Democrat campaign operative James Carville may not be a modern day Nostradamus, but he does possess more than his fair share of homespun wisdom when it comes to strategizing a way forward for his party.

A month or so ago, when he was asked what kind of strategy the Democrats should employ in the face of the MAGA moment and Donald Trump's conquest of the Republican Party, he suggested that the only reasonable course forward was for the Democrats to just "play possum" and keep their engines running in neutral.

The presumption was that the Trump administration would, eventually, self-destruct by moving too far too fast and end up alienating its base of supporters.

When Carville said that, I could almost literally hear the gears in his head moving in synch with his decades of experience as a political watcher and strategist. I envisioned the next words to come from his mouth as … "After all, why spend all that energy and time attacking a party that is bent on dismantling its own immune system?"  Carville would have said it much simpler, probably something along the lines of, "That dog won't hunt," but I suspect that the suggestion takes us to the same political stomping grounds.

For those of you who weren't alive during the Bill Clinton years, Chester James Carville, Jr. was thought of as the campaign guru who possessed the political Midas touch when it came to understanding the common voter.

His ability to distill the complex into bite-size digestible form was envied by many of his peers.

But, for that, he was also ridiculed as a hick by the intelligentsia that made their homes in the high rises of Manhattan, on California's gold coast, or in the rough and tumble cityscapes of Chicago and Detroit. He was the Louisiana bayou equivalent of Jimmy Carter's Georgia mafia.

What most folks fail to remember was that Carville was right when he said that "it's the economy, stupid" about Bill Clinton's strategic push for the presidency.

I can't help but think that every Armani-suited, D.C.-quaffed political consultant making their homes in Georgetown or Alexandria still look down on him today and see him as a relic of the days when political analysts actually understood what made the American public tick.

Playing possum takes me back to country singer George Jones's hit of the same name.

Jones's lyrics talk of real life and real heartache and how those who've been wronged have a right to seek retribution from those who did them wrong:

Well, you didn't think I knew that you'd been cheatin' on me. You thought that I was stayin' home while you went on a spree, but I've been staying outta sight and I see the things you do. I've been playin' possum, I've been a-watchin' you.

Jones concludes his song to his figurative philandering girlfriend by singing:

I'm a-playin' possum, playin' possum, a-watchin' you, seein' you do all those things that I know you shouldn't do. But I'll keep hanging on because my love for you is true.

Jones could well have been talking about the voters that deserted the Democrat party, and his last sentence could be the justification for why Carville said to his brothers and sisters in arms, that they should step back, regroup, rethink and rededicate themselves to finding a pathway to success – one that rejects the cultural "tail wagging the dog" dominance that has characterized the numerous bad decisions taken by the party since Barack Obama's time in office.

It's because we love you, stupid.

In other words, forget the gender distractions. Get back to basic rural American values and don't call everybody that disagrees with you a Nazi, a tyrant, or a racist. Remember that all politics is local and get involved with your community, etc.

Sorry, James for putting all these words into your mouth, but I think we know you pretty well and what you might say.

Enter the Europeans

It seems that the Europeans are giving America's Democrats a helping hand.

From this tiny country of Denmark with slightly under six million people where I have chosen to put down my roots, the Danes have declared "war" on Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and anything associated with the U.S.A. because they simply cannot stand Donald Trump and are extending their dislike to everything American. Not since my time here in the immediate post-Vietnam conflict years have I seen such an explosion of anger and thirst for retribution on the part of the normally calm, cool, and collected Danes.

Now they are pushing their public institutions to find alternatives to Microsoft software and to pull all their pension fund investments out of anything American. The pushback against the sale of Tesla electric vehicles has escalated despite the fact that the car is affordable here and considered one of the best electric cars on the road.

The rise of the ideological consumer

The Danes do not understand that a boycott of American goods would have only a minimal impact on American consumers. We simply buy too little from Denmark to make a noticeable difference, but they forget how intertwined our two economies actually are and how many American products and services they would have to forego if they rejected everything that contained an American part, an American ingredient, or provided an American-sourced service.

They also conveniently refuse to acknowledge how many Danish jobs are dependent on the distribution and sale of those products (the Danes have a multiple-level distribution chain from importers or agents to master stocking distributors, to distributors to retailers, each adding a percentage on to the price of the final product). Many food products are produced under contract or license here and many franchised restaurants are owned by Danish companies. A loss of sales would mean the loss of Danish jobs, but would that reality make enough of a difference to the Danes to drop their boycott ambitions?

I am not completely sure.

The Danes are feeling more European today than they have for many years, certainly more than they felt when they rejected the Maastricht Treaty and decided to keep their own currency. Trump's comments on Greenland, on NATO, and his attitude toward arming Ukraine unleashed a storm of protest and angst from many Danes who, according to recent polling, say that they can no longer count on the U.S. to live up to its NATO commitments. They are also against Trump's presumed willingness to "annex" or somehow take over 98% of the Danish Kingdom (that's how big Greenland is in relation to the rest of the Danish realm).

Allowing that to happen would be like taking one gigantic Ozempic pill to lose the weight of its $600 million yearly check to the Greenlanders (Ozempic is the weight loss pill produced by the Danish pharmaceutical company, Novo, approved for use in the U.S. that would be affected by the application of a high tariff on such products).  

But how does this help the Democrats, you say? The answer is simple, the Danes are doing the Democrats' dirty work by pointing out the machinations of Donald Trump as dangerous and destructive to the world order, to international trade, to freedom and to territorial sovereignty.

By doing so, they  are promoting the idea that Trump and his Republican supporters are nothing but a bunch of thugs who are willing to break all the rules and crush free trade, free expression and free choice of a "better way" (read: the European way) to achieve peace, stability, fairness and opportunity.

What the Europeans fail to mention is the enormous trade imbalance that exists between the U.S. and Europe. Currently, it was a whopping $235 billion in 2024 and is characterized by high tariffs like 10% on the import of U.S. cars into Europe versus the 2.5% we charge on the import of European cars, to say nothing of all the other non-tariff barriers on American products.

Yet, while the Democrats may be benefitting from the current bad vibes against Americans and our leaders, they are suffering from the "tree falls in the forest" problem. If no one is around to hear it fall because the American media is not reporting it or it is not immediately affecting the American consumer in his/her pocketbook, does it really make any difference?

I suspect that if we asked Carville what he would say about others doing the job for his own Democrats, he might refer us to Tom Sawyer and his ability to get others to whitewash his Aunt Polly's fence and say, "We Democrats simply call that delegation!" and laugh.

Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat specializing in international trade who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven on American politics, and has written over 1,500 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He now lives in Denmark and is a frequent political commentator on Danish media. He can be reached at: stephenhelgesen@gmail.com.

Image: Pixabay, via Picryl // CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain