Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Pete Buttigieg: First Impressions



After you have read four articles on Pete Buttigieg, it is fair to say you are no Pete Buttigieg expert, and I make no such claim. For a guy who was Barack Obama's first full-time volunteer in all of New York City - me - I am proudly a detached spectator this election season. And so, considering yesterday was the first time I looked into Pete ought to tell you. People are not paying attention just yet. Those who worry Pete is lagging in South Carolina don't remember Hillary was leading Obama by a wide margin in South Carolina at this stage of the game. South Carolina was talked of as Hillary's "firewall." That wall collapsed overnight, literally, when Obama won Iowa. To me it is a foregone conclusion that should Pete win both Iowa and New Hampshire, he will very likely be the nominee. I would give him a 95% chance.

So what are my first impressions? First of, this guy is not policy timid like the media makes him out to be. I found him anything but. He comes across as less policy timid than everyone who made a go at it over the past four decades. And it is partly him, mostly that Reagan, as he points out, has run out of steam.

The biggest lie about him is that Bernie and Warren are for Medicare For All, but Pete is not all that. He is very much for Medicare For All, but he thinks it needs to be phased in. And when phasing in if people who have private insurers wish to keep it that way, why not? If you listen to Pete, he is basically criticizing Bernie and Warren for not having thought this through. There is definitely anxiety among the 150 million-plus who have private insurance. They are not opposed to others having health care. But they hear Medicare For All and they hear, looks like Bernie wants me to take off my oxygen mask. That anxiety is real. And it is a symptom that Bernie has not done a good job of selling whatever it is that he is selling.



Pete is policy bold. I was surprised to learn. I should not have been. On politics, he is both agile and steel. More surprising than his policy boldness is that this guy is tough. Of all the Dems running, Donald Trump, if it is him and not Pence for some reason, would have the hardest time pushing Pete around. And he pushed everybody around in 2016.

Pete is the polar opposite of Trump on good manners and basic decency. Donald Trump gives you the impression his mother taught him table manners which he forgot at his mother's dinner table. I mean, the guy was discussing his penis size at a presidential debate during the 2016 cycle. Children are supposed to learn civics lessons from their president. Not from Donald though. Pete is amazingly decent. And after a few years of Donald, you thought that had gone to disuse.



Trump is fake tough. Trump is stupid tough. It is immigrants not automation. Pete is genuinely tough. He is comfortable enough in his toughness that he is not worried decency will cut him out to be a loser.

And Pete is young. That is no small detail. Half the field is way past retirement age. That makes Pete stand out. There is a freshness to his appeal.

I have yet to watch videos of Pete. I would like to watch a few hours of him. I have not yet watched even 10 minutes, I don't think so. YouTube makes you feel you can always look him up, so why rush!

If I had to take a guess, I'd say Pete might pick Andrew Yang for running mate, or someone who is not even running. If AOC were old enough, she would have been great, but she is not yet 35.

My first impressions of Pete Buttigieg are that he is a great human being, a great politician, and a remarkable policy guy. He would make for an excellent nominee.





Googling Pete
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Pete Is It?
Finland: Capitalist Paradise?
Why Resign!?
Step By Step To Solving The Big Problems
If Pete Buttiegieg Were To Win Iowa
Two Out Of Three: Kamala, Andrew, Pete
Kamala Pete 2020

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Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Googling Pete

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11/27 The Woke Attack on Pete Buttigieg “woke” white people are “woker” than most black people. ...... “woke” black people in academia and media are “woker” than a great many black people who don’t have the privilege of a byline. .......

Millennial Buttigieg

...... mayor of a town with a large black population ....... Buttigieg was speaking out of informed sympathy, as anyone familiar with American sociopolitical discussion should have noticed. Our antennae must go up when notions of what an insult is become this strained. We must heed our inner blip of confusion instead of suspending logic when we grapple with race issues. ........ It is as if Buttigieg gave a Christian sermon without mentioning God or Jesus, or listed only five Commandments. ....... Yesterday, Buttigieg was large enough to actually telephone Harriot, upon which they had what The Root billed as a “productive” conversation....... Buttigieg has made it glaringly obvious in countless ways that he understands structural racism.



11/15 Could Pete Buttigieg win the Democratic presidential nomination?

Mayor Pete is surging in Iowa polls.

........... Since a well-received televised town hall last February, he has made an excellent impression, both in retail campaigning and in debates. His crowds, war chest and organized support have all grown. ....... Buttigieg is new, younger and an outsider. ....... smart. .... flexible. ....... a more incremental Medicare-for-all-who-want-it. ...... the only top candidate with military experience and, by all accounts, scandal-free. ......... If elected, he’d be the fifth straight inexperienced president, though hardly as ill-prepared and unknowledgeable as Trump. ........ So far, polls show more worry by voters about the age of some candidates than his youth. ......... “Being gay was a barrier for these voters, particularly for the men who seemed deeply uncomfortable even discussing it”



11/22 Pete Buttigieg, Failure Pete Buttigieg’s polling strength is, as far as I can tell, based on one factor only: He’s a smooth talker. He speaks the kind of fluent Ivy League-technocrat-consultancy lingo that makes a certain kind of highly educated white liberal’s heart melt, especially when combined with an appealing sense of reasonableness and youthful, forward-thinking optimism. Alas for him, he can’t talk much about the wonderful improvements he made as two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, because they aren’t there. ........ More than a quarter of the city lives at or below the poverty line, well above the national average of 14 percent. A USA Today survey called it the 40th worst city in the country, noting it is “one of the most dangerous cities in America” and has depressed property values. The median South Bend home is worth $77,400.



4/3 Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign and policies, explained How the mayor of South Bend became a surprisingly serious contender in the Democratic primary race. ........ “As far as I’m concerned, one real thing has happened [in 2020],” the New York Times poll analyst Nate Cohn writes. “Buttigieg has emerged.” ........ he’s a graduate of Harvard and Oxford ...... Liberal Democrats see in Buttigieg an intellectual who could be President Trump’s polar opposite, and whose focus on political reforms like abolishing the Electoral College channels their frustration with a system that feels rigged in the GOP’s favor. ....... right now, it’s clear that Pete Buttigieg is, as improbably as it seemed just a few months ago, one of the leading candidates for the Democratic 2020 nomination. ......... “He’s got the swoon factor, the young factor, the honest-to-the-point-of-vulnerable factor, and he’s great on the stump” ......... Born in 1982, near the beginning of the millennial generation, he graduated from Harvard and won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. He went on to work at McKinsey, the giant consulting company, then enlist in the military — as a gay man — before the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He did a seven-month tour in Afghanistan as a naval reserve officer. He reportedly speaks seven languages, and he apparently learned Norwegian for the sole purpose of reading an interesting-sounding book. ......... On his way out of office, President Barack Obama named Buttigieg as one of several future leaders of the Democratic Party.......... Buttigieg’s bid in 2017 to be the chair of the Democratic National Committee failed — he dropped out just before the first round of ballots — but that did little to dampen the party’s enthusiasm for the young mayor. And in 2019, he almost seems lab-engineered to appeal to a variety of Democrats looking for a clear antidote to Trump. ..... Moderates look at his biography and see someone they aren’t scared of; the liberal partisans that make up much of the party’s base look at his positions and rhetoric and see someone who’s their kind of fighter. .......... Despite Buttigieg’s reputation as a big-thinking candidate, he’s often strikingly unwilling to commit to specific policies. But cobble together his policy positions from various public appearances and it’s clear that he’s solidly progressive in a way that could satisfy the Democratic base’s hunger for a bolder, less centrist approach to policy. ........ Buttigieg has endorsed a single-payer health care system, although he proposes starting out with a transition policy like a public option or all-payer rate setting. He’s said the Green New Deal is a “sound framework” for tackling climate change and called for a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. He has defended Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for a 70 percent effective marginal tax rate, though he stopped short of openly committing himself to a particular rate........... Buttigieg supports abolishing the Electoral College. He’s also endorsed automatic voter registration and statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, and signaled openness to abolishing the Senate filibuster. ........ radically overhaul the Supreme Court. ....... “One solution that I’ve been discussing in recent weeks is structuring it with 15 members, but five of whom can only be seated by a unanimous consensus of the other 10,” he said to Hasan. “Anything that would make a Supreme Court vacancy less of an apocalyptic ideological struggle would be an improvement.” .......... a party willing to play hardball in pushing voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and the theft of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat........ Buttigieg might be a quiet and reserved guy, but he embodies a kind of political boldness. Rather than forge a policy compromise with Republicans, he wants to transform ideas and structures that define American politics. If Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a class warrior, Pete Buttigieg is a partisan warrior......... “I think we’re in a tectonic shift in America such that even now we may be underreacting to how deep this moment is. I mean, you have basically a 30- or 40-year-long Reagan consensus that that held sway over this country. ... And that’s, that’s done,” he told my colleague Ezra Klein. “I think it’s a moment that’s really crying out for big ideas and for us to pay attention to just really profound things happening.” ............ a competent executive whose vision directly addresses their Trump-era anxieties and partisan anger. ........ set up the Court so that it has more people thinking for themselves ....... Buttigieg is able to both be a partisan warrior for the base and present an attractive image for moderates: a kind of “everything to everyone” appeal that resembles no one more than Barack Obama......... Buttigieg is positioning himself as the opposite of Trump — a competent, qualified executive who knows how government works. But he’s also appealing to liberal America’s anxieties about winning over the white working class and rebuilding Hillary Clinton’s so-called “blue wall” in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the states that were supposed to hold the presidency for Democrats but instead handed it to Trump. ........

“My impression is that in South Bend, he has been quite a spectacular success,” Gerald Wright, the chair of Indiana University Bloomington’s political science department, told me.

.......... When Buttigieg took office in January 2012, South Bend had been experiencing slow but steady population decline. For the past five years, there’s been small but noticeable population growth. On Buttigieg’s first day, unemployment in the South Bend metro area was at 10.2 percent — 1.6 points higher than the Indiana state average. As the end of 2018, it was essentially even with the statewide average (3.7 percent versus 3.5).......... Buttigieg turned Route 31, the big thoroughfare that ran through South Bend’s previously moribund downtown, from two different one-way lanes into a series of two-ways to encourage people to stop and spend. Roughly 1,000 people live in downtown South Bend today; that figure was “effectively zero when Buttigieg took office” .......... Buttigieg wanted to move South Bend, the home of the University of Notre Dame, away from its industrial past and toward an economic model designed for an overall US economy centering on tech and jobs requiring more education. This kind of vision is often criticized for ignoring deeper structural inequalities: Development can often entrench inequality or price out poor and minority residents altogether.......... And Buttigieg did come in for some criticism on that front, particularly during his push to demolish 1,000 unlivable and uninhabited homes as part of a broader development scheme. But what was striking, according to the experts, is how responsive he was to these concerns. Stacey Odom, a resident of the heavily black LaSalle Park neighborhood, heard that her area was being targeted for redevelopment. She asked him for help, including a $300,000 grant for home repairs for local residents. Buttigieg gave her $650,000. ......... becoming the breakout insurgent star of the Democratic field based on his perceived intelligence and policy chops ........ And if somebody is saying that I had it easy, I would invite them to join the military and enter Indiana politics in 2010 as a gay person.” .......... Robinson writes. “No more Bright Young People with their beautiful families and flawless characters and elite educations and vacuous messages of uplift and togetherness. Give me fucked-up people with convictions and gusto. Give me real human beings, not CV-padding corporate zombies.” .......... “We need to actually see the furthest boundaries of our idea space. If the debate is just between a center-left and a center-center-left, then we’re not really exploring all of the different possibilities right now,” he told me. “Most of the boldness in American politics in my lifetime has come only on the right, and it’s refreshing to see that change — even if some of what’s coming on the left leads to policies that I would approach differently.”



10/17 Pete Buttigieg Talks Impeachment, Health Care, and the Political Spectrum At the latest Presidential-primary debate, on Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was notably pugnacious. Challenging Elizabeth Warren on health care, he said, “Your signature, Senator, is to have a plan for everything. Except this.” He had a contentious exchange with Tulsi Gabbard about Syria, and, in a back-and-forth with Beto O’Rourke about gun control, he told the former congressman from Texas, “I don’t need lessons from you on courage, political or personal.” The Washington Post described Buttigieg’s performance as “uncharacteristically fiery.” ......... depends on whether there is enough of a threat to the power of the Senate Republicans that they would be reunited with their conscience, which, obviously, they’ve taken a holiday from. ............. this is about accountability when the President has admitted to an abuse of power. ............ The rubble of our norms and institutions? And our population, our families, maybe, our communities, even more torn apart by politics than we are now, if you think about everything we’ve been through and everything we’re about to go through? ............... And we’re talking about my neighbors. I’m from the industrial Midwest. There are a lot of people where I live; they don’t think he’s a good guy—they’re not stupid. But they voted, effectively, to burn the house down. ...............

for me and anybody younger than me, we’ve lived our entire lives in the Reagan era.

And I would argue that that era—you could call it the neoliberal era—continues almost to this day, and now it’s collapsing, because none of the prescriptions that were offered in this so-called consensus around how to create growth—none of them worked. ............. I led the field in proposing Democratic reforms that, to this day, some candidates supposedly on my left haven’t embraced......... create a public alternative that the private sector is then forced to compete with. ......... things like Internet-service providers—my fellow-mayors had been doing it. And it’s remarkable what happens in the private sector when you have a public challenge. ........... The core principle for me is not whether or not the government is your health-insurance provider. The core principle for me is that you get covered one way or the other. That’s what Medicare for All Who Want It entails............... my mentality, as a mayor, is that you should only make promises that you’re prepared to keep, and you’re actually going to be in charge of doing the thing you said you were going to do. ........

what I’m proposing, just to be really clear, is the biggest, boldest transformation of American health care in more than fifty years.

......... there’s been an idea that age equals wisdom. And, certainly, wisdom comes with age. But, you know, the current President is the oldest we’ve ever had. . . ........... while I was there, it was increasingly difficult to understand what our goal was. And the thing that has made me feel a greater and greater sense of urgency about moving on is the fact that I thought I was one of the last troops leaving. Like, turning out the lights and wrapping things up. Years ago, when I left. And we’re still there. ......... I can tell you exactly what Governor Pence was like, because I dealt with him a lot. And what you had was somebody who I disagreed with ferociously on many things, although we also found ways to work on economic development in other areas. But my sense was, even though he believes things that are completely fanatical, he really believes them. Now, it’s very hard to understand what he believes, because the President that he has supported to be the political and moral leader of this nation is somebody who offends not just my values but his own. And it raises the question of what is left in there. ............... Mike Pence had lost the respect even of the business conservatives in Indiana, over his anti-L.G.B.T. agenda. And the one way that Donald Trump would have lost is if he had been unable to unite the Republican Party. So he needed that legitimacy from the religious right. So the—from a cynical political perspective, it’s actually a brilliant pairing. ..................... The idea that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves turns out not to be true. The idea that, if we deregulate banks and so forth, nothing bad will happen. The idea that climate change isn’t real, or, now that we know it’s real, that it’s happening on its own, so we can’t really do anything about it. The idea that society’s integrity depends on making sure people like me can’t get married. The idea at one point that, for some reason, we had to invade Iraq. I mean, all of the core tenets of conventional Republican politics have really collapsed in terms of their ability to serve the American people. And so, if you have only that and none of the dazzle of the chaos of this Presidency, then I think it actually accelerates the process by which the Republican Party as we currently know it is dying..............

I would much rather be debating whether the progressive approach to a carbon-neutral economy was better than the conservative approach to a carbon-neutral economy, instead of debating—if you can even call it debating—whether this fundamental reality is in fact a reality. We need conservatives to come to their senses.

......... We have to advance policies that are bold enough to get the job done, which is why we can’t go with too safe of a choice. We can’t pretend that the Trump Presidency is this weird anomaly that we can just kind of recover from by returning to the old normal. We are where we are because normal didn’t work. .......... Part of it’s my personal story as somebody who saw, for example, the Afghanistan War, not just in terms of the theoretical debates going on about U.S. foreign policy but the simple fact that it changed the course of my life. As somebody whose marriage exists by a one-vote margin on the United States Supreme Court, I think about politics not in terms of its own internal dynamics and the excitement of the game and the show but in a very grounded way. ..................

whether it’s President Trump or President Pence, I represent the opposite of what we have just had.

....... South Bend. .. the per-capita income in our city just went above twenty thousand dollars for the first time in a long time. .......... your job is not just a source of income; it is a source of community, a source of identity, and a source of purpose............. if you don’t have some source of those things, something ugly will fill the void. Something ugly like substance use, or something ugly like white nationalism. ........ an antiracist policy agenda that is more, I would argue, systematic and comprehensive than any of my competitors’.

The Douglass Plan is designed to be as ambitious as the Marshall Plan, but right here in the United States, for dealing with systemic racism.

........ the Douglass Plan is intended to be a systematic, intentional, and well-funded response to the problem of systemic racism in this country. Of all the things we’ve been up against as a country, only one of them actually came convincingly close to permanently ending the American project, and that was white supremacy during the course of the Civil War. And I am now convinced that, if we don’t tackle that in my lifetime, it could wreck the American project in my lifetime........ I think where this is going to shake out is, if you really do want the candidate with the most years of Washington experience, the most familiar face possible, then you’ve got your choice. And, if you want the most ideologically conventionally left candidate you can get, then you’ve got your choice. Most Democrats I talk to are looking for something else, and that’s where I come in. ........... I really am convinced this will be one of those epochal moments where one chapter in American history ends and another one begins. ....... I came out with the most selfish agenda, which is I just wanted to start dating, and I couldn’t figure out a way to do that if I didn’t come out, so I came out..... I was thirty-three......... I’m a grown-ass man. I own a house. I’m the mayor of a city. I’m a war veteran. I’ve got no idea what it’s like to be in love. Like, when a love song comes on the radio and I’m trying to relate to it, I’m just extrapolating........

It’s not unusual for somebody to come up to me in an airport or on the street and begin to cry and not get a word out.

...... when somebody protests you just for existing, it’s just, like, come on, man. Like, you’re protesting the wrong thing....... I got eighty per cent of the vote—after coming out. There was such a long part of my life where I assumed that this one thing could multiply everything else by zero, in terms of my chance to have an impact—at least an impact through public life—and learned to accept that and accept that that might happen...........there’s an outright war on transgender Americans going on right now, and it has to end ........ One of the best moments on this whole campaign was a teen-ager—I think she was maybe sixteen—came up to me and let me know that that my candidacy—this was in Iowa, in a back yard—she said my campaign let her go to school and be who she was and stand up for herself and not be ashamed of having autism. .......... politics, fundamentally, in my view—it’s not always about what people think. It’s about what people feel.



Pete Buttigieg on Bernie Sanders This essay was first published in 2000 by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. That year, Buttigieg was the winner of the library’s annual Profiles in Courage Essay Contest................... One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only independent congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders....... It is the second half of Sanders’s political role that puts the first half into perspective: he is a powerful force for conciliation and bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy wrote that “we should not be too hasty in condemning all compromise as bad morals. For politics and legislation are not matters for inflexible principles or unattainable ideals.” It may seem strange that someone so steadfast in his principles has a reputation as a peacemaker between divided forces in Washington, but this is what makes Sanders truly remarkable. He represents President Kennedy’s ideal of “compromises of issues, not of principles.” ........... I have heard that no sensible young person today would want to give his or her life to public service. I can personally assure you this is untrue.



10/16 Pete Buttigieg wins the night Buttigieg’s big moments were important for several reasons. They established him as a forceful presence, they expanded his distinctive ideological space, they distinguished him from the top tier candidates, and they reinforced his persona as a political pragmatist. ..... Billionaire Tom Steyer seemed hugely pleased not just with himself but with his each and every answer, though why that was so remained very much a mystery. ......

judged by who did best in delivering smart, distinct, candidacy-clarifying moments, this was clearly Pete Buttigieg’s night.





What’s Really Behind Pete Buttigieg’s Lack Of Support Among Black Voters? Lately, Buttigieg is doing great in Iowa polls and pretty well in New Hampshire polls, but he’s still behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in many polls of Nevada and South Carolina, and in most national polls. ........ Buttigieg is relatively weak with voters under 30 and those with incomes below $50,000 a year. “Why are Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire (basically all of whom are white) so enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?” is just as valid a question as “Why are black voters so not enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?” ......... black Democrats as a group are not as supportive of gay relationships or gay marriage as white Democrats. ......

My expectation is that if Buttigieg were nominated, he would get around 90 percent of the black vote in a general election, as Democratic presidential nominees typically do.

......... maybe three or four candidates (say Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren) remain viable through much of the primary season, dividing up the black vote so Biden is not getting 80 percent of it. Secondly, maybe Buttigieg’s efforts to appeal to black voters pay off in the next few months and his numbers rise........ A candidate’s issue may not lie with any single group, but with their strength overall.

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