James Carville is a shrewd strategist and a keen political observer, but he’s neither a hypnotist nor a magician. So, try as he might, he won’t be able to keep folks from spewing coffee all over their monitors when they hear him say, “The modern Democratic Party is flat-out better on crime than Republicans.”

No one believes that. Not even Carville himself.

A month ago, Carville took to Vox, a leftist news outlet, to sound the alarm about wokeism. He knows that while his party and its radical base have embraced the issue, no one else has. “Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it,” he said with Carvillian candor. “Maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost f—king no one wants to do that.”

This week, though, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Carville has chosen to be a lot less candid. He begins:

From 1993 to 2019, crime steadily decreased in the U.S. Every president since Bill Clinton inherited a declining crime rate and left office with a further decline in crime rate, until Donald J. Trump came along. During Mr. Trump’s final year in office, violent crimes and homicides spiked. Yet if you tuned into Fox News, you’d draw the conclusion that the Democratic Party is opposed to law and order.

No, James, we’d draw that conclusion because the Democratic [sic] Party is opposed to law and order. One need only look back on the past year to see ample evidence of it. The George Floyd riots, and the demonization of the cops, and the Democrats’ calls to defund the police — all of these things were brought to us by the Democrats. And all of them say the same thing: soft on crime.

Carville tries to distract us by disingenuously calling Donald Trump’s presidency “one long crime wave.” It wasn’t. “Eight of his campaign associates were put in shackles,” he writes, without saying a word about the Democrats’ three-year Russia collusion hoax that railroaded them into unrelated and insignificant criminal convictions.

What Carville refuses to acknowledge, though, is that when the American people see footage of 72-year-old Paul Manafort being perp-walked for the crime of failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, they don’t think, Ahh, the Republicans are soft on crime.

But when they see footage of urban centers in flames, and widespread looting, and downtown shopping districts being boarded up, and statues of our Founding Fathers being defiled, and Black Lives Matter thugs harassing restaurant patrons, and leftist rabble chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” — when they see all these things, they absolutely do think, Ahh, the Democrats are soft on crime.

Nice try, James, but this cake has long since been baked.

Carville calls himself “a proud Democrat,” but no one believes that. Oh, he used to be a proud Democrat, back in the '90s, but these days he’s an alarmed Democrat, an anguished Democrat, because he knows better than anyone that his party has taken a hard left turn since the days of the more centrist Bill Clinton.

Our nation’s big-city law enforcement agencies have never before engaged in self-preserving pull-backs from the urban areas where policing is most desperately needed. But they do today. And the result has been widespread mayhem. Cops are quitting in droves. And they’re not quitting because of a lack of support from Republicans. They’re quitting because they’ve been denounced and defunded by Democrats.

Last night, Tucker Carlson covered the Democrats’ efforts to whitewash their party’s many calls to defund the police by substituting the word “reimagine” for the word “defund.” It’s a desperate ruse, a euphemistic ploy, and the American people will see through it.

James Carville is a brilliant dude. But he’s not coming clean. He’s not playing it straight with us. In his heart of hearts, he knows that his party, the Democrat Party, is the anti-cop party, the soft-on-crime party.

If crime is an issue in the 2022 midterms, the Democrats will be on the losing end of it. And no amount of reimagination will make it otherwise.

(Updated.)