James Carville On Trump, Harris, Clinton

Carville needs no introduction, but he’s a legendary consultant, a former CNN contributor, and the author of a dozen books. He currently co-hosts the Politics War Room with Al Hunt, a podcast available on Substack, which you should definitely follow for the election season.

You can listen to the episode in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For four clips of the highly quotable Cajun — on Harris’ convention speech, Vance’s conversions, Bill Clinton’s “pussy business,” and woke condescension toward minorities — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in a poor town famous for its leprosy hospital; one of eight children in an “extremely” Catholic family; the vast majority of his peers were African-American; the woke left’s caricatured view of “the marginalized”; the flattening term “communities of color”; NPR; the misnomer “LGBTQIA”; the resilient old queens of the South; progressive orgs paralyzed by young woke staffers; the shocking strength of Harris’ acceptance speech; why masculine rhetoric is even more effective coming from a female pol; her immigrant background; her poor management of staff; how she needs to own up to her 2020 views and convey “growth”; the crime issue; the border crisis; Gaza; Starmer and “stability”; Carville leading Wofford to an incredible comeback in his Senate race; teaming up with Begala to guide Clinton to the White House; Bill’s profound charm and smarts; his Achilles heel; the sudden implosion of the Church in Ireland; the sex-abuse crisis; Spotlight; how the closet attracts predatory priests; Trump as the antithesis of a Christian; January 6; how Harris is focused on mockery rather than fear; how the race is now “fresh vs. stale”; how Biden was pushed out by big donors and Pelosi; how the timing turned out to be perfect for Harris; how she’s avoided the press longer than Palin did; how Walz is further left than Carville; Vance and “childless cat ladies”; common-good conservatism; the difference between cradle Catholics and converts; the Gospels; infallibility; Garry Wills’ influence; Trump thrilled by domination; the hatred of elites and foreign wars and offshoring; the snipes at Walz’s son; and Carville dealing with ADHD.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Eric Kaufmann on left-liberal excess, Michelle Goldberg on Harris, David Frum on Trump, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty, and Sam Harris for our quadrennial chat before Election Day. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a fan of our latest episode with Jeffrey Toobin on the courts:

I was struck by your recent chat with Toobin, especially the parts about the conservative backlash after Nixon and the rebuilding of executive power. It was a fascinating discussion!

Another listener has a “qualified ‘mega-endorsement’ and a softcore dissent”:

First, the dissent: as a law professor, I find that a lot of Toobin’s complaints about recent SCOTUS case law (much of which I absolutely oppose, particularly on stare decisis grounds) to be suspicious, insofar as the judiciary always ends up supporting Toobin’s policy outcomes.

For instance, Chevron was a judge-made — not a constitutional or even statutory — doctrine that presumes that administrative agencies are experts in their fields and need to be given space in which to operate. Many agencies are experts, but many of them are filled with partisan hacks. A presumption that they are all experts who can make regulations that the judiciary — who are trained in interpreting statutes — must almost always uphold seems ... odd, especially compared to legislators (who are accountable) and judges (who are trained in law).

Moreover, the end of Chevron does not end Skidmore, which holds that an agency’s interpretation of its enabling statute can be given weight (distinct from “space”) as the judiciary interprets the legislation. But most importantly, if Congress wants the agencies’ decisions deferred to, there are ways to achieve that, such as amending their enabling legislation without the Chevron presumption. Granted, there are stare decisis arguments to uphold Chevron, but the “sky is falling” mantra seems based in a romanticized notion of the administrative state — the least accountable branch of government in our constitutional order.

Turning to the mega-endorsement, I want to commend Toobin for summarizing the recent SCOTUS immunity decision in a way that was truly fair, neutral, and no defender would have objected to. (I say as a non-defender, so maybe take my view with a grain of salt.) If everyone was as good as steel-manning their opponents, indicating that he clearly understands them, I feel we’d be in a much better place as a society.

I’ve always admired Toobin’s fairness, even though he’s a pretty obviously conventional left-liberal on most things. Here’s another clip from the episode, on the Ken Starr saga:

Another listener dissents:

I was a Jeffrey Toobin fan. I used to read all his pieces in the New Yorker and own several of his books. Listening to him now, though, I can’t help but wonder: has he changed, or have I?

His comments on Covid got my attention. He called out Fox News for misinforming the public and accused them of causing additional deaths. Talk about deflection. MSNBC and his own CNN were fountains of misinformation. They told us that the Covid vaccine prevented infection and stopped transmission. They parroted White House talking points — from lockdowns to outdoor masking. And as you said, they refused to acknowledge the possibility of a mishap by a lab that was experimenting with coronaviruses in Wuhan.

Either he is no longer the even-handed Jeffrey Toobin I remember, or I have completely lost tolerance for this kind of groupthink by media commentators.

It did strike me that he seemed very much more in the bubble than I expected. Another reader is wanting more balance with the Dishcast right now:

I listened to your episodes with Toobin and Applebaum. Can you have some conservatives on too? Partisan Dems are kind of boring at the moment.

We recently had on Erick Erickson (who just endorsed Trump); next week, we have Eric Kaufmann, one of the smartest of the conservative intelligentsia on race and immigration. But point taken. Here’s a guest rec:

It occurred to me you haven’t engaged with someone from the left in a while — not the Jeffrey Toobin Acela-corridor Dem establishment, but the actual socialist-leaning left. I liked your conversation with Briahna Joy Gray a while back, for example.

What about Jedediah Purdy, the legal scholar and public intellectual? He has ties to both Appalachia and Yale Law, so it would be interesting to hear his thoughts on J.D. Vance; and his 2022 book Two Cheers for Politics would be fascinating to discuss this election year. I recently read an essay he wrote in Dissent about the literary scholar Raymond Williams, and I would also be curious if/how you encountered those scholarship-boy British cultural leftists like Williams, Stuart Hall, et al.

Oh God. Stuart Hall. But that’s a great idea and we’ll invite Purdy. Another rec:

While I was listening to this interview with Andrew Doyle on YouTube, I kept telling myself that I should write to you and recommend him as a conversation partner on the Dishcast. The issue of how the gay rights movement has been coopted by trans philosophy is one you have covered, but Doyle really fleshes the issue out in this episode (and they mention you by name toward the end). I think both you and your Dishheads would profit from a discussion like this.

One more rec:

RFK Jr. Your audience needs to understand what Bobby just did and why. They’re not going to get this by reading the legacy media. It would be a Dishcast public service. You should talk to Bobby about his views on the political realignment taking place. The question for debate: where do the classical liberals go?

You might think some of the stuff he says is daffy. I sometimes do. But he is the most censored politician in America right now, so his thoughts on censorship’s fundamental incompatibility with democracy should be of utmost interest to all 15 of us who still believe in the core tenets of liberalism :)

Next up, a reader dissents over my take on Harris’ running mate:

I saw your reaction on Notes to the Tim Walz pick. Maybe give him a minute before labeling him a “fanatic”? He seems pretty down to earth to me, with a bio that got him elected repeatedly in a conservative district and then to governor. How many people responded to the initial BLM protests and riots in a way that they would stand by 100% today? Sure, it’s easy for me to criticize his position now, but he was at the epicenter of that incredibly chaotic moment, in the city where George Floyd died, in the midst of a very different political climate. 

I like that he grew up in a small town in a farming community. I like that he’s a hunter and gun owner who supports logical gun control. I like that he was teacher and football coach who also offered to help guide the school’s gay/straight alliance group. I like that he is pro-labor. I like that he talks about minding your own business. I like that he has a sense of humor and what appear to be good political instincts.   

I agree that it would be great to see more policy specifics. But the reaction right now is one of relief. You were right to push for Biden to step aside, and the energy and enthusiasm for Harris/Walz reflects that massive shift from resignation regarding a second Trump term to some hope for the upcoming election. Big picture, neither nominee has shared much in the way of tangible policy commitments. And we should pressure them to do so. But my hope is that Walz’s pragmatic and down-to-earth persona is a positive influence on Harris and her handlers.

Looking at the actual data of prior elections, Steve Kornacki throws cold water on the notion that Walz has crossover appeal. Then there’s this noxious comment on free speech:

And then there’s this kind of “equity” enthusiasm that condescends to and damages African Americans:

In May, Walz signed into law the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, the most radical child-welfare-reform bill in the country. Inspired by activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system, the new law makes it harder to remove black or other “disproportionately represented” children from homes where they may have been neglected or abused. While supporters have argued that the law supports children’s welfare, in reality, it keeps black and minority kids in unsafe environments in the name of racial equity.

Dissents over my August 2 column on Harris continue from the main page:

She so clearly flailed in her 2020 campaign and ended up taking ridiculous positions to stand out in the cultural minefield that the left was then enmeshed in. Like any good pol since forever and a day, the astute ones appease their base to simply “live another day” — and then veer to the center to win the election. There’s nothing novel about this playbook.

I suspect the bit that’s tripping you up is that this pivot has happened over a four-year delayed election cycle! Yes, these are unusual times, but I think it’s pretty easy to see how this pattern-matches fairly well to a very normal and honestly boring campaign trajectory.

I don’t think any party has ever gone quite as far left as the Dems in 2020. And that requires some explanation, if you are really moving to the center. The lack of any plausible explanation suggests to me that Harris is puling one over on me.

Another reader looks at the upside of losing:

Being a traditional Democrat has its virtues: whenever members of our coalition veer too far left, as Harris did in 2020 (or too far right, as Joe Manchin did during the Biden presidency), they lose electoral competitiveness. That’s why losing is so important for politicians to go through. This traditional Democrat is happy to welcome candidate Harris back into our ranks, as well as any centrist or center-rightist whose views align with two-thirds of the American electorate.

Except she hasn’t actually moved to the center, except rhetorically. Another reader doesn’t trust Harris’ centrist pitch either:

As a conservative who decided to never support or vote for Trump (though I hate the term “Never Trumper”), I am right there with you on the choice before us in the election. I would love to be able to vote for Harris, but as someone who voted for Biden in 2020, I can’t shake the feeling that I was taken for a fool.