James Carville on Aging, Edibles and His Anxieties About Harris

At 79, the Democratic commentator is the subject of a documentary that captures his musings — and his warning to President Biden — about the toils of age.

Mr. Carville was among the first prominent Democrats to urge Mr. Biden to drop out of the presidential race. “I could have been embarrassed. He could have run and won. But it never occurred to me that I was wrong,” he said.

James Carville stretched out his legs and leaned far back in his chair behind a rooftop table at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. The Peninsula is a gathering spot for Hollywood celebrities and executives but Mr. Carville, who is neither, was the object of attention on this afternoon.

“It’s the economy — nice to meet you, Mr. Carville!” a lunchtime patron said as he passed by the table, recalling (if incompletely) the campaign slogan that Mr. Carville championed as the chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

A few moments later, as Mr. Carville recounted for a reporter his efforts to convince Democrats that an aging President Biden would lose to Donald J. Trump if he stayed in the race, Jenny Durkan, the former mayor of Seattle, walked over and declared: “You were right!”

“Thank you, darling,” Mr. Carville responded in his native, languorous Louisiana accent.

It has been 32 years since the campaign that put Mr. Clinton in the White House and, in the process, established Mr. Carville as a celebrity in his own right. And now, at the age of 79 — he is turning 80 later this month — Mr. Carville may well be as prominent as ever. He says the contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump is the last he will play a role in, and it has given him what would seem to be a last hurrah.

In a matter of weeks this summer, Mr. Carville went from being a lonely figure in his party, warning about the perils of keeping Mr. Biden on the ticket, to cheering from the sidelines as Mr. Biden ceded to pressure from leading Democrats to stand down.

“He was one of the first inside the Democratic Party to speak out openly and say this will be a mistake: that the American people do not want these two men,” said Karl Rove, the longtime Republican consultant. “That took a lot of courage.”

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