Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg jumps into 2020 race
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South Bend racial make-up:
http://southbend.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm
Mayor Pete won reelection AFTER he came out with 80% of the vote.
In the MidWest.
With Mike Pence as Governor.
It's not 'the same thing'. It is, however, analogous.
The Country did not elect Trump, the electoral college did. There is a marked difference.
I’m sorry, I missed where there will be a different process in 2020 than the one that elected Trump.
And when he ran for statewide office in Indiana, he lost only getting 37% of the vote.
There was nothing to miss. I simply clarified your position. Nothing more.
These two things are not mutually exclusive. He was the Democratic Party nominee in 2010 for State Treasurer of Indiana. Buttigieg lost to Republican incumbent Richard Mourdock, garnering 37.5% of the vote. This was BEFORE he was Mayor. He's had 8 years as mayor and was reelected after he announced that he was gay. There is a bit of nuance that has to be taken into account here.
The argument that is being put forth is that he would not be elected because he is gay. Yet he has been re elected after his sexuality was made public.
He lost statewide in 2010 and was elected locally in 2011. He’s locally popular, not statewide.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...pete-buttigieg-mayor-pete-pronounce-explained
Also you have anti gay/trans bathroom bills popping up all across the country.
And even with ALL of the 100% positive to the point of collusive positive press he’s gotten, he’s still 4-5th in most polls.
Have You Heard? Pete Buttigieg Is Really Smart
BY LIZA FEATHERSTONE, Jacobin
The recent craze for Pete Buttigieg — multilingual Rhodes Scholar and all-around smart guy — is just the latest incarnation of the meritocratic cult of “smartness.” It’s social Darwinism for liberals.
He holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Like many Ivy League grads, he also worked as a consultant for McKinsey. He won a national essay contest in high school. He speaks eight languages, including English, Norwegian, Maltese, Italian, French, Spanish, Dari, and Arabic. He learned Norwegian to read a favorite author in that language, and at a recent press conference, spoke with some Norwegian journalists in their native tongue. He was a Rhodes Scholar.
He’s been precocious all his life — no wonder that at only thirty-seven he’s running for president. Pete Buttigieg, son of two professors, is a classic Smart Dude, and there is nothing journalists love more. His followers even have a proudly know-it-all approach to his name, showing up at his rallies with signs explaining, “It’s Pete BOOT-Edge-Edge.” He says he’s all about “bringing forward good ideas.”
For the upper professional-managerial class (PMC), guys like this represent a dreamy ideal of human supremacy. That’s because for them, all of life is an Ivy League application. Well-rounded “smartness” is everything, even in the wake of recent news that this is not necessarily what elite college admissions are based upon.
As a result, BOOTedgedge has been the focus of a media frenzy, despite polling far behind Sanders and Biden (even 538 is skeptical of his recent much-ballyhooed jump in Iowa). CNN’s Chris Cillizza finds his resumé “remarkable.” Some call him “bookish.” Queerty.com exults that he “represents the best and brightest of our country.” A New Republic headline uses the word “Genius.”
Liberal feminists have rightly bristled at the collective ecstasy over the mighty dome of BOOTedgedge. When economist boy-wonder Alan Cole tweeted this week, “Mayor Pete seems head and shoulders smarter than the other candidates running and IMO that should count for quite a lot,” he was widely and correctly rebuked for sexism. What about Elizabeth Warren, asked Katha Pollitt, Jill Filipovic, and many others. The Twittersphere weighed in with lists of Warren’s accomplishments. Others pointed out that the tweet was possibly racist as well as sexist; Julian Castro holds degrees from Harvard, Harvard Law School, and Stanford, and Cory Booker was, like BOOTedgedge, a Rhodes Scholar, among a pile of other academic achievements.
The question of what “smart” even means and why this type of smart should matter in a presidential race got less attention. One person rightly asked, “are you sure he’s not just smart in the ways you also fancy yourself to also be smart.” No one asked why this particular form of well-credentialed “smart” should “count for quite a lot.”
That’s because while the PMC are often eager to be more inclusive about who gets to be “smart” — women, black people — they have tremendous faith in the concept itself. They love rich people whose intelligence has made them prosper: they may cringe at the science-denying Koch Brothers but they went into deep mourning when Steve Jobs died. They devour Malcolm Gladwell’s veneration of the wisdom of genius entrepreneurs over the plodding, clueless masses.
This notion of “smart” allows elites to recast inequality as meritocracy. In this narrative, you’re rich because you did well in high school and went to Princeton, not because capitalism has taken something from someone else and given it to you. Yet the culture of smart is not all smugness; it also contains a heavy dose of fear. The PMC understands that while it’s fun to brag about having a kid like BOOTedgeedge, it’s not optional (like, say, having a pet that can do weird tricks, a cat that can use a human toilet, for instance). In the neoliberal order, if you’re not born into the top 0.1 percent, you have to be “smart” and unusually talented and motivated, otherwise you will not only lose what privileges you have, but possibly not even survive. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman once gleefully proclaimed, “Average is over.”
The PMC therefore tries hard to make their children “gifted” and to nourish their talents, an effort that is supposed to culminate in the kind of august institutional validation that BOOTedgedge has enjoyed. Because they have, all their lives, felt a certain panic about the need to be college-application impressive, the PMC has come to see such impressiveness as somehow morally admirable. For people like this, the recent college admissions scandal, exposing corruption at institutions like Yale and USC, occasions not eye-rolling and wisecracks, as it does on dirtbag Twitter (this writer is guilty), but earnest hand-wringing about fairness and social justice. Smartness, to them, makes some people more deserving of the good life than others. Smartness culture is social Darwinism for liberals.
This obsession pervades the politics of the PMC. Trump’s proud ignorance and shameless pandering to the nation’s dumbness often seems to gall them more than his inhumane, death-drive policies. This class always seeks a Smart Dude as savior. Obama, of course, represents successful fulfillment of this dream, and they can’t wait to repeat it. Beto, after some initial signs of promise, has now revealed himself to be a dummy who has to ask his wife on the proper usage of “subconscious.” Hence, BOOTedgedge mania.
The quest reflects a theory of change in which, as political scientist Adolph Reed Jr remarked years ago, describing the worldview of some of his academic colleagues, “all the smart people get together on the Vineyard and solve the world’s problems.” Davos is the fullest expression of this: elites get together and showcase how smart they are, advertising how fit they are to be our ruling elites.
It’s oddly banal, the culture of smart. Like most of the detritus of “smartness” culture, from Freakonomics to TED Talks to NPR, BOOTedgedge is politically underwhelming. What good ideas he has are shared by other candidates in the crowded field, some originating from politicians to his left, like Bernie Sanders. His bad ideas are hardly edgy, either: capitalism can be good while government regulation can be bad.
This Democratic primary lineup is not the worst, and within it, neither is Mayor Pete (the term used by those not quite smart enough to pronounce BOOTedgedge). He seems to support Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in some form. He invested in infrastructure in South Bend. He won office as an openly gay man in Mike Pence country and has a record of connecting with voters who voted for Trump. And there’s no question that he’d be a better president than Trump or some of his Democratic primary competitors. We do need a president capable of reading a book, not one reveling proudly in his ignorance like the current occupant of the White House, who seems to reflect our dumbest tendencies insultingly right back to us. (When Trump this week fantasized that a Hillary Clinton victory would have turned the power grid over to solar energy and deprived us of the joy of watching TV, the writer Tara Rose aptly observed, “He’s so perfect for the kind of stupid that we are.”) A BOOTedgedge presidency would reassure those of us who believe in things like science and logic that we have stepped back from the braying idiocy that now envelopes us like a toxic plume. Of course, that would be a pleasant reprieve.
But the obsession with his kind of ostentatious intelligence is deeply unserious and anti-democratic. “Smart” is not going to save us, and fetishizing its most conventional manifestations shores up bourgeois ideology and undermines the genuinely emancipatory politics of collective action. Bernie Sanders, instead of showing off his University of Chicago education, touts the power of the masses: “Not Me, Us.” The cult of the Smart Dude leads us into just the opposite place, which is probably why some liberals like it so much.
To be fair, you could have said the same to discredit Professor Obama when Bush was president. The country often jerks in wildly different directions with its presidential choices.
But, as intelligent as Obama obviously was, he ran on two things...
Hope...do you want some hope?
Change... do you want some change?
He didn’t go around saying “look how smart I am speaking all these languages”.
The intellectual politcal junkie crowd is rapt incollective awe of pete’s intelligence along with the media. The vast center of the country thinks that common sense is more important than book smarts.
They need to talk to people outside their circles.
Yeah, very valid distinction.
To be fair, Pete has never said those things as a reason that he would be a better option than the current president... he consistently talks about the issues. It's the media that is using that jargon as a descriptive.
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Also, I think that we're getting caught up in the same arguments that the GOP is using and playing the game on their terms. My questions is, "Is he a better option than the current president?" and to that, my answer is a resounding "YES".
That's true of every candidate and 97% of the country! The bar should be much higher in a primary, where the Dems have a chance to pick the best next president, not just someone who isn't Donald Trump.
Sorry, but you are at least a generation away from that ever happening.......
I don't actually have a problem with that either. Here is my thing, we want BIG changes, no electoral college, healthcare for all, a revamped Supreme Court etc. Change rarely happens like that, it happens in fits and starts, spurts and lurches, one step is taken then more is built on that and more is built on that until we reach the end goal. We tend to say, "Oh that'll never happen!" and as a result, no moves are made at all.
The GOP on the other hand does exactly what I'm proposing, they started with deregulation based on trickle down economics and ended up with Trump in the White House and massive tax cuts for the wealthy, they took it step by step and it took 40 years. Whereas we, on the other hand, seem to have the position that if the entire thing cannot be done now, it doesn't need to be done at all. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We need to follow the GOP's playbook here. Look at all of the tools that they have slowly put into place over the years using policy to their advantage. Gerrymandering to impact voter registration. The filibuster to stop all progress. A deeply partisan Supreme court starting with the Merrick Garling debacle and ending up with Cavanaugh. They took their time because they knew that they had to make changes in increments.
If we do not begin to tackle these major issues now, Climate Change, Healthcare, UBI etc., there will be no progress in 40 years and we'll be worse than where we are now. We can begin now to dismantle the Electoral College. We can begin now to depoliticize the Supreme Court. We can begin now to lower emissions. But SOMETHING must be done. It doesn't have to be the entire enchilada, but it needs to be a start. We keep arguing about how to get out of the starting block.
yeah but that is the far left's agenda......I am a moderate....I don t want healthcare for all (trust me I work in healthcare, your tax dollars will go to silly bullshit complaints from people who will abuse the system), I do think the environment is important but not as much as the far left.....I don t want BIG changes.....I want a balance.
he won in a college town....c'mon son
Is there a country on earth that wastes more of its health care spending than the US? Trust me, there will be waste, but there will be less waste and better patient outcomes than under the current system.
And there it is. I'd vote for him but never watch him and his husband ever. Still better than Trump
I hate to say it, but I agree with you.
I can see Buttigieg being selected as a Vice Presidential pick, but I don't think nationally folks are ready to vote for an openly gay man as their President.
Trump/the opposition would destroy him by pushing photos/videos of him.
Buttigieg CAN make noise and honestly, yes, can win in more open States, but in states he needs to carry, like Ohio, FL, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, and Michigan, I'm not sure they are ready.
No there wont...because the people will still be fucking their bodies up with shit.
I think you and others here would be well served by watching his CNN townhall (or even his Fox appearance) among other interviews. To say he's got "it" would be an understatement, dude is polished af and has that Midwest "aw shucks ma'am" thing all the way down. He hits the right notes on racial and progressive talking points but I'm not sure how that squares with his record back home or his actual policy positions just yet.
All this to say, y'all can afford to ignore this dude until debate season but I'd bet a rack he'll clean tf up in front of those cameras on game day. Get familiar, I was legit shocked at how well this dude comes off on TV.
Oh, I’m familiar with him, even from when he was running for DNC chair.
I watched his CNN town hall and his appearance on morning joe. And some of his appearance on the breakfast club. He’s a really smart guy.
And for all the stuff you’re saying he has, I’ll refer you to the person the people just elected to the presidency. He’s selling intellectualism to a country that doesn’t value it. Of course the political class loves him. But, in my opinion, he doesn’t connect on an emotional level because he’s emtionally a cold fish.
And to win the presidency, he will need to connect on an emotional level.
I agree that the pundit class is celebrating this dude's intellectual bonafides a little heavily (hardly unexpected during this retarded Trump era) but he tends to come off off pretty humble and measured on TV imo bruh.
I'll refer you to the uncharacteristically warm youtube comments on his Fox appearance lol... buddy has it, I'm not sold just yet but he was totally new to me until a month or two ago and his media savvy has stood out to me big time, he may be the best communicator in the whole field tbh.
And the dude keep talking about Christianity which is going to get him checkmated. Calling out Trump because Trump doesn’t follow what the Bible says. Well Christians will hit him with the Bible verse saying a man shouldn’t lie with another man and he’s not following the Bible either.
Check fucking mate.
Check fucking mate.
CNN said he was the first person to ever get why Hillary lost right ever. That she talked about not voting for Trump but not why people should vote for her.
Like that hadn’t been said 1000 times before, but suddenly Pete invented it.
Right now, hardly anyone is paying attention to any of this except the political junkies. But I’m telling you, he cannot win states in the South to even get the nomination. Once people in the South find out he’s gay, it’s a wrap - they won’t care how many languages he speaks. His only chance would be to try to win Cali and NY and hope for a few other states. Except, he ain’t beating Kamala in Cali. He ain’t beating Beto in Texas. And New York has two senators running so it will be hard to win there too.
So the media will keep fawning over him, but the oppo research will go on without them and they’ll force the media to cover his past and record.
Hate to admit it but part of the reason I didn't even look his way until relatively recently is that I felt his candidacy would be totally untenable due to all the fake moralists out here. Having watched a shit ton of his interviews I think he's a breakthrough candidate in that regard (in the same vein as Obama). At least in the sense that his personal presence and insane communication skills will push him to the forefront of the public imagination in a really unexpected way... I think this will become really evident at the debates. I have my concerns about him but it's clear he's going to show up in a big way soon
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The fags will vote! Flaming homo mf!
Lets see bruh! I have a sense that Beto and Kamala are gonna fizzle out but we'll see soon. This is probably the most interesting Dem primary ever lol
Plus there is a new report that hispanics are supporting trump in huge margins because the economy is good and deregulation is helped alot of small business.
The Left Wing Democrats are in a bubble. Nobody is going to vote for a opening gay guy with a boyfriend in the white house. He can maybe win NewYork and California which has a heavly gay community for for the rest of the 42 States he will lose.