Vice President Joe Biden, despite some vulnerability due to his political past, is the man to beat in the Democratic primary, representing "stability" and familiarity, according to Clinton Family political guru James Carville.
"It's really a question of Biden and everybody else," Carville told "The Cats Roundtable" on 970 AM-N.Y. "Can Biden stay in the lead? Or does he falter and then one of these other people come charging in from behind? We're going to have to wait and see.
"I think Biden represents stability and a return to something Democrats are familiar with, that Obama administration, but doesn't represent generational change."
Carville does acknowledge Biden has to answer to some of his political past, but he can absolve all of that against Democratic primary opponents and President Donald Trump in the general election, by reminding everyone former President Barack Obama thought he was the second-best man to be president of the United States before the 2008 campaign.
"Biden has one classic good answer to everything – anything that happened pre-2008, he [can] say, 'President Obama knew about all this, looked at the totality of my record, and thought that, of all the people in the United States, I would make the best president besides him," Carville told host John Catsimatidis.
"This is how he puts that to rest."
President Trump's case against Democrats rests heavily on the economy, which is not quite as promising the parts of America that actually supports the president, according to Carville.
"We have had growth, two-thirds or 70% of all the growth we've had has been in urban areas, which are never going to vote for Trump," Carville said. "Where Trump's base is — in a lot of these rural areas — the economy is not appreciably that much better than it was when he took office.
". . . Maybe [the economy] is propping him up. Maybe he'd be at 30% approval [without a good economy]. We don't know that. But we know that attitudes about him are pretty hard and pretty fixed."