Democratic strategist James Carville claimed that it was clear that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s heart just wasn’t in it when he responded with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address Tuesday. “He didn’t want to be there,” Carville said.
WATCH:
Host Brian Williams began the segment of “The 11th Hour” on MSNBC by asking Carville why he thought the Democrats’ response was drawing such unfavorable commentary. “Tell me why responses are so bad,” he said. “Tonight, this Chuck and Nancy visual tonight launched 1,000 memes while they were still talking. There was an ‘American Gothic’ meme. There was ‘your mother and I are very upset you stayed out so late’ meme.” (RELATED: Schumer And Pelosi Delivered Their Response To Trump — Here It Is Through Snapchat Filters)
Carville noted that a large part of the problem was an apparent lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Democrats giving the response. “[Schumer] didn’t want to be there,” Carville explained. “I’ve been more excited about colonoscopies than he was giving the speech tonight. He didn’t want to be there.”
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pose for photographers after concluding their joint response, to President Trump’s prime time address, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 8, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The only good news, Carville said, was that this type of response rarely moves the needle politically. “I just don’t think — the only good thing about it, it didn’t matter,” he said. “They could have given The Gettysburg Address and it wouldn’t matter.”
Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele agreed with Carville, saying, “Dems, don’t do that again. You know, you don’t — I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish here. Certainly, the message was lost in the visual, but Jim is right, I mean, didn’t really matter in the end because nobody wanted to be doing what they were doing tonight.”
Carville and Steele were just two of many who noted that both Schumer and Pelosi appeared to be — at the very least — a little uncomfortable during their televised joint rebuttal to the president’s call for increased border security in the form of his proposed wall.