On “Anderson Cooper 360” Wednesday night, former Clinton adviser James Carville had some tough criticism for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for his statement earlier in the day regarding his lack concern for the “very poor.”
Although it’s fairly standard for Carville to attack Republicans, his comments echoed those of conservative standard bearer Charles Krauthammer from Wednesday night, that Romney’s comment contradicted conservative doctrine. Carville explained Romney lacked that understanding, noting he is familiar with it being the husband of Mary Matalin, who worked for two Republican administrations.
“Well, it was an eruption among conservatives in the Weekly Standard, in the National Review,” Carville said. “I saw three or four comments that people came out. It was just a really, he just not a very good candidate. And by the way, he doesn’t understand conservative doctrine. I mean, I happen to live with it in my house. They say they really care about the poor and these kinds of programs actually hurt the poor. Not only does it come across as sort of [for] voters in the middle as kind of callous and that’s after saying corporations are rich people. To real conservatives, it comes across as just dumb and doesn’t represent what they say they think.”
Carville argued this was part of a much bigger problem for Romney as a candidate who he claimed succeeded based on his ability to outspend his competition.
“You know look — Mitt Romney is not a very good candidate. I said that before. Yeah, if he outspent somebody 5-to-1 and dumps 95 percent negative spots on the air, he’s going to win a primary. He’s going to be the nominee. Ari knows there’s zero chance of Newt Gingrich, Santorum or any of the guys gets close to the Republican nomination.”
Carville added that Romney won’t have the spending advantage in the general election.
“Did he actually mean that?” he said. “Was it a slip of the tongue? He has a lot of slips of the tongue. These are the kinds of things that really scare people. It’s a problem that he has. I don’t think his campaign can trust him to go out there on his own. He can do OK if he’s scripted and he’s got 5-to-1 money, but he’s not going to have that in the general election.”