

The weights were then post-stratified on 2016 Presidential vote choice, and a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories) and education (4-categories) to produce the final weight.

The margin of error within this poll is 3.4%.

Topline results and crosstabs for the poll can be found at http://www.umass.edu/poll

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Republicans Blame Democrats, Antifa and U.S. Capitol Police for Jan. 6 Mayhem, According to New UMass Amherst/WCVB Poll - UMass News and Media...