Showing posts with label Pete Buttiegieg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pete Buttiegieg. Show all posts

Monday, July 22, 2024

Pete Buttigieg: Making A Case



  • The guy has already run for president. He has been through the wringer. It is an experience. He has been vetted.
  • He is smart, and articulate.
  • He has executive experience, as Mayor, and as a member of the cabinet.
  • Kamala has already worked with him. Is currently working with him. They have been in the same cabinet for the past three and a half years. She already knows what it is like to work with him. It is good chemistry. They are in sync. NSync.
  • He is from Indiana, America's crossroads.
  • The Midwest is where several swing states are.
  • Number one: he is ready to switch to the top job at a moment's notice, which is the true mark of a VP candidate.
  • He is a rare Democrat who shows up on Fox, and gets applause.
  • He has offered the best takedown of Vance that I have heard. The VP debate will not happen.
  • A Kamala-Pete ticket will sink Trump. That is before the Democratic Convention.
  • He is a white guy. Balances the Indian woman. Kamala is not Black. That is an Indian name. :)
  • A Kamala-Pete ticket turns Trump into a candidate with an age issue.
  • He will give America bullet trains.
  • Trump be like, "Where are all the TV cameras at?" The attention has shifted.


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Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Kamala Pete 2024





27 Facts About J.D. Vance, Trump’s Pick for V.P. Mr. Vance spilled scores of details about his life in his coming-of-age memoir. We’ve collected the highlights.

Can Democrats Replace Biden? Here’s What to Know. While it is possible, it would most likely lead to political upheaval in the party unless the president decides to step aside on his own terms. ........ Mr. Biden has the power to leave the race and release all the pledged delegates he has accumulated — 3,894 of 3,937 committed so far, according to a tally by The Associated Press — during his march to the nomination. If he were to do so, those delegates would be free to vote for whomever they chose. That would lead to an open convention, a rarity in modern American politics.

If Trump Wins .... and unilaterally deploying troops to Democratic-run cities.



An Attempt to Kill an Ex-President, Caught in Real Time, Stuns the Country The shooting targeting Donald J. Trump was the first of its kind in the era of social media, and was followed by a flood of striking images, rich eyewitness accounts and furious, fearful reaction. ........ A picture of Mr. Trump, fist aloft, American flag fluttering overhead, became iconic in an instant. ............ Not long after, far bigger names on the right, including Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, a finalist to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, had settled on the argument that Democrats had set the stage for an attempted assassination by framing the 2024 election as a battle between the forces of democracy and the soldiers of fascism. Of course someone was going to take a shot, these conservatives said. .......... Before anyone knew a thing about the man who had pulled the trigger, Mr. Trump’s most senior surrogates, including Mr. Vance and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, were blaming President Biden and Democrats. ......... “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Mr. Vance wrote on the social media site X, owned by the right’s favorite billionaire, Elon Musk. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” ............. The BBC’s interview of a man who was on hand for the rally was stunning: He recounted how he had seen a man with a rifle crawling on a nearby rooftop and, for several minutes, tried to warn the police. Still photographs appeared to show the body of the gunman on the roof after he was killed. .......... An AR-15-type rifle was found near the man believed to be the shooter, which could have fueled more Democratic calls for an assault weapons ban, but the party’s leaders held their tongues. ........ But in the internet era there is always someone who doesn’t. .......... Ms. Lamar wrote, then deleted, “the extremism from the MAGA regime has brought us to this moment,” but not before conservatives had grabbed screen shots and sent them flying around the internet. ......... An obscure aide to Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, became a casus belli for some on the right for suggesting, “please get you some shooting lessons,” even as actual members of Congress were lobbing their own fire bombs from the right. ............. “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” wrote Representative Mike Collins, Republican of Georgia. ............ A fellow Georgian, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested, “Democrats wanted this to happen.” ............. Arch conspiracy theories came from heroes of the far right, like the activist James O’Keefe, who suggested that the Secret Service was somehow in on it through the “Deep State Intel Community.” ............ Among younger social media users, an image of Mr. Trump’s face photoshopped into a famous portrait of Vincent van Gogh with a bandaged, partly amputated ear was widely shared, often with an ironic “too soon?” attached. .................. In some quadrants of the political right, the mood was almost celebratory, as supporters shared images of a bleeding Mr. Trump, fist aloft. ............... Within minutes after the news of the shooting broke, Mr. Musk took the moment to officially endorse Mr. Trump to his 189 million followers on X, something he had only flirted with previously. He then spent the evening amplifying pro-Trump sentiments and castigating a liberal tech billionaire, Reid Hoffman, for once saying he wished he had made Mr. Trump “an actual martyr.” ............... Even Jeff Bezos, who has shied from politics, weighed in, declaring on social media that “our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire.” ......... Mr. Musk could uncork his fortune, measured at $265 billion by Bloomberg, on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

Elon Musk Endorses Trump, Moments After Shooting at His Rally Mr. Musk also suggested, without evidence, that the Secret Service may have been “deliberate” in allowing the attack.



Democrats Need to Wake Up From Their ‘West Wing’ Fantasy The show, which ran from 1999 to 2006, portrays politics and policy not as ruthless powermongering pursued by nihilists (that’s “House of Cards”) but as a higher calling that flawed but idealistic people engage in from a place of civic pride........... Jed Bartlet, the fictional Democratic president, is often reaching across the aisle to a wrongheaded but often well-meaning Republican. It’s an attractive fantasy that bears little relation to the world we live in, where partisan animosity is about more than policy disagreements and is rarely resolved via civil debate. ........... Most voters will go to the polls in November not to vote for their guy but to vote against the other guy, a phenomenon known as negative partisanship. Voters say they want Americans to be unified, but Republicans mean they want everyone to be a Republican, and Democrats want everyone to be a Democrat. ......... And partisan obstructionism in Congress has deadlocked policymaking in ways that appear to be getting worse. Working across the aisle isn’t easy when your colleagues are telling their constituents that you’re demonic and they are pushing conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking in pizza parlors. Bipartisan cooperation requires a shared idea of reality that exists in “The West Wing” but not in the real world................ Mr. Biden offers mostly dry policyspeak. On reproductive rights, the president defaults to talk of rights and reason, while Donald Trump makes utterly false but compellingly graphic statements like, “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.” ........... The Democrats talk about facts and analyses. The Republicans talk about a holy war in which civilization hangs in the balance. ........... For many, it’s hard to reconcile the idea of an intrinsically good America with, for example, civilian deaths in Gaza enabled by American money and American bombs. ........ Instead of watching “The West Wing,” Democrats should have been taking to heart the lessons of “Veep,” Armando Iannucci’s very different White House series, in which everything dumb and disastrous that can happen does happen. A dark and devastating comedy, it depicts Washington as staffed by petty, venal people who are too busy tripping over themselves to successfully advance their own interests. ............ somewhere in a dusty box in a closet in the Pentagon, there’s a plan for what the United States will do if we’re invaded by Canada. This plan exists not because we think such a thing will really happen but because we have intelligence professionals who are paid and trained to think about how every possible thing could go wrong. ............ This is not an election with a wrongheaded but well-meaning Republican. It’s an all-out war with an illiberal megalomaniac who will happily destroy American democracy if it buys him one more ounce of power and keeps him out of prison.

Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished Mr. Trump is now the clear front-runner to be the next president of the United States. .......... I’ve never seen such a grim Electoral College landscape for Mr. Biden: He not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020, he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008. .......... Mr. Biden’s problems run much deeper than one bad debate. By spring, he had the lowest job approval average of any recent president seeking re-election since George H.W. Bush in 1992. His support has dropped by nearly a net 10 points since the 2022 midterm elections. .......... What made Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance so devastating was that it reinforced voters’ strongest negative idea about his candidacy: that he is simply too old to run for re-election. In a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after the debate, 74 percent of respondents said Mr. Biden was too old to govern another term in office. ............. As 2024 began, the presidential campaign looked to be a repeat of the 2020 and 2016 elections, with the same battleground states determining the outcome. Not anymore. ......... Since his victory in 2020, Mr. Biden has suffered a significant decline in voter support across the board. Any state that he won by 10 percentage points or less in 2020 should now be considered up for grabs. In a sign of how much Mr. Biden’s political position has deteriorated, the map of states where he is clearly favored has contracted, for a total of only 191 electoral votes. ........... he has not dealt with voters’ fundamental concerns that he does not have the physical and mental capacity to take on Mr. Trump, or to serve another full term as president. ........... In the upcoming weeks, if Mr. Biden is unable to excel at the basic activities of running for office — a robust schedule of spontaneous campaign events, regular television interviews and periodic news conferences — calls for his removal from the Democratic ticket will intensify.

James Carville: Biden Won’t Win. Democrats Need a Plan. Here’s One. Mark my words: Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race. Whether he is ready to admit it or not. ........ But it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open — the exact opposite of what Donald Trump wants us to do. .......... For the first time in his life, Mr. Trump is praying. ........... To win the White House and increase his chances of avoiding an orange jumpsuit, he needs Democrats to make the wrong moves in the coming days — namely, to appear to rig the nomination for a fading president or the sitting vice president or some other heir apparent. ........... We’re going to nominate a new ticket in a highly democratic and novel way, not in the backrooms of Washington, D.C., or Chicago. ............. I want to see the Democratic Party hold four historic town halls between now and the Democratic National Convention in August — one each in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. ............. You want the prosecutor, or you want the criminal? .......... And our opponent? The one born with a platinum spoon but no moral compass? The pathological liar? The felon? The predator found liable for sexual abuse? The wannabe dictator? The Putin lickspittle? ............ It’s been an agonizing time for those of us who think President Biden more than earned a second term but isn’t going to win one. But now we’ve got to move on. ............ A superdemocratic process — the opposite of what Mr. Trump and his MAGA minions would do — is how we’re going to honor that wisdom in our own “Will democracy prevail?” moment.

Jim Clyburn Is Right About What Democrats Should Do Next President Biden faces a problem with no solution. No interview or speech will convince a doubtful public that he is still fit to serve. Perceptions of him had years to harden. In June 2020, 36 percent of voters said Biden was too old to serve. By 2024, that number had roughly doubled. In the Times/Siena poll conducted in February, 73 percent said he was “too old to be an effective president.” In the April poll, 69 percent said the same. In the June poll, 70 percent. After the debate, 74 percent. ............ Representative Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina elder statesman who saved Biden’s campaign in 2020 and is one of its co-chairs in 2024. In an interview on CNN, Clyburn said on Wednesday that if Biden leaves the race, the party should hold “a mini-primary.” .......... I think that Kamala Harris would acquit herself very well in that kind of a process, but then it would be fair to everybody.” ........... The cliché used to be that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. In recent years, Republicans have fallen apart and Democrats have fallen in line. ............ Some information cannot be surfaced without a bit of chaos and conflict. We have all had seasons in our lives in which we lost control, only to discover new strengths and possibilities. As it is for people, so it is for parties. .......... A coronation would also deny Democrats the reward of a contest: constant media coverage from here until their convention. Imagine Trump’s fury if he spent the next few months barely able to break into a news cycle. .............. And if multiple candidates were seeking our nomination, you would have wall-to-wall, weeklong, prime-time coverage of all of our best rising stars, delivering the party message that, frankly, Joe Biden couldn’t against Donald Trump.” .......... Take the seven states that will almost certainly decide this election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats control the governor’s mansion in five of them. Democrats won 11 of the 14 Senate seats across them. .......... — Pete Buttigieg, for instance, never looks better than when he is on Fox News.

Something Big Just Happened in Kenya Most of the demonstrators were part of the country’s young majority, spreading information about where and when to show up on TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp. No central political figure or unifying political party stood behind the crowds, and no common ideology united them beyond anger at the government’s plan to increase taxes while social services collapsed, public university fees soared and an unemployment crisis deepened. Even as the street action has faded, more Kenyans are now openly following graft cases on social media, circulating excerpts from the constitution and calling and texting legislators. ............ This marks a seismic shift in a nation where young people have been accused of political apathy. During general elections in 2022, most young Kenyans didn’t even register to vote. Now, for the first time since the country adopted a new constitution in 2010, the country’s youth are a critical part of a movement in which people are risking their lives to fight for the democratic gains they have been promised. It is clear Mr. Ruto senses his tenure is in danger; on Thursday he sacked all but one of his cabinet secretaries, bowing to public pressure.

Democrats Fear Safe Blue States Turning Purple as Biden Stays the Course Lingering worries about President Biden’s age could make Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia competitive, party operatives believe. .......... Down-ballot Democrats, local elected officials and party strategists say Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — all of which Mr. Biden won comfortably in 2020 — could be in play in November after his miserable debate performance last month. ......... Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico told Mr. Biden that she feared he would lose her state ............ Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, said that his state was “in play” this year ....... the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said they planned to open eight offices in Minnesota and 11 in Virginia. ......... With typical braggadocio, Mr. Trump has promised to compete even in New Jersey, a firmly Democratic state. ......... In New Mexico, Democrats control the entire congressional delegation, the governor’s mansion and the State Legislature. .......... Some party leaders have begun to worry that Mr. Biden could soon find himself playing defense even in a Democratic bastion like New York, where no Republican presidential candidate has won since Ronald Reagan. Mr. Biden carried the state by 23 points in 2020, and so far, the Trump campaign has taken no meaningful steps to contest it. But a reputable poll found Mr. Biden up by only single digits before the debate. ......... And a statewide survey in Oregon completed this week found that Mr. Biden had just a single-digit lead over Mr. Trump

‘This Is the Pick of a Very Confident Presidential Nominee’: Four Columnists Size Up J.D. Vance In 2016, on the eve of the election, Vance and I were guests on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show. At the time, he was still a Never Trumper. .......... As Vance told Steve Bannon, “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” ........ Presidential politics boils down to getting to 270 Electoral College votes, and Vance could help Trump in the industrial Midwestern states that are those must-win “blue wall” states for President Biden. ........... Trump had an opportunity to widen his base geographically by choosing someone like Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, given that Trump is running only a point behind Biden there in the polling average, or culturally by choosing someone like Marco Rubio, helping to make inroads for Republicans among Hispanic voters, or ideologically by reaching out to Nikki Haley, thereby appealing to more centrist-leaning voters who thought of her as the sort of Republican they could get behind. Instead, Trump went with the guy who’ll play well at his rallies and will never cross the boss. ............ At a moment when Trump seemed likely to lose, Vance texted a former roommate that Trump would either be “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.” But Vance is an ambitious guy, and once Trump was in power, he had good reason to hop on the MAGA train. To justify doing so, he had to convince himself that he was fighting diabolical forces, and that because his enemies betrayed liberal democratic values, he needn’t be bound by them either. It’s an ideology of Caesarism disguising itself — as all authoritarian creeds do — as self-defense. ........... The thing that stood out to me about Ross’s conversation is that Trump has impulses, whereas Vance has an ideology. He’s done more work than just about any politician in America to create something coherent out of MAGA’s concerns and MAGA’s grievances. He doesn’t just want to possess power, he wants to wield it in quite specific ways. To the extent that MAGA has ideological legs after Trump leaves the scene, it will in large part be because of Vance. ......... In many ways, Vance is an avatar for countless Republicans who’ve significantly changed their assessments of Trump since 2016. Trump loves it when his previous critics bend the knee, and few people have bent the knee more deeply than Vance. He’s gone from being vitriolically Never Trump to perhaps his most enthusiastic supporter in the Senate. I’ve personally known a number of Republicans who’ve made the exact same transition. ........... Vance really is one of those Republicans who think that practically the only foreign policy we need as a country is a secure, militarized southern border — and perhaps a northern one, too. ............. he’s frequently couched his critiques of Biden administration policy in terms of limited U.S. resources and the need to prioritize other threats — meaning China’s threat to Taiwan above Russia’s threat to Ukraine. ........... He’s the vice-presidential pick for the base, for the people who want to see revolutionary disruption in the American government. This is the pick of a very confident presidential nominee. ........... Vance does nothing to help Trump: He is loved by MAGA but no one else. He’s as demagogic as Trump but entirely lacks his dark charisma. ........... and if Trump wins, I can’t imagine him certifying a Democratic victory in 2028. ........ After the assassination attempt against Trump, Vance has been trying to intimidate Democrats out of talking about the ex-president’s authoritarian tendencies, pretending that telling the truth about Trump constitutes incitement to violence. But with Vance on the ticket, Democrats are going to have to talk about how democracies devolve into systems of what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism. ............ He speaks for millions of Americans who feel forgotten, disdained, condescended to or despised by the proverbial coastal elites. ............ And he’s young: He turns 40 next month ......... Vance has a particularly bitter contempt for women without children; he’s railed against “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” It will be interesting to see if Harris can draw his misogyny out for all to see.

Why I’m Moving Home I’ve frequently found myself in places hit hard by manufacturing job losses ......... the conservative scholar Charles Murray calls “super ZIPs.” These super ZIPs are veritable bastions of opportunity and optimism, places where divorce and joblessness are rare. ........... As one of my college professors recently told me about higher education, “The sociological role we play is to suck talent out of small towns and redistribute it to big cities.” There have always been regional and class inequalities in our society, but the data tells us that we’re living through a unique period of segregation. ........... this geographic sorting has heightened the polarization that now animates politics. ......... I’ve heard ugly words uttered about “flyover country” and some of its inhabitants from well-educated, generally well-meaning people. ......... there were practical reasons to move: I’m founding an organization to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic. We chose Columbus because I travel a lot, and I need to be centrally located in the state and close to an airport. And the truth is that not every motivation is rational: Part of me loves Ohio simply because it’s home. .......... what many communities need most is not just financial support, but talent and energy and committed citizens to build viable businesses and other civic institutions.

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Monday, December 30, 2019

Bernie, Cybersecurity, Pete, TV, Warren



What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like? It could happen, really. Vice President Warren is being considered, and plans are in the works to de-Trumpify immigration and climate. Much less likely: Medicare for All....... He is first in New Hampshire, and second in both Iowa and delegate-rich California ...... In terms of style, they envision a government driven by impatience, one that sees itself with a mandate to confront climate change vigorously, to shore up the nation’s labor unions and defend its immigrant populations. ..... Moderate Democrats would join Republicans in Washington to obstruct many of his initiatives, complicating his ability to use the full power of the party. So would much of corporate America. But Sanders’ supporters would start making noise, too, perhaps creating a newly potent political constituency of the working class and disaffected young people.....

“People will be demonstrating all over the world.”

...... Rep. Ro Khanna, Sanders’ campaign co-chairman and his partner in an effort to cut off U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, is frequently mentioned by Sanders supporters as a potential secretary of Defense. ..... He has praised Joseph Stiglitz, the economist and Nobel laureate. ...... Matt Duss, Sanders’ top foreign policy adviser and a progressive critic of much of Washington’s foreign policy apparatus, could be national security adviser. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, whose short-lived presidential campaign was built entirely around climate change, could helm Energy........ Cornel West, whom Sanders has called “one of the most important philosophers of our time,” put it, the Cabinet would be “much more relaxed. It’d be less dogmatic, it’d be more flexible, and it would respect the life of the mind.” ..... “On our first day in office, through executive order, we will overturn all of Trump’s racist executive orders.” ...... he would convene a “hemispheric summit” to address migration. .....

Sanders says his attorney general would open a criminal investigation into the fossil fuel industry, litigating over climate change as the government once did to the tobacco industry over smoking.

......... He would direct his administration to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, and he would end American support for the war in Yemen. ...... “Day One there would be a fundamental shift in foreign policy that emphasized restraint from intervention, that emphasized cooperation with other major powers on tackling climate change, that prioritized human rights and that aspired to make America a moral leader in the world and not just an economic leader,” Khanna said. ...... the full sweep of his legislative agenda can be felt plainly at any rally, where he paces in a sweater, railing against

“the oligarchy.”

...... he wants immigration reform, an “extreme wealth tax,” free college tuition at public colleges and universities and the elimination of $1.6 trillion in existing student loan debt. ...... “Right now, in New Hampshire your moose population, as I understand it, is suffering. You know why? Because with the warmer weather there are more ticks, and ticks are draining the blood out of moose.” .......

“Everything,” Sanders said, “is connected to everything.”

....... James Carville, the former Bill Clinton strategist, said a magazine article like this one about a Sanders presidency belongs in the “fiction section.” ..... said of McConnell, “I don’t know if his heart’s going to grow three sizes.” ...... He advocates not just for nonintervention, but also an international movement of workers. Reengaging the world on climate change, as Sanders would certainly do, would itself be significant. ..... on foreign policy, much of what has unnerved foreign governments is “the predictable unpredictability of the American president.” ...... Sanders’ own view of the Bernie era appears to be that of one long campaign, reliant less on his ability to work within Washington than to bend the capital to his will by rallying the forces outside it. ..... “The press was saying, ‘Bernie can’t win,’ ‘Bernie can’t win,’ ‘Bernie can’t win,’ and he wins and shocks the world,” Tulchin said of this scenario. “The grassroots movement that he has built to date just explodes exponentially.” ...... And once it does, said West, the intellectual and activist, the transformation Sanders is promising would resemble those brought about by Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. ..... “All three of them were thermostats, they were not thermometers. They didn’t just reflect opinion, they shaped opinion,” West said. “It’s going to be a beautiful thing.”



DHS Was Finally Getting Serious About Cybersecurity. Then Came Trump. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen came in with the potential to be the most effective cyber leader in agency history—only to be sideswiped by the president’s fixation on the Mexican border.

Is Pete Buttigieg the Next Emmanuel Macron? They’re both young, brainy, global in their thinking and determined to thwart Donald Trump.

How TV Predicted Politics in the 2010s This was the decade that idealism vanished from political TV. That might not be a coincidence.

The Key to Elizabeth Warren’s Crisis Moment? Outside the organized women’s movement, she cracked the walls of the boys’ club in her own way. Will it help or hurt her in 2020?

President: Bernie Sanders
Vice President: Elizabeth Warren
Shadow Vice President: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Secretary Of Urban Affairs: Pete Buttigieg
Attorney General: Kamala Devi Harris
Secretary Of Labor: Andrew Yang
UN Ambassador: Tulsi Gabbard



#PRESIDENTSANDERS TRENDS AS VERMONT SENATOR REPORTEDLY LEADS DEMOCRATIC FUNDRAISING RACE
Sanders surges ahead of Iowa caucuses
Bernie Sanders Is Not Only Back, He Has The Best Shot At The Nomination Right Now
Despite Iowa poll average showing Sanders in solid 2nd, CNN uses old poll to show him in 4th

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Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Pete Buttigieg: Videos



Pete Buttigieg: First Impressions



Googling Pete

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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
Could It Be A Pete Andrew Ticket?
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

Instagram

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Never stop serving others.

A post shared by Pete Buttigieg (@pete.buttigieg) on





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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