Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., took a shot at Democratic strategist James Carville on social media Sunday after he went viral for saying that his party’s problem was with a predominance of messaging from “preachy females.”
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females,” Carville said in an interview with a New York Times columnist on self-defeating messaging that he claimed was prevalent in his party. “’Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’”
He continued: “The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”
“Maybe he should start a podcast about it,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post on X. “I hear men are really underrepresented in that space.”
The far-left congresswoman is often not shy to criticize other Democrats she perceives as insufficiently progressive.
The moment underscored the tensions in the party, as the Democrats’ hard-left flank is often accused by figures like Carville of favoring ideological purity over pragmatism and results. Carville rose to fame as Bill Clinton’s chief campaign strategist in 1992.
Carville also slammed elites in the party and the media for ignoring male Democratic voters, stating, “If you listen to Democratic elites – NPR is my go-to place for that – the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election.”
Rebuking this stance, he told Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”
Carville criticized the Democratic Party’s concern with woke politics, calling it a “giant, stupid argument” that will hurt the party at the polls and in elections.
Carville, who Dowd described as “blithely un-P.C,” claimed that “no one” wants to live according to woke principles and that they’re a fast track to conservative political victories.
Dowd described Carville’s general attitude to far-left identity politics, writing, “He complained that ‘woke stuff is killing us,’ that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like ‘Latinx’ and ‘communities of color,’ and with a tone many Americans found sneering.”
Noting how this wokeness provides more of an ego trip for its proponents rather than political results, Carville told Dowd, “There are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior.”
Fox News’ Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
