Democratic strategist James Carville yelled down Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg as the two finally went head to head after months of sparring from afar over the future of the party.
The 25-year-old earned the ire of Carville, 80, when he announced that his organization, Leaders We Deserve, planned to spend $20 million of donor money in safe blue districts to challenge older House Democrats who he says “are asleep at the wheel.”
That sparked intra-party tension and caught the attention of the Ragin’ Cajun, who even suggested that DNC members should sue Hogg, who survived the Parkland school shooting in 2018, in response.
Last month, the veteran Democratic strategist went on CNN and NewsNation on the same evening to air his grievances with Hogg.
Carville told the former that the young upstart’s planned primary challenges against “ineffective” Democratic lawmakers was the “most insane thing” he’d ever heard. Carville dubbed Hogg a “contemptible little twerp” while on NewsNation.
Naturally, that was a flashpoint when the two met on The Tara Palmeri Show podcast on Wednesday.
Carville criticized Hogg’s plan again, calling it “abominable” and “jacka–ery of the highest level” for its aim of bumping off sitting Dems rather than beating Republicans. Hogg said he aims to “do two things at once.”
“You have to understand the nuance here,” Hogg attempted to explain, with Carville shooting across him.
“I don’t,” Carville interrupted. “There’s no nuance to it. It’s just flat-out wrong. That’s money that could be used to beat Republicans to beat Democrats.”
Hogg then quizzed the Democratic Party elder on his plan “to deal with our abominable approval rating.”
“Win elections!” Carville shouted, leaning angrily into his camera. “Win elections, you see, against Republicans.”
“You want my strategy? It’s to win elections,” he added. “It’s not to win an election in Queens, which you don’t ever run against a Republican. It’s to help Democrats win elections.”
The mood softened somewhat when the two men came together on the party’s need to “elect the best Democrat possible” and its struggles attracting male voters. The pair also had a meeting of the minds over Joe Biden‘s failure to drop out of the 2024 presidential election sooner.
After a period of cooling off and a phone call with Hogg, Carville then acknowledged that the DNC “needs” his young counterpart.
“Just called @DavidHogg111. He reminded me of the story of, after the battle of Shiloh, Henry Halleck urged President Lincoln to fire Ulysses Grant. Lincoln said: ‘I can’t fire him. This man fights.’ David Hogg fights. The DNC needs him,” Carville wrote on X after the on-air battle.
DNC chair Ken Martin said in a conference call last week that he has warned Hogg that he can’t roll out his plan when he’s an officer of committee.
“I’ve said to him, if you want to challenge incumbents, you’re more than free to do that, but just not as an officer of the DNC, because our job is to be neutral arbiters. We can’t be both the referee and also the player at the same time,” Martin said.
“It’s important for us to maintain the trust that we have built with Democratic voters and to keep our thumb off the scale as party officers,” he added.
In his CNN interview on April 17, Carville questioned whether Hogg was violating his “fiduciary duty” to the Democrats by raising money to primary members of his own party.
Carville, the lead strategist in Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 presidential campaign, has previously chided the “pronoun politics” of the Democratic Party and name-checked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Hogg as being part of the problem.
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