Some Dems see what is happening to their election-year chances

James Carville is not happy:

James Carville, a former top adviser to President Clinton, laid out a scathing critique of his party, arguing that it drifted way too far to the left and was on the way to failure as a result of pushing extreme policy ideas.

"We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about and we won," he said in a Vox interview published on Friday. "And now it’s like we’re losing our damn minds. Someone’s got to step their game up here."

Carville added that he considered himself a "liberal" rather than a centrist -- but Democrats went too far even for him.

"They’ve tacked off the damn radar screen," he said when asked if the party moved too far left.

His comments came just after another interview in which he said he was "scared to death" after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., netted a large portion of the vote in Iowa's caucuses.

According to Carville, both Sanders and Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., were pushing "stupid" ideas about higher education.

"Democrats talking about free college tuition or debt forgiveness. I’m not here to debate the idea. What I can tell you is that people all over this country worked their way through school, sent their kids to school, paid off student loans. They don’t want to hear this s--t. And you saw Warren confronted by an angry voter over this. It’s just not a winning message," he said.

Carville was referring to a tense interaction in which a father blasted Warren for forgiving student debt after he and his daughter worked to pay off her loans. 

Carville also took a shot at Sanders for saying that he wanted to expand voting rights for people like the Boston bomber. Sanders, the well-known Democratic strategist suggested, would be ineffective as president and wasn't representative of the Democratic Party. Instead, Carville said, he is an "ideologue."

And Jonathan Chait, writing at New York magazine, is pretty gloomy, too:

It is always darkest, John McCain used to say, before it gets totally black. So it is for the American center-left right now. Bernie Sanders is currently favored to win the nomination, a prospect that would make Donald Trump a heavy favorite to win reelection, and open the possibility of a Corbyn-esque wipeout. While Sanders has not expanded beyond a minority of the party, he has consolidated support of the party’s left wing, and while its mainstream liberal wing is split between numerous contenders, it is hard to see how the situation is likely to improve soon. Indeed, it could get worse, much worse.

 What are the chances someone with the capability of exerting influence will get a clue?