Pete Buttigieg

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Pete Buttigieg

This is just a preliminary analysis, but our team’s initial report shows we raised over $7 million dollars in Q1 of this year. We (you) are out-performing expectations at every turn. I'll have a more complete analysis later, but until then: a big thank you to all our supporters.

\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zunsfxjyOAE

Pete Buttigieg, Democrat mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has thrown his hat into the ring for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nom and explains what his black agenda is. Plus, Buttigieg goes into what it's like to be an openly gay politician running for president.

Pete Buttigieg
Pete Buttigieg is a millennial Mayor, Afghanistan war veteran, and husband.
Pete Buttigieg is in his eighth and final year as Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Pete was first elected mayor in 2011 at only 29 years old, and re-elected in 2015 with 80 percent of the vote.

Under his leadership, South Bend has reimagined its role in the global economy with job growth and major investment in advanced industries, with a focus on data and technology.

Pete served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and took an unpaid seven months leave during his mayoral term for a deployment to Afghanistan. For his counterterrorism work, he earned the Joint Service Commendation Medal.

In 2017, he ran for Democratic National Committee chair, earning national praise for his clear message and emphasis on rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ground up in every community. He currently serves as the chair of the “Automation and the Impacts on America’s Cities” task force at the United States Conference of Mayors.

The Washington Post has called him “the most interesting Mayor you’ve never heard of” and President Obama named him one of four Democrats who represented the future of the Democratic Party.

A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and graduate of Harvard, he lives with his husband Chasten in the same South Bend neighborhood where he grew up, with their two rescue dogs, Truman and Buddy.
https://www.peteforamerica.com/meet-pete/

Mayor Pete Buttigieg receives LGBT service award
https://www.wndu.com/content/news/Mayor ... 99581.html

HONEST-TO-GOODNESS INDIANA
Mayor Pete’s Anti-Trump Tactic: Target ‘Hypocrite’ Mike Pence
The intensity of Pete Buttigieg’s critiques of the vice president speaks to a long history, both political and personal—and the young mayor’s deep disdain for hypocrisy.
Scott Bixby

03.31.19 9:31 PM ET

Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s message for fellow Democratic hopefuls is a straightforward one: It’s not enough to just attack the president—no matter how loathsome you might find his words, actions and policies.

The vice president, on the other hand? It’s a little more complicated.

“It just felt like every few months, there would be some fresh embarrassment,” Buttigieg told The Daily Beast, in a conversation about his time as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, under then-Governor Mike Pence. “We had to deal with this kind of rotation of blunders that really made our entire state look silly.”

Other Democratic candidates have occasionally criticized Pence on the campaign trail—Sen. Kamala Harris called Pence’s past remarks about his refusal to dine alone with women without his wife present “outrageous”—although former Vice President Joe Biden was forced to backtrack after calling Pence “a decent guy” during a speech in Iowa.

But the frequency and intensity of Buttigieg’s critiques of the vice president speaks to a long shared history, both political and personal—as well as the young mayor’s deep personal disdain for perceived hypocrisy. Pence’s outspoken religiosity, the mayor said, is in direct and irreconcilable conflict with his position in the Trump administration, and with Buttigieg’s belief in the importance of “good faith.”

“That’s one of the biggest things that scripture counsels us to avoid,” Buttigieg, a churchgoing Episcopalian, told The Daily Beast. “It is galling… it’s just a real affront to see that happen.”

The tensions between Buttigieg and Pence run deep, as Buttigieg details in his memoir Shortest Way Home, in which the mayor describes his relationship with Pence as “long and complicated,” to put it mildly. Their dynamic, Buttigieg writes, was a precarious balancing act, working together on a regional economic development program while sparring over labor policy, refugee resettlement and Pence’s decision to withdraw Indiana’s application from a federal preschool grant.

“For the good of the city, I had to work with him on economic development, especially when his administration was doing something that I thought made sense,” Buttigieg told The Daily Beast. “At the same time, morally as well as for the good of the city, I had to fight him on things like the anti-gay policies. Not just as a gay person, but just as a mayor.”

When Pence, who during his time in Congress was known best as a warrior for social conservatism, signed the state’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” into law, he made any continued cooperation nearly impossible. The bill, which gave individuals and organizations the ability to discriminate against LGBT people based on their personal religious beliefs, sparked massive and immediate backlash around the country. That outrage was further inflamed when Pence appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos and refused to say whether he thought that businesses should be able to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

Buttigieg, who is openly gay and has described his marriage to husband Chasten as bringing him closer to God, called the fallout from the bill “a disaster” for the state.

“It really made my life harder, as we were trying to demonstrate that Indiana was ready for the future,” Buttigieg said. “He seemed to be intent on sending us back into the past.”

A spokesperson for Pence did not return requests for comment on Buttigieg’s allegations of hypocrisy, although the vice president has dismissed criticism by other Democratic candidates as “being driven by the most extreme liberal elements in their party.”

RELATED IN POLITICS
2020 presidential candidate South Bend (IN) Mayor Pete Buttigieg pauses as he delivers remarks at the United States Conference of Mayors winter meeting in Washington, U.S., January 24, 2019.

The heightened community tensions sparked by the RFRA eventually made their way to Buttigieg’s front door, literally. When the young mayor came out of the closet in the middle of his reelection campaign, only months after the bill was signed, he was informed by a neighbor that his newspaper wasn’t being delivered anymore because the delivery man didn’t want to give a newspaper to “one of those”—meaning, a gay person.

“It really made my life harder, as we were trying to demonstrate that Indiana was ready for the future.He seemed to be intent on sending us back into the past.”
— Pete Buttigieg
“There are really consequences to this,” Buttigieg said of the bill and its accompanying anti-LGBT rhetoric. “Me not getting a newspaper is a nuisance, but there are still so many cases of real harm coming, especially to LGBT youth who don’t know if they belong. That’s everything from a gay kid who’s still being pushed into conversion therapy to a transgender student who just has to use the bathroom like everyone else getting the message from her own president that policymakers can’t tell the difference between her and some kind of predator.”

Pence’s inability, or refusal, to see those consequences, Buttigieg said, is “a good example of how the behavior of our leaders matters, not just in terms of policy but in terms of tone, and what they allow to happen and what they excuse.”

“In many ways, that moral or tonal dimension of leadership is as important or more as the actual policies that they put forward.”

The crisis ended in humiliation for Pence, who eventually signed a “fix” into law that effectively admitted that the legislation permitted discrimination against LGBT people, but it also set the stage for Pence to use his “culture warrior” reputation to legitimize the candidacy of Donald Trump, a thrice-divorced serial philanderer with poor understanding and worse credibility on issues like abortion and LGBT rights.


Buttigieg called the move “very clever” on Trump’s part—and “very cynical” on Pence’s, whose decision to join forces with the Trump campaign, he said, was “just really breathtaking in its hypocrisy.”

“If he’s serious about his understanding of his faith, I would think that it would preclude joining forces with somebody like this president,” Buttigieg said. “When you see somebody who engages in sanctimony and has as rigid a view of religion as he does, only be willing to throw it out the window completely and get on board with a project that is an affront not only to my understanding of Christianity, but also to his own, that’s the kind of hypocrisy for which scripture reserves some of its very harshest words—the idea of professing faith but taking worldly steps that fly in the face of that faith for the purposes of gaining power.”

Buttigieg cautioned that, while Pence’s religious hypocrisy gets him hot under the collar, “the less this election is about either him or the president, the better.” But some Hoosiers are more than happy to see him go toe-to-toe with the former governor.

“We have seen the vice president as incredibly problematic as a representative of our state,” said Josh Peters, a former president of the Indiana Stonewall Democrats, who is running for Marion County Treasurer in 2020. “We’re incredibly proud of the tone that Mayor Pete has set. Taking on the vice president’s alleged religiosity is a tactic that works even here in Indiana, because his positions run counter to our ‘Hoosier Nice,’ live-and-let-live attitude.”

People in Indiana, Peters said, need Buttigieg’s voice “to counteract the example that Mike Pence has set for what people think Hoosiers are.”

From a purely political perspective, Buttigieg’s broadsides against Pence have been a tactical victory. A dark-horse presidential candidate and self-described long-shot, the mayor’s polling (and fundraising) numbers skyrocketed after a breakout performance in a CNN town hall in early March, in which he blasted Pence as “the cheerleader of the porn-star presidency.”

According to Buttigieg, his frequent and forceful denunciation of the vice president is less a campaign strategy than the honest feelings of a fellow Indiana native with deep convictions, and even deeper political differences.

“It’s not part of some master plan,” Buttigieg said. “I’ve just noticed that people really care about what’s going on with this vice president and president, and I recognize that as somebody who saw this up close, that I can help people understand what’s going on and what to be wary of when it comes to this [vice president].”

If it were a strategy, however, it would be a smart one, Republican communications experts told The Daily Beast.

“The left and a lot of independents think Trump is... a loudmouthed dick,” said Liz Mair, a veteran Republican communications consultant who has broken with the party over Trump. “They also think he’s pretty racist and misogynistic and transphobic but maybe not homophobic per se, and kind of moderate on economic policy and not as into foreign adventurism… In some ways middle-of-the-road, just loud and annoying.”

On the other hand, Mair said, those same voters “think Pence is literally going to turn America into what’s depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“One of those things is a lot scarier for a whole suite of voters than the other,” said Mair, who has contributed as an opinion writer at The Daily Beast. “I would be willing to bet that among the Democratic primary electorate… there will be more who are more scared of the latter than the former.”

By juxtaposing himself with Pence, said Republican communications operative Tim Miller, Buttigieg also presents an opportunity to make good on his pledge to foster a new “Religious Left” in the country.

“In the end, you are going to have to be the nominee who can stand up to Trump to win—being an effective Pence foil is a good way to demonstrate that,” Miller said. “Pete’s style is a good contrast with Pence because it’s earnest. He doesn’t do it in a way that condescends towards ‘deplorable’ religious people.”

That kind of contrast, Buttigieg said, helped demonstrate the growing nationwide consensus around equality for LGBT people following the RFRA debacle—but it has also provided political refuge for bigotry of all kinds.

“At best, people with bigoted attitude are given cover—kind of the same as you’re seeing with the white nationalism,” he said. “At best, it kind of enables these things, because it gives some sort of tacit blessing from the highest office in the land.”

But Buttigieg isn’t running for president to confront Pence at every turn, he said.

“We do have to confront what is wrong about this presidency… but it’s not enough to just talk about what you’re against,” Buttigieg said. “We don’t need to dwell on it that long, because I think most people have made up their minds about that already. What you need to do is show how you’re going to do something better.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pete-butt ... mike-pence

Pete Buttigieg puts Conservative Christianity on Damascus Road
MARCH 31, 2019 BY SHANE PHIPPS


As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Paul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. For three days he was blind, and he did not eat or drink anything.

Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Saul, he sad, “Brother Saul, the Lord–Jesus, who appears to you on the road as you were coming here–has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

-Acts 9: 3-9 and 13-19
With the rise of Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, I’ve been thinking about this scenario a lot lately. Buttigieg has emerged from the obscurity of his position of mayor of South Bend, Indiana to become a new star on the national stage as one of the Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2020. He has captured the imagination of many on the Left. Many of my friends who are Democrats are beginning to publicly endorse Mr. Buttigieg. I’m still researching and considering multiple candidates, but I am very intrigued and impressed by what I’ve seen from Mr. Buttigieg so far. Win or lose, Pete Buttigieg is going to make a huge splash in this election cycle. His candidacy will put Conservative Christianity on Damascus Road.



Pete Buttigieg is, perhaps, the most unusual major candidate we’ve ever seen run for president. In some ways he is the kind of candidate that would appeal to Conservative Christians. He is a a Christian and regular attender of the Cathedral of St. James Episcopalian Church in South Bend. He is a military veteran who served as a Naval intelligence officer and saw active duty during a seven month deployment in Afghanistan. In those ways, Buttigieg’s resume is–or should be–far more appealing to a conservative Christian than President Trump’s.


Pete Buttigieg’s politics certainly make him attractive to those left of center. His campaign platform includes universal healthcare, strengthening labor unions to protect American workers, universal background checks for buying guns, environmental protections, protection for DREAMer immigrants, legal protections for LGBTQ people, and legalizing marijuana to help end the drug wars. Buttigieg is young, attractive, and vibrant. He is also brilliant, a graduate of Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar, and speaker of Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari, and French. He is also a gifted musician. He is just the kind of candidate that the Democrats need.
But the real twist to this exciting candidate is that he is openly gay. This is going to be interesting.

I am so excited to see what happens from here. I want Buttigieg to succeed and become a major player in this election because he will absolutely put a face on the LGBTQ Rights issue–a face that Donald Trump and whomever else might have a hat in the ring will be forced to confront on a national stage.

Conservative Christians are going to have to take a good long look at the issue that seems to be one of the ultimate dividers. This issue has already split Christianity into two camps, the Progressive/Inclusives on the Left vs. the Conservative/Fundamentalists on the Right. We have heard many mouthpieces of the most conservative wing of the Church blaming all the world’s troubles on the acceptance of homosexuality. Meanwhile, a growing facet of more progressive Christians are trying to reach out in love to the LGBTQ community. Pete Buttigieg now stands squarely in the breach. With Buttigieg front and center in the discussion, conservative Christians are going to have to look him in the face and deal with him directly. The way they do so will be a spotlight moment in the history of this nation. Will scales fall from their eyes or will they continue as always? Will they realize that judging people is the job of God? Will they consider the fact that people are as God made them? Will they reflect the love of Christ when they stand face to face with Pete Buttigieg?

A nation will be watching very closely.

This is going to be a a landmark–a milestone–a crossroads–the Damascus Road.

This is going to be interesting.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/shanephip ... scus-road/

RELIGION MAR. 26, 2019
Openly Gay, Openly Christian Buttigieg Challenges the Religious Right
By Ed Kilgore

Who’s going to cast the first stone at Mayor Pete for not being a “real” Christian? Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As someone whose identity includes serious Christianity and serious progressive political stances, I’ve always been wary of trying to counter the Christian right with some sort of Christian left, in a Bible-quotation–loaded competition to claim God for a party or ideology. As Barack Obama once convincingly argued, doubt about what God wants people to do politically is an important part of an attitude of humility which used to be called “the fear of God.” It’s also part of the foundation for the great American doctrine of separation of church and state, which was sacred to Southern Baptists when I was growing up in that faith community (they’ve dramatically flip-flopped since then, alas).

Still, it’s important now and then to challenge the conservative assertion — often shared in ignorance by secular media — that religiosity, and particularly Christian religiosity, dictates reactionary positions on culture and politics. So I found it interesting and provocative that 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker goes out of his way to talk about his own religious faith:

[Booker] bids fair to become the most overtly Christian Democratic presidential candidate since Jesse Jackson and perhaps even Jimmy Carter, at a time when his party is trending irreligious and the opposition claims a monopoly on all things biblical. What makes Booker different from many left-of-center figures who are “personally” religious is that he purports to be progressive because of his faith, not despite it or incidentally alongside it (e.g., the way John F. Kennedy referred to his own faith as an “accident of birth”). If this becomes central to his identity as a presidential wannabe, it will be provocative to both the Christian right and to secular Democrats. And that could be both a benefit and a handicap for Booker ’20.
As E.J. Dionne observes, there is another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who’s conspicuously talking about his faith, the fast-rising dark horse Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana:


During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, the 37-year-old from South Bend, Ind., made a modest plea: “I do think it’s important for candidates to at least have the option to talk about our faith,” he said. He specifically targeted the idea that “the only way a religious person could enter politics is through the prism of the religious right.”

An Episcopalian and a married gay man, Buttigieg pointed to the core Christian concept that “the first shall be last; the last shall be first.”

He added: “What could be more different than what we’re being shown in Washington right now — often with some people who view themselves as religious on the right, cheering it on? . . . Here we have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes into the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion. Which is the last thing that I imbibe when I take in scripture in church.”
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Dionne notes that Booker and Elizabeth Warren share Buttigieg’s willingness to talk about Christian faith. But what makes Mayor Pete especially interesting is that he challenges the idea that Christianity is inherently homophobic in a direct and personal manner. To him, LGBTQ folk aren’t third parties who are the subject of some argument between Christians and progressives: He’s Christian, progressive, and gay. So conservative Christians who like to imply that their more accepting co-religionists aren’t “real” or “orthodox” because they don’t exclude gay people need to be willing to tell Buttigieg he’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. And that may be — and certainly should be — uncomfortable for them.

The Episcopal Church of America accepts gay parishioners, priests, and bishops in churches that recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday and have as authentic a claim to “orthodoxy” as any other church and more than many. So, too, do such solid elements of the American and global religious landscape as the United Church of Christ (a.k.a. Congregationalists), the Presbyterian Church (USA) (the largest gathering in that faith tradition), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ditto), the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and many congregations and whole regions of the United Methodists and my own Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that embrace gay people as equals in every way. There are many smaller denominations and nondenominational gatherings that do the same. And that’s aside from the millions of individual Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals who reject, quietly or openly, the homophobia of their own denominations.


Any Democratic presidential nominee who can authentically talk about his or her faith would be well advised to do so if only to confound Christian-right leaders and followers who have cast their own lots with the heathenish warlord in the White House. But Pete Buttigieg offers a particularly interesting contrast with the 45th president. Would anyone be confident in accusing this married, churchgoing, Afghanistan veteran of being ethically inferior to Donald Trump? Not without risking hellfire.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/ ... right.html

[seemslikeadream]

I really like Pete..... It's 'Boot-Edge-Edge'


this

Pete Buttigieg to @GMA: "That hypocrisy needs to be called out, it needs to be called out forcefully. But we need to factual, we need to be honest, and we do...need to be decent as well.

https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg

Vox

Before @ezraklein interviewed @PeteButtigieg, he was surprised to see the South Bend mayor and 2020 hopeful catching fire. He isn’t anymore.

Listen to the conversation that changed his mind:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4uRxeq ... ISJGRr8bew

After Obama, Democrats need a new theory of change. Pete Buttigieg thinks he’s got it.
The most important debate in the Democratic primary is over how to make governing great again.

Ezra KleinApr 4, 2019, 8:00am EDT

Democratic presidential hopeful and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks to reporters before appearing at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, on March 28, 2019.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
It seems very weird that the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is catching fire as a presidential candidate.

Until you talk to Pete Buttigieg. Then it doesn’t seem so weird.

I sat down with Buttigieg for my podcast, and came away unexpectedly impressed. A lot has been made of the eight languages Buttigieg speaks and his stint as a Rhodes scholar and Navy intelligence officer, but what struck me most is that Buttigieg has a coherent theory of what’s gone wrong in American politics, and what’s required to fix it. That’s rarer among presidential candidates than you might think.

In 2007, Mark Schmitt wrote a piece I think about often. In it, he argued that the contest between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards was “not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track.” It was, he said, the “theory of change primary.”

Obama won that primary, and in the short period in which Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate, he managed to push through quite a bit of legislation. But while Democrats broadly revere Obama, there’s a consensus that his theory of change ultimately crashed on the shoals of Republican obstruction. As a result, many of the problems Obama sought and failed to address — from inequality to climate change to wage stagnation to money in politics to gerrymandering — have worsened, and Democrats see President Trump as the poisoned fruit of those failures.


Pete Buttigieg talks with a reporter at his office in South Bend, Indiana, on January 10, 2019.
Nam Y. Huh/AP
The central lesson of Obama’s presidency, Buttigieg argues, is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.” The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.

“You can only go so long with this divergence that we have between the center of the American people and the center of the American Congress,” Buttigieg says. “Donald Trump was not exactly a corrective, but he was a consequence of the fact that people watched their government drifting further and further away from them in terms of what it would deliver.”

Buttigieg’s response — one that you also hear from 2020 hopefuls Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Gov. Jay Inslee — is to restructure government so that popular majorities translate more cleanly into governing majorities. He’s discussed eliminating the Electoral College, scrapping the filibuster, and remaking the Supreme Court so each party nominates the same number of justices and vacancies become less “apocalyptic.”

There’s nothing new about a Democratic candidate promising to fix the system. Obama ran on similar themes in 2008. House Democrats opened their session by passing a sweeping package of good-government reforms. But once Democrats take power, concrete policy change, with the immediate benefits it promises, tends to win out over the abstractions of procedural reform. It’s easier to run for reelection bragging about a tax cut than about weakening the Electoral College.


Obama’s presidency, in this respect, was typical. Once he was elected — and understandably, given the economic freefall — fixing the system took a back seat to moving legislation through the system. Obama stabilized the financial sector and expanded health insurance to tens of millions of people, but he left the corrupting influence money plays in our politics untouched.

What surprised me while talking to Buttigieg was his insistence that he would prioritize political reforms over policy wins. “This is the difference between somebody who’s thinking about 2024 versus somebody who’s thinking about 2054,” he says. “To me, yes, it’s worth it because we’re talking about setting the terms of the debate as they will play out for the rest of my life.”

Democrats need to debate their theories of change

So far, the 2020 Democratic primary has been fought through ambitious policy promises, primarily, though not exclusively, around health care. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris believe in creating a universal Medicare program and abolishing private insurance. Sen. Cory Booker and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke believe in creating a universally accessible Medicare program and keeping private insurance.


Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke all seen launching their bids for the 2020 presidential race.

These differences seem vast, and ideologically, they are. But what do they amount to when translated into practical politics? Democrats aren’t going to have 60 votes in the Senate, and you can’t abolish private insurance with 51 votes, or even pass Medicare for America that way.

The key question here isn’t what the president believes, but how the Senate works. If Democrats don’t remove the filibuster, their only chance to pass major legislation is the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process. The main constraint on reconciliation is that each provision has to be primarily budgetary in nature, and reforming the health care system on that scale requires a vast quantity of regulatory changes. No one really knows what the Senate parliamentarian will and won’t allow, but experts I’ve spoken to believe both bills would be disqualified dozens of times over.

“My sense has been that provisions that look like regulations — such as lowering the age to 55 for buying into Medicare — tend to be viewed as such by the parliamentarian, meaning that they would require 60 votes,” says political scientist Sarah Binder, an expert in congressional procedure.

The challenge the filibuster poses to the progressive agenda — or really any agenda — is just one way the differences between the candidates’ theories of political change matter as much as, or more than, the differences in their policies. But the candidates rarely debate these questions openly, in part because we have almost no vocabulary for describing that dimension of politics.

The words we use to describe the ideologies of presidential candidates are imperfect, but at least they exist. There are liberals, neoliberals, democratic socialists, leftists, conservatives, neoconservatives, centrists, paleoconservatives, libertarians, and New Democrats, to name just a few. The boundaries among these groups can be fuzzy, but overall, it’s a pretty flexible vocabulary for describing what this or that politician believes.

There’s no similarly accepted shorthand for the difference between candidates like Warren and Buttigieg and Inslee, who envision sweeping reforms to the way laws are made, and people like former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who emphasize that their relationships with Republicans better equip them to maximize change in the system we have. Nor are their categories clearly describing the approaches the candidates intend to take toward electing allies or mobilizing public opinion, or much discussion of whether they’d prioritize expanding the earned income tax credit over curbing money in politics.

Too often, we assume policy ambition corresponds with political style, but that shortcut often misleads us. Sanders, for instance, has proposed raising tens of trillions in taxes to build a European-style welfare state in America. But asked whether he’d eliminate the filibuster, he pronounced himself “not crazy” about the idea. And he’s not alone. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Booker, and Klobuchar have offered outright defenses of the filibuster, and Harris has dodged the question. As far as I can tell, the only senator running for president who seems to be seriously considering eliminating the rule is Warren.


By contrast, among others running for president, the filibuster isn’t nearly as revered. Along with Buttigieg, Inslee and O’Rourke have both discussed scrapping the practice (as, it should be noted, has President Trump).

Similarly, Republicans leveraged their obstruction of the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and the advantage they hold in the Electoral College to maintain generational control of the Court. There’s been some talk in Democratic circles about restructuring the Court in response. Buttigieg has embraced an interesting idea (first proposed in this Vox article by Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman) by which Democrats and Republicans would get to name five justices each, and then those justices would jointly name another five members to the Court. Harris, Warren, Gillibrand, and Inslee have been open to the idea of adding justices, though they’ve shied away from offering specific plans.

But Sanders has thrown cold water on such proposals. “My worry is that the next time the Republicans are in power, they’ll do the same thing,” he said. That’s a reasonable view — arguably it’s the most reasonable view — but conservative control of the Supreme Court endangers Sanders’s broader agenda. What’s his plan for that?

Democrats who want to reform the political system have a long list of policies to choose from. Granting statehood and political representation to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico makes moral sense, and could well tip the balance of power in the Senate, where Democrats currently operate at a large geographic disadvantage. Eliminating the Electoral College commands virtually unanimous support in the field, though no one has a viable plan for how to do it. Campaign finance reform is both popular and long overdue. The Washington Post has a useful overview of where the various candidates stand on some of these issues.

But these ideas require the power to implement them, and Democrats currently lack even that. What are the candidates’ theories of party building, such that they’re likelier to have the congressional allies necessary to make these kinds of changes? How would they approach governing if Republicans hold the Senate, as is the likeliest 2020 outcome?

We are better at discussing what candidates want to do than how they will do it. That hole in our political vocabulary matters, as it makes it hard to debate the core question of any political campaign: How will the candidates actually make real people’s lives better?

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Buttigieg for his vision of America’s national identity. “The only semi-convincing justification for American exceptionalism,” he replied, “is this idea that America represents a way of governing, a way of doing things, that makes us all better off.”

It wasn’t the answer I expected, but it frames the challenge for Buttigieg, and the rest of the Democrats, well: How does the party that believes in government make governing great again?

Mayor Pete Buttigieg answers questions during a gathering in Raymond, New Hampshire, on February 16, 2019.
Pete Buttigieg answers questions during a gathering in Raymond, New Hampshire, on February 16, 2019.
Charles Krupa/AP
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... reme-court

Pete Buttigieg Once Wrote a Thinkpiece About Dave Matthews Band, Radiohead, and Politics
A split image of Thom Yorke, Pete Buttigieg, and Dave MatthewsThom Yorke photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns, Pete Buttigieg photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Dave Matthews photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
PITCH

by Jeremy D. Larson

It is categorically rude to dig up a writer’s college newspaper column from decades ago and parade it around for all to see. But when that writer is a folksy, polyglot presidential candidate who once pined for the simpler times when he could listen to Dave Matthews Band and not have to think about 9/11—well, it’s still rude, but at least it’s fair game.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is a rising political star. Buttigieg announced he’d entered into the Democratic presidential primary in January, just days after his 37th birthday. Along with his mayorship, which he’s held since 2012, Buttigieg’s résumé includes a B.A. from Harvard, an M.A. from Oxford’s Pembroke College, and the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He speaks in the ballpark of eight languages.

He was also, sorry to say, a political columnist for his college paper. In November 2003, when Buttigieg was a senior at Harvard, his bi-weekly op-ed for the school’s newspaper The Crimson turned its eye toward the popular music of the day. In a column titled “Rock the Vote?,” Buttigieg wrote about the music heard around the Harvard campus for the past four years and reflected on the heady political times of the Bush administration, the September 11 attacks, and the pulse of the new millennium. (How 9/11 reframed Buttigieg’s life is a theme he comes back to often in his new book Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future.)

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serpentwithfeet | “messy” | Midwinter 2019


The column begins—as any good political column should—discussing Dave Matthews’ 2003 debut solo LP Some Devil and—as any adroit op-ed writer would do—compares it to Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief:

This week, I picked up a new album by Dave Matthews, prophet of the carefree joy of my high school years. But unlike the cheerful strains of late-nineties-Dave, the solo project Some Devil is a sober, even grim reflection of how much the world has changed in a few short years. The man who brought us the playful riffs of “Too Much” and “Everyday” is now promoting the album’s first single, “Gravedigger.” Matthews is not the only one undergoing a tonal shift; if you’ve paid attention to Radiohead this year, you know that they have grown not only darker, but more explicitly political. In titling their new project, for example, they replaced the cryptic inclinations that brought us previous efforts like or Kid A, and called this one Hail to the Thief.

Buttigieg moves on to talk about the halcyon days of listening to Dave Matthews Band before 9/11, when the worries of the world seemed smaller and when, according to him, “Saddam was a joke, Anthrax was a metal band, [and] Afghanistan was a place where, in commercials, shepherds were using the internet to improve business.” By Buttigieg’s reckoning, the hoary strains of Sting’s 1999 album Brand New Day represent a lost bastion of idyllic globalism.

However, my eyes are drawn to this paragraph, the big turn, when everything changed for Buttigieg and America and the way we collectively listened to those early Dave Matthews Band records:

Then all hell broke loose. Just as we were adjusting to the fact that our country could function even if the president didn’t completely know what he was doing, a team of Saudis with box cutters torpedoed our innocence. Right then, like our cell phones, our culture stopped working for a minute. What sense could the old Dave Matthews make when Dave Letterman was weeping on air?

Florid as this may seem, it’s true that in the days following the attacks, DMB’s titanic 1996 ballad “Crash Into Me” was actually removed from some radio station playlists because the title alone might remind the nation of its trauma.

In his column, Buttigieg goes on to talk about how several bands specifically marked this change from light to dark within a tumultuous political and cultural landscape. Music of the early ’00s was more acerbic, more politically efficacious, he writes, as embodied by Eminem’s 2002 album The Eminem Show: “He warned young Americans to think about a draft, joked about Dick Cheney’s cardiac health, and lashed out at the ‘Divided States of Embarrassment’ for abandoning free speech.”

In closing he ponders the state of the national mood in the upcoming 2004 election:

So one year from now, when the notoriously apathetic youth of America is asked to participate in the choosing of our national leadership, we’ll owe ourselves a few thoughts about how and why our national voice changed so quickly from a hopeful Dave Matthews telling us that “All you need is every day” to an unwell Radiohead wondering why “two plus two always makes five.”

It’s overly earnest and it’s dated, but none of Buttigieg’s writing or thought process is clownable or as embarrassing as, say, Vice President Mike Pence once writing that he was “victimized” by Disney’s Mulan. Say what you will about using Dave Matthews or Radiohead or Eminem as flashpoints of a great cultural shift, but a few tortured metaphors aside, Buttigieg’s column is a good window into the storied form of political music writing. Change the bands, change the president, and a piece like Buttigieg’s could well be written today.
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/pete-but ... -politics/

Rock the Vote?
Liberal Art
By Peter P.M. Buttigieg
November 10, 2003

This week, I picked up a new album by Dave Matthews, prophet of the carefree joy of my high school years. But unlike the cheerful strains of late-nineties-Dave, the solo project Some Devil is a sober, even grim reflection of how much the world has changed in a few short years. The man who brought us the playful riffs of “Too Much” and “Everyday” is now promoting the album’s first single, “Gravedigger.” Matthews is not the only one undergoing a tonal shift; if you’ve paid attention to Radiohead this year, you know that they have grown not only darker, but more explicitly political. In titling their new project, for example, they replaced the cryptic inclinations that brought us previous efforts like or Kid A, and called this one Hail to the Thief.

Music is always regarded as an index of the times, so a glance at what’s changed in our short student lifetimes could tell us a thing or two. And indeed, there are some lessons in even a casual overview of what has happened to campus music trends just in the last few years.

When the class of ’04 arrived at Harvard, it was all about Dave Matthews Band. And that fit pretty well. Bill Clinton was president, Saddam was a joke and Anthrax was a metal band. Afghanistan was a place where, in commercials, shepherds were using the Internet to improve business. The government was running an unheard-of surplus, and we were too well-off and peaceful to know what to do with ourselves. And Dave was there, with his stringy, barefoot exhortations to “eat, drink, and be merry” and to make the most of our “One Sweet World.” A new record appeared in February of 2001—it must have been one of the last albums recorded during the Clinton administration—focusing on the importance of the “Everyday” as a possible route to progress. Lyrics like “pick me up love…everyday” seemed to offer a formula for advancing ourselves now that the country was, broadly speaking, in order. It was the new millennium, time to get cracking on personal and spiritual growth.

You may also remember that Sting had a big year then, with a similarly millennium-conscious album, its title heralding the world’s Brand New Day. A video of his hit song “Desert Rose” (the last collaboration anyone can remember between American and Arab pop culture icons) featured the singer, some malaise on his face, fiddling with a digital camera in the back seat of a slick black car, driving through the desert on his way to a gig in a hopping and vaguely Arab dance club with his collaborator, Cheb Mami. This said it all: we were globalized, technological, well-funded and figuring out what to do with the rest of the world.

Then all hell broke loose. Just as we were adjusting to the fact that our country could function even if the president didn’t completely know what he was doing, a team of Saudis with box cutters torpedoed our innocence. Right then, like our cell phones, our culture stopped working for a minute. What sense could the old Dave Matthews make when Dave Letterman was weeping on air? For one long winter, no one knew what the hell to do, except to vow that we would never be the same.

It’s at this point, when we swore to ourselves that we were changed, and it seemed the culture of irony had been replaced by a newfound sincerity, that we might have expected to see musical expressions of our new national solidarity and purpose. As America paused to trust the leadership it was accustomed to mocking, we might have seen a rebirth of faith in our music to tell us that what nearly killed us had made us stronger. But our startled leaders draped us in flags and led us into our history’s first war against an abstract idea, and our musicians captured our unredeemed state by summer.

The anthem of our new life came on an arresting new album from Eminem. Tossing expletives at Dick Cheney and Tipper Gore, Eminem was, as he put it, “dumping it on White America,” building a new narrative—aggressively American, abused, angry and alarming. He warned young Americans to think about a draft, joked about Dick Cheney’s cardiac health, and lashed out at the “Divided States of Embarrassment” for abandoning free speech. The national rhetoric of redemption began to ring hollow as this spokesperson of the Midwestern underclass resonated all the way to Harvard; sales tripled those of his previous release.

One summer later, it seemed everyone on campus was listening to Radiohead. The band’s tone of alienation and danger—more than one reviewer has found the word “unwell” an apt term for their feel—touched a nerve in America, which speaks volumes about how quickly things changed. The band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, admits puzzlement at why they continue to catch on, telling a reporter he’s “never been able to understand why so many people get it.” But given the temperature of the times, it should surprise no one that their dyspeptic experimentation is popular. We, too, are nationally unwell.

Reading music in this way is, of course, an imprecise science. There are other ways to interpret our favorite bands shifting from bright to dark, or from abstract to political, other ways to read the rise of angry white rap; and there are, obviously, counterexamples. Marilyn Manson’s shock-rock, after all, peaked at about the same time as the internet boom. But Marilyn Manson is a countercultural figure, not a figure of the modern American Zeitgeist. Manson will be remembered as a diversion, but our memories of 2002 may well be soundtracked by Eminem, who tapped something in the national psyche and lay claim to the national tone.

This brings us back to the question of leadership. Our political leaders are responsible for setting that tone and supporting that psyche, and music is not a bad way to look at how they’re doing with our country. Jimi Hendrix’s famous and tortured rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” in 1969 would have been as meaningless to a country reassured by and enamored of President Kennedy as it was necessary for a nation under Nixon. So one year from now, when the notoriously apathetic youth of America is asked to participate in the choosing of our national leadership, we’ll owe ourselves a few thoughts about how and why our national voice changed so quickly from a hopeful Dave Matthews telling us that “All you need is everyday” to an unwell Radiohead wondering why “two plus two always makes five.”

Peter P.M. Buttiegig ’04 is an history and literature concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003 ... is-week-i/

[liminalOyster]

Americans who have a college degree earn more than Americans who don't. As a progressive, I have a hard time getting my head around the idea a majority who earn less because they didn't go to college subsidize a minority who earn more because they did.

Yuck.

[seemslikeadream]

ok all dems are bad I get it


cause they said something

can we go by his whole life? or a couple words he said once

I think I need to post more about what Pete thinks...AND I will

let's not judge by one statement .....shall we?

A Conversation About Pete Buttigieg, Identity, and Diversity in the 2020 Race
Christina Cauterucci and Mark HarrisApril 04, 20192:19 PM
Buttigieg speaking into a mic.
Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg speaks during a news conference on Jan. 23 in Washington.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Last week, I wrote a piece about Pete Buttigieg that made a lot of people mad. My goal was to apply an intersectional lens to Buttigieg’s queer politics and identity in the context of conversations happening on the left about diversity in the 2020 Democratic presidential slate. Relying on statements Pete had made about his gay identity, and my own analysis of the ways homophobia affects all queer people differently based on race, class, gender, and gender presentation, I wondered if his lived experiences might more closely mirror his white male counterparts’ than any of his other competitors’.

I expected that some of my fellow queer people would disagree with what I wrote, but I didn’t expect the overwhelming volume of angry responses that followed. So I asked one of the critics of my piece, film writer Mark Harris, to discuss the topic with me, help contextualize the backlash, and further analyze Buttigieg’s possible candidacy. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.
—Christina Cauterucci

Christina Cauterucci: A lot of the responses I’ve gotten have been from people who were legitimately hurt by the piece, who said it resurfaced the shame they felt while growing up gay or living in the closet. So I do want to apologize for any hurt I caused. I specifically wanted to talk to you, Mark, because you tweeted some useful comments in response to the piece. And before I wrote this, you were involved in kind of a broad Twitter conversation about Buttigieg and his qualifications, and the fact that he was beating everyone but Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in this recent Iowa poll. Tell me a little bit about the discourse you were seeing and what prompted you to comment on Buttigieg.

Mark Harris: I think what interested me was that some of what I was seeing on social media was a pushback from Elizabeth Warren supporters, saying basically it’s a reflection of media bias that Pete Buttigieg is getting all the attention that Elizabeth Warren should be getting, when his proposals are just either pale versions of her proposals or good versions of her proposals, but late. It seemed to me that he was being used as a kind of avatar for media inequity, like: This is a typical imbalance where a white guy comes in, says the same things as a more qualified woman and gets all the attention, and kind of sucks the air out of the room. First of all, I thought that was not really an accurate statement of what was going on with Buttigieg, and second, I thought he, in particular, is a really bad example if you want to make that point, which I do not think is an illegitimate point to make.

Cauterucci: I appreciated one tweet I saw of yours, which was actually a little bit of the inspiration for the piece I went on to write, where you said gay people in America are never given a free ride. I interpreted that tweet as saying, “You know, you can’t write him off as just another white male candidate, because he’s not. He’s different from all of the white male presidential candidates who’ve come before, in that he’s openly gay.” Is that a fair characterization of your tweet?

Harris: Absolutely. Yes, and I do think there is this tendency among a certain set of progressives to feel that about LGBT issues, certainly about gay and lesbian issues. To feel like: “We solved that, and everybody’s equal now,” so we don’t have to factor in [sexual orientation] when we talk about candidates. I certainly don’t know any actual gay people who feel that way, so it can be a little jarring to hear this historic nature of a gay candidacy and have a gay candidate dismissed by other progressives.

Cauterucci: Including me, possibly. Is that right?

Harris: I think you were raising the question, yeah. I think where I pushed back was the sort of: Is he just another white guy, or is being gay sufficiently unusual to nullify the same old, same old aspect of the rest of him?

I think that connects to a bunch of larger questions about how we view this extremely large and still-growing Democratic field, because when you look at it in the aggregate, the field of Democratic candidates is men, it’s women, it’s African Americans, it’s white people, it’s a Latino, it’s someone of mixed heritage, it’s straight, it’s gay, it’s Jewish, it’s Christian, it’s coastal, it’s Midwestern. So, like, all together, it’s pretty great. It covers the bases you would want a progressive, inclusive party to cover. But the fact is, one person is going to get picked, and if we view that eventual choice only through the prism of the idea that certain demographics are going to get shafted, we’re probably going to be in trouble no matter who gets picked.

Cauterucci: Yes. I completely agree with that. And at the same time, I think it’s worth questioning how different identities and perceptions of identities affect the conversation that happens before the election. I think it’s important to explore how the intersecting identities of all the candidates affect their lives, and their own conceptions of their lives, because someone isn’t [reducible to] just their marginalized identity. With Buttigieg in particular, I think it’s interesting to look at how he’s framed his gay identity in his political career.

He only came out midway through his political career. He was already mayor of South Bend, so we actually have a lot of information on how he sees his sexuality and how he explains it to others, how it affects his political worldview. There were some conversations I was having among friends about how some of us—not all of us, but some—were feeling a little bit less than excited about him as this possible gay trailblazer in part because he’s tried to distance himself a bit from gay culture and from queerness as anything but this kind of unimportant distinction in who he happens to love.

Harris: Well, I mean, you’re opening so many interesting doors here. I would argue a little bit with the idea that he has distanced himself from it. I don’t think you become an openly gay mayor of an Indiana city, population 100,000, without … I mean, I think he’s owned it in a pretty large way. But you’re absolutely right that we can’t look at a candidate simply as a distillation of one particular identity or another, or even as an intersection of identities. On the other hand, I think we also can’t look at candidates, as much as some people would like to, as just kind of fleshly embodiments of positions on issues.

I think this was where I got my back up a little bit about the insistence on comparing Buttigieg and Warren, because Pete Buttigieg is a gay, Midwestern, veteran mayor of a city. That’s not Elizabeth Warren’s background, and all of that is part of who he is. The fact is, people don’t vote just by closing their eyes, getting the pictures of who the candidates are out of their heads and saying, “OK, but what are their positions?” It’s about this weird intersection of positions and biography and demeanor and experience and age. And with a lot of those X factor issues, probably most of all the issue of “relatability,” there’s a huge amount to interrogate about the difference between the way men and women are treated. That’s where I think the criticism is legitimate. I just think it was interesting and, to me, somewhat disturbing that this wasn’t a discussion of Warren versus Inslee, or Warren versus Hickenlooper, or Warren versus Biden. It was about the one gay candidate in the race, and it felt like he was not necessarily the right place to aim one’s wrath about this particular issue, I guess.

Cauterucci: One of the things I was trying to do in this piece, which relates to the questions you’ve just raised, is [think through]: What do voters—especially voters in the Democratic primary—mean when they say they want representation or diversity, beyond the sort of aesthetics or feel-good factor? Like, what do we actually value in diversity and in the candidacies of people from demographics that have been underrepresented in politics? Why is it important?

I mean, it’s amazing to see the Democratic slate right now. It’s incredible. It feels like a Band-Aid has been ripped off, or maybe it’s just that this diverse pipeline is finally starting to mature.

Harris: Right.

Cauterucci: I was trying to think about, what do we value in a candidate who comes from a background that’s underrepresented? And how does that identity, if they want to identify with that aspect of their identity, affect their perspective? How have Pete Buttigieg’s identities informed his perspective? Recently, talking about Chick-fil-A, he said that the boycott of Chick-fil-A is a lot of virtue signaling, or maybe it’s a worthy cause, but there’s a lot of virtue signaling involved there among progressives. To me, that says he’s actively trying to play down the way his gay identity might be affecting his politics, because an economic boycott is the opposite of virtue signaling. It’s trying to prevent money from being funneled into the hands of people who would want to continue to subjugate queer people.

Harris: I agree with you about that, and I think one thing that’s going on … I mean, first of all, we’re going to learn a lot more about him, rather than the sort of fun [trivia] like, “Oh, his father was Maltese, and he speaks Norwegian.”

We’re just at the tip of what we’re eventually going to learn, so I don’t agree with him about Chick-fil-A or virtue signaling, but I’m also conscious of … like, I remember the “Obama isn’t black enough” pushback in his first campaign, and it seems to me absolutely inevitable that the first really viable gay candidate is going to be mild, moderate, almost aggressively reasonable about gay issues.

Cauterucci: Reasonable for straight people, not reasonable for gay people.

Harris: Right. Exactly. That said, I absolutely do not doubt that he would be a fantastic president on LGBT issues, which is something, by the way, that I feel about most of the candidates in the Democratic field. It’s not that he would be unique in that regard. I’m just saying I think he’s trying to reach out to a lot of people, and so he’s going to disappoint some people who want him to be absolutely where activists are on some of these issues.

Now, I mean, if he were to say, for instance, “I think it’s fine that religious people shouldn’t have to bake wedding cakes for gay people,” then I would have a real policy problem, but I would be surprised if he said that. I don’t think that’s who he is or where he is. I mean, in one of the interviews he’s done in the last few weeks, he used the word gaydar. He was asked if he thought James Buchanan was actually the first gay president.

Cauterucci: Oh, my God.

Harris: I have to admit, I reeled for a second at the idea that there is someone who is doing fantastically in fundraising, and is polling now at 4 percent nationally in one poll, who can actually be free to say a sentence like: “My gaydar isn’t actually that good.” I do not discount the historic nature of this candidacy, nor do I think that that gives him a free pass, but as I said on Twitter, no gay candidates get a free pass, no gay people in America get a free pass for stuff like this.

Cauterucci: Yeah. To his credit, he has talked about that quite a bit. Whenever somebody asks him about what it’s like to be the first gay candidate, or the first openly gay candidate in a major party—actually, he hasn’t announced his candidacy yet, has he? He’s still in the exploratory mode, so I guess he’s the first openly gay exploratory committee person in a major party.

Harris: It’s still exploratory.

Cauterucci: Still historic.

Harris: Right. I’m all for having a gay explorer. That seems good to me. I wanted to go back to this really important question you asked, which was: Why, other than the great optics, do we value diversity in a candidate?

I would just say the most optimistic version of that would be that if somebody belongs to any demographic category that is historically ignored, or demonized, or underrepresented, or brushed off, that they would take that experience not just to advocate for their own category, but for all of the categories of people who have been in that position. I mean, as much as I like Pete Buttigieg, I think the optimism and hope with which we would invest a diverse candidate could apply to a lot of the people in this race. I think one thing that the anger about him, from this handful of Warren supporters, did not acknowledge was that this was the first thing in the Democratic race so far that has been a genuine surprise. We’ve had a lot of announcements. We have Bernie and Biden in the front of the pack, which is I think where pretty much everybody thought those two guys would be. But Pete is the first candidate who has gotten noticed in a way that’s out of proportion with what people expected.

That in itself is exciting. This race could use a lot more positive surprises like that.

Cauterucci: Yeah, and it’s also out of proportion. The attention he’s gotten has been out of proportion with his name recognition in general. I mean, most of the other candidates in the race have had years of national press to accompany them, to get people used to their candidacies, and he hasn’t. So I think that probably plays into some of the excitement, too, and he’s a very interesting person and a very good politician.

One question I wanted to ask is about a nerve I think my piece hit, which is about gender presentation and how that affects the homophobia that all queer people experience in one way or another. In queer women’s communities, at least the ones I’m a part of, it’s a pretty common conversation: the different privileges or stereotypes that attend femme presentation, or a butch presentation, or a nonbinary presentation—the way society has a strong preference for masculine characteristics, but also a distaste for gender nonconformity.

These are all different lenses that inform the way people experience the world and are perceived by the world, and I tried to make an argument about that in relation to Buttigieg … that because he’s a masculine gay man who was not out, maybe not out to himself, but definitely not out to the world until 2015, his experiences in life might have been more akin to that of a straight man than some of the women in the race, let’s say. And a lot of people took issue with that. I’m not asking you to speak for all gay men, but I would love to hear from you why you think that in particular has been hurtful to people.

Harris: This issue of gay self-presentation, vis-a-vis masculine self-presentation, is so fraught for gay men. I mean, so many of us grew up learning to pass, learning to conceal any kind of femmy traits that we have, trying to deepen our voices, trying not to be sibilant, watching our wrists, watching our walk, all of that stuff, and so it’s hard to hear that framed as the idea that straight-acting gay men are the recipients of privilege that is not afforded to femmier guys or gender-nonconforming guys. Because while that’s true, for many people, that presentation was developed as a survival strategy. You needed to look a certain way and act a certain way and be a certain way to get through your adolescence, to get through high school, and, often, beyond high school.

It was a survival strategy for a lot of people. That said, it’s funny to hear Pete described as some sort of representation of alpha male homosexuality, because in his demeanor, I don’t get that from him at all. I mean, yeah, he was in the [Navy]. That’s pretty alpha. But I think judging or ranking gay men or lesbians or any gender-nonconforming person by how they come off, what their demeanor is, their walk, the timbre of their voice, their manner, how legibly gay they are or nonconforming they are, that’s something we should all probably stay away from.

Cauterucci: Yeah. I definitely never intended and would never try to rank people on how gay they are based on their characteristics. I definitely won’t ever say that anyone who identifies as gay is more or less gay than another person who identifies as gay, but—

Harris: I didn’t take that from your piece at all, by the way.

Cauterucci: Thank you. A lot of people did. … You know, the author is dead, and I’m fine with people interpreting my piece however they’d like to, but I think one difficulty that I’m now facing as I continue to try to write about this stuff is how to … It’s a topic that is infinitely interesting to me to pull apart how public perception and self-perception plays into candidates’ campaigns and narratives, self-narratives, and I think gender presentation is a big part of that.

I don’t doubt that any political candidate, gay or not, has thought about their gender presentation. I want to find a way to talk about this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like I’m playing the so-called oppression Olympics, or saying that one person has been uniformly privileged, while another person has been uniformly disprivileged.

Harris: I think for anyone who isn’t a straight, white man, self-presentation absolutely becomes an issue that they think about. I think that’s true for all the candidates who aren’t straight, white men in that [they wonder], “Am I too angry? Am I too shrill? Am I going to get criticized for how I eat, or the way I look, or if I point too much, or if I raise my voice?”

We’re looking at a field now where probably at least half the candidates, maybe more, are not so-called traditional candidates, and so I think it’s going to be really incumbent on any of us who write about them to try to check our own biases. I’m sure there are ways in which my thinking defaults to straight, white male candidates and politicians just because that’s what I grew up with, and I’m gay, so I think it’s not going to be easy for a lot of people, but yes.

What you call the oppression Olympics would be the worst possible road for any of us to take. Any kind of “Gay people have had it worse than women, or … ”—that would be just an utterly pointless road for us to go down.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... arris.html

Mayor Pete is the Mister Rogers of presidential candidates
Annalisa Merelli31 minutes ago

AP Photo/Richard Shiro
A family-friendly candidate.
Just weeks ago, very few would have recognized the name Pete Buttigieg, and even fewer would have known how to pronounce it. (It’s boo-tih-jej.)

Now, the South Bend, Indiana mayor is the talk of the country as his presidential run gains momentum.

Buttigieg is young—he’s only 37—and has no federal experience. But even before officially announcing his candidacy for the Democratic primaries (so far he has only launched an exploratory committee), he has raised an impressive $7 million in about three months. His campaign book, Shortest Way Home, is selling well on Amazon, and he is rising in the polls, ahead of better-known names such as Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar.

His broad and growing appeal might surprise some, but it shouldn’t. His gentle manners and nerdy demeanor are a respite from the polarized and uncivil politics many Americans say are stressing them out.

He is, in a way, the political equivalent of Mister Rogers, the beloved children TV personality who for over three decades taught American preschoolers radical acceptance under the mantra “there’s no person in the whole world like you; and I like you just the way you are.”

Mister Rogers was a soft-spoken, kind man who (sometimes hesitantly) tackled important social issues—race, disability, homosexuality. He presented himself as the everyday neighbor, but had a sophisticated understanding of human psyche, and a radical empathy that allowed him, amongst other successes, to secure funding for children TV in a Senate hearing of unusual emotional impact.

Like him, Buttigieg’s conciliatory and moderate attitude may be confused with passiveness, but it could well be a harbinger of change. He, too, comes across as a non-threatening product of the status quo. He doesn’t wear Rogers’s signature cardigan, but has a similar penchant for normcore (amongst the things he can’t live without are cushioned boot socks.) He has not one, but two cute rescued dogs—well, First Dog Truman is his husband’s, but that makes it even sweeter—and a relationship so lovely it’s hard to read about his wedding in the New York Times’s “vows” section without melting a little.

In the same way it did for Rogers, his slightly boring, mainstream façade could help Americans process issues that make them feel anxious, or scared.

A veteran of the war in Afghanistan with an impressive academic pedigree (Harvard degree, Rhode scholar at Oxford), Buttigieg was elected mayor of South Bend in 2011 at only 29. He proceeded to turn the city’s economics around through what he describes in his book as a pragmatic, but fair approach.

Buttigieg is a Democrat in a Republican stronghold. He’s gay without being flamboyant, open to all religions yet still solidly Christian, progressive without being a rebel. Of course, there is privilege in that. His record on how he dealt with minorities in South Bend—particularly its large black population—is bound to undergo serious scrutiny. For one thing, he will have to prove he is capable of standing up for the poor as much as for business development. After all, Buttigieg is yet another white guy wanting to be president, and though he would be the first LGBTQ person to hold the US’s highest office, polls suggest most Americans are fine with that.

Still, he is beloved in his town, where his constituents like to share heartwarming stories of his good deeds, like the time he rushed to the emergency room to translate for an Arabic-speaking patient. Because Buttigieg, affectionately dubbed “Mayor Pete,” isn’t just compassionate and generous—he also speaks Arabic, and seven other languages, too.

Sure, he does not attack conservatives with the feisty energy more left-leaning Democrats would like to see in a presidential candidate, but there is something refreshing about that in a political scene dominated by lime-light-chasing politicians with cult-like followings. It’s not unthinkable that voters would pick a humble “friendly neighbor” president with a hard-to-pronounce last name over a leader with the brand recognition of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or even Beto O’Rourke.
https://qz.com/1585971/why-do-people-li ... -buttgieg/

[liminalOyster]

ok all dems are bad I get it


cause they said something

can we go by his whole life? or a couple words he said once

I think I need to post more about what Pete thinks...AND I will

SLAD, what gives? I'm not mindlessly opposed to dems and am certainly not cherry picking. He said this very recently and it's all over the news today. It's entirely significant because it shows us 1) how he intends to carve out his position and bloc in the election and 2) specifically how he allies with a kind of extra market-y liberalism.

The basic ideological rift between some form of Left progressivism and some form of Liberalism is clearly a central aspect of the current moment, just as it was during the Sanders/HRC portion of the primary.

[seemslikeadream]

but that is all you had to say about him....I was just going by what you posted...what I thought you thought was important to say Yuck

could you name one Democrat you like?

it seems no one here likes any dem.....maybe I am missing something...but every dem thread consist of what is wrong with them.....I have read nothing positive ...maybe I missed it

[liminalOyster]

but that is all you had to say about him

In the given post, sure. What;s the problem? I saw the tweet from another source and popped over here to kind of notebook it as part of a thread about the guy. Don't you also do this all the time? Pete seems like a nice enough guy. It's hardly personal. But this quote, in particular, seems to very clearly signal what his "message" is going to look like. I'm not a fan of that message, albeit still emerging, and I'm struck by the cynical appeal to some sort of populism to support an agenda that, to my eye, plays out as a deeply conservative statement against social mobility.

[seemslikeadream]

ok I will wait to see what else you think of him....I was just going by your first reply...what was the first thing you thought was important about Pete to post about

the thing is I had never seen anyone here say anything nice about any dem.....all the threads are trashing them.....I just thought it would be worth finding the good in someone

I don't think one sentence makes a man or encompasses his total message

I don't judge a person because of a single sentence ....I've read a lot about him and that is what I am going by

I thought this was nice

Pete Buttigieg
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Verified account

@PeteButtigieg
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Congratulations to mayor-elect @LightfootForChi on her historic victory in Chicago. She will be a terrific new leader for her city and in the community of American mayors.


To all the women not being paid fairly, or who even have to wonder if they’re being paid fairly: I believe you deserve better. It’s time to ensure every American woman is paid fairly. Let’s mandate gender pay transparency.
A bold and simple idea on this #EqualPayDay: the US should pass a new law reporting a simple annual statistic for every large company: for every dollar paid to a man, how much less was paid to a woman?

[Wombaticus Rex]

Oh great, another asshole Rhodes Scholar gets vomited out by the system for Democrats to get excited about.

The cynicism of it all is what devastates me: because their estimation of the voting public is so abysmally low, and they're right. They're right about the endless need for messianic media figures in an environment where nobody actually has any Hope for real Change. We'll settle for fleeting fixes and symbolic victories instead, and turn for deliverance to the exact same upper class of crooks and spooks. Again and again and again.

These motherfuckers are actors and few of them even have the time to write their own lines.

And there's a whole shitty industry of these scribes to power standing in line to hype them up -- again and again and again -- in the same establishment magazines and DNC-owned blogs and websites. It's the same cheap tricks and hack writing as every other product they've already sold you.

I guess it's somewhere between appropriate and inevitable that Rigorous Intuition would go from an exotic wildlife refuge from the hypocrisy and mediocrity of Democratic Underground, to a dumping ground for the endless wasted text that passes for news media. Instead of being a sanctuary from that, it's an archive for it! Jesus Christ

Fuck everyone who's been posting Facebook memes here, too. You let yourselves get turned into retards and you used to know better.

[seemslikeadream]

ok ask Elvis to lock the thread ...might as well

but I find it interesting you have decided it was this thread out of all the other dem threads started by other members to rant about...but of course your reply is not about Pete is it Womby?

I don't have a Facebook account btw


I understand you are not happy about me posting here..I get it

[Wombaticus Rex]

Meh, what good does locking the post do? I'd apologize but we're so far past that. You flood the channel and you get defensive on everyone who brings that up. What part of that is discussion, in general?

The reason I lost it on this thread is just the fact that ol' Pete is such a perfectly distilled example of the absolute Ghost Dance insanity that liberals embody right now. McKinsey? The Cohen Group? If this dude wasn't gay he'd be Hunter Biden.

I wasn't that psyched about Bernie, either, as you may recall. The contempt of familiarity is what motivates my feelings on politics; I have worked for these assholes before and I will surely work for these assholes again. It's better than honest work.

[seemslikeadream]

yes lets use this thread to discuss why you are so pissed at me...what the hell...might as well ...keep it going

let's make it as personal as you want...I'll have Elvis change the name of the thread to accommodate your feelings

[Wombaticus Rex]

But I'm not pissed at you: I am sad. I am very, very sad when I contemplate the tectonic plates beneath this thread. And that's definitely about Pete Buttwhatever, that's about the ecosystem that produces Pete Buttwhatevers and praises and propels them, and that's about the targeted fanbase he's aimed at the whole time.

This con is never going to stop working. Not until the lights finally go out. So I'm not pissed at you, because I don't see how else things could have gone, for any of us.

Still, I'm gonna fucking swear about it, just the same. Cheers.

[seemslikeadream]

ok then your post sure didn't seem like it was about sadness



Shouldn’t have said that
Sorry


I am sad also

[Wombaticus Rex]

Please don't kill yourself over Pete -- or worse still, any of us.