Take Carville’s wisdom one step further: Evict Biden from the ticket

National Democratic leaders really should listen to legendary Democratic strategist James Carville and then go a step beyond. They should find a way to push President Joe Biden off the party’s ticket for 2024.

Start with Carville. He was at it again over the weekend, blasting his party’s political tone-deafness. It’s a message he has pushed for several years now. Beginning at the 6:15 mark of an interview with the Politicon podcast, Carville said that “Democrat messaging is full of s***. … Don’t talk about f***ing Gaza and student loans. That’s so out [there].”

Citing polls showing both of those issues far, far down the list of voters’ concerns, Carville then said: “Why are we forgiving student loans for people that go to Harvard? Which — according to [marketing professor] Scott Galloway, quite accurately, is nothing but a hedge fund that has classrooms — well, they got a $52 billion f***ing surplus! Why are taxpayers going to bail these people out?! Why don’t you come out for a proposal to tax every university endowment over $5 billion and use that money to give their former students relief?”

Carville’s message was that Democrats should be talking about the “cost of living” and about issues related to the Supreme Court. Combine that with his several years of complaining about “wokeness” taking over the Democratic Party, and what Carville is consistently saying is that Democrats need to start sounding populist messages rather than appealing to leftist elites.

While Carville’s latest rant did not include calls to remove Biden from the ticket (and indeed, he long has said he thinks well of Biden), he has said repeatedly in recent years that Biden shows political weakness nationally. But he has said that “right below the presidential level,” the Democratic Party is quite “talented.” To New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in March, he listed the following names: “Mitch Landrieu, Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock, Gretchen Whitmer, Gina Raimondo, Roy Cooper.” (Follow the links for more about each.)

Carville is right. If Democrats really do think former President Donald Trump is a menace to the nation and the world, they need to put up a stronger candidate than Biden to beat him. To do so, they also need to stop kowtowing to the woke Left and start appealing to the very broad center of the electorate.

Democratic insiders know the reality: While Biden isn’t technically senile, he is growing so physically limited that he gets tired very easily. And when he is tired, his brain, like that of people of any age, gets somewhat foggier. He isn’t up for the job now, and he certainly won’t be up for it for four more years.

Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and four or five others should meet with Biden and his wife, Jill, and lay it on the line. If they say he could ride into the sunset as a winner if he just finishes the current term strong but also say the political reality is that his decision to stay on the ticket is giving Trump a lifeline, they could at least have a chance of convincing him to step aside.

Their problem is how to do so without leaving inept and unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris as the heir apparent. They might need to just tell her that she has no future electorally and to convince her that a Court of Appeals judgeship is her best option for a lasting legacy, with a potential Supreme Court post in the future. They could prevail upon a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to take “senior status” and then slam her nomination through with the slim Democratic majority between the election and year’s end.

If the replacement for Biden is a white male, of course, the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics would dictate a new black running mate. Democrats should be creative. They could choose one of the top black, female chief executives of impressive corporations.

One way or another, though, Democrats need to offer voters somebody other than an unpopular, rapidly diminishing ghost of yesteryear who would be 86 by the time his next term ends. They owe the country a better choice against Trump. The truth is that with Biden as the standard-bearer, the Democrats’ messaging will remain full of politically unsalable stuff, no matter what their chosen topic — because in the end, at the presidential level, the candidate himself inevitably is the message.

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