James Carville says Democrats lacked 'endgame plan' for shutdown, urges party to move on

Democratic strategist James Carville said Tuesday the Democrats didn't have "a real endgame" with their government shutdown strategy but argued no one in the party should be mad with each other.

Carville appeared on former CNN host Jim Acosta's Substack to discuss lessons learned from the government shutdown, which is expected to end on Wednesday with the House of Representatives set to vote on a federal funding bill. 

Acosta noted President Donald Trump said during a Fox News interview this week that Republicans "broke" Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

"First of all, the lesson is, everything that everybody says is true," Carville said. "There was not a real endgame plan here. It was a simple legislative maneuvering that we didn't do that well on. There were a couple of points, and also the eight senators who decided to reopen the government - everything they say is true," he added.

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The eight senators in the Democratic caucus who voted with the GOP on a deal to end the shutdown have taken heat from members of their own party over their vote. Schumer has also faced backlash and calls to be replaced as the top Democrat in the Senate, though he did not vote to end the shutdown.

"And this is just one of those things, that I'm not mad at anybody on the Democratic side. And no one on the Democratic side should be mad at anybody else on the Democratic side," Carville added.

He urged Democrats and others to vent all they want about the Democrats' decision to cave on the shutdown until Wednesday. After that, he said, people should "shut up" and move on.

"So, when you're in a coalition, you have different tensions within the coalition. And when you negotiate with a cult, and understand that is what the Republican Party is today. It's a cult," Carville said. "You're at a severe disadvantage."

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Carville said Democrats have a "you're not the boss of me" attitude that differentiates the party from the GOP. He argued that if he were a Republican, he would have sided with the Democrats on extending the Obamacare subsidies, because "it's going to really hurt" key voters.

"I can just say the Democrats held me hostage," he said. "The Democrats, you know, I think they had an exit ramp here. And now they've just shut the exit ramp down. And there's no interstate that goes into infinity.

"I actually thought, politically, the best decision they [Republicans] could have made was claim that the Democrats are political terrorists, but we've got to vote for this and it would have been out of the trap. But they hate it [Obamacare] so much, it's irrational," Carville added.

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Carville speculated someone on the Democratic side thought that this was "too good a deal for them to pass up." Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have criticized the deal.