Democratic strategist James Carville joined The Daily Beast Podcast less than two weeks before the election with one message: Worry less about the race being so close right now, and focus more on how it will end on Nov. 5.
“I‘m not interpreting things, I‘m trying to affect things,” Carville, Bill Clinton‘s lead strategist in the 1992 presidential campaign, told hosts Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee. He labeled Republican nominee Donald Trump “cognitively out of it,” and accused The New York Times of not running enough stories about the former president‘s age.
(In other stories Carville believes the media is failing to address, he flagged in no uncertain terms Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s much-speculated ties to Russia.)
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“We’re going to lose the idea of what the United States is,” Carville added in regard to the possibility of a second term for Trump in the White House.
If the strategist could tell Kamala Harris something, he said: “Pick a thing and stay with the thing, and drive it home relentlessly.”
His advice for those who want to have an impact in the final weeks of the race? Postcards. That is, sending postcards to prospective voters as a way encourage them to go to the polls—not taking a trip abroad away from the campaigns’ last gasps (and then bragging about the beachy views to the folks back home). “You don’t know if it’s going to be close on Election Day,” Carville reiterated. “But stay focused on what you have to do.”
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