Longform Excerpts: Understanding Mayor Pete’s Candidacy
As Democratic candidates for president slowly but surely fall by the wayside (Marianne Williamson’s Twitter returning to irrelevance is an American tragedy) and the remaining contenders get better and better at speaking in pithy soundbites, I have found that digging into longform profiles is a great way to get to know candidates better. This may be especially true for Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has a tendency to insulate himself from vulnerable moments by leaning on his slick speaking style and crafty phraseology during debates and town halls.
Below, I pulled excerpts from two longform stories about Buttigieg. In the first, a December story from The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells makes it clear early and often that he is a Mayor Pete skeptic. If you’re curious why it can feel like Buttigieg has received far more severe pushback from the progressive wing of the party, than, say Joe Biden, take the time to make it through this ~30 minute read.
The second story, published in GQ in November, paints a different picture. From the headline (“The Audacity of Pete Buttigieg”) to the hope-heavy candidate quotes (“It’s the hope of being able to look back not that many years from now at the moment we’re living in and actually be proud of what we did to change it.”), the profile, by Jason Zengerle, frames Mayor Pete as a thrilling, albeit imperfect, Obama second coming.
Take a look at the six excerpts below to get a flavor of why Mayor Pete has been a magnet both for excitement and disdain within the Democratic party. My goal is to do this for each candidate moving forward as we all try to wrap our heads around the good, the bad, and the ugly among the candidates.
The New Yorker: Pete Buttigieg’s High Hopes
On his political style:
Watch Buttigieg long enough and you notice that he uses abstraction as an escape hatch. Above the quotidian divisions of politics, he describes a realm where all Americans are one. His campaign has failed dismally to attract African-American voters — according to one recent poll, his support among black Democrats in South Carolina is at less than one per cent — so I asked him what themes helped him make a connection with them. “A really big one is faith,” he said. What common ground could he offer Republicans, given his progressive policy ideas? “I think appealing to family and family values is really important to me,” he replied. It was like watching a pilot, once all normal systems had failed, push the button on an ejector seat. These appeals to old-fashioned American values are his most politician-like habit, and they give his language a touch of nostalgia.
On neoliberalism:
In South Bend, Buttigieg was keeping up the Harvard connections that would help make his high ambitions seem plausible. Through his friend Eric Lesser, who was working in the Obama Administration, he met and impressed Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who introduced him to Lis Smith. His friend Swati Mylavarapu, a tech founder and investor who was with him at Harvard and Oxford, is his campaign’s investment chair. Another college friend reportedly introduced him to Mark Zuckerberg, who, with his wife, Priscilla Chan, recommended two people who were hired by the campaign. This past September, Buttigieg was asked to define neoliberalism on Twitter, and he replied, “Neoliberalism is the political-economic consensus that has governed the last forty years of policy in the US and UK. Its failure helped to produce the Trump moment. Now we have to replace it with something better.” Neoliberalism might also be defined as the political-economic consensus that allows Mark Zuckerberg to recommend campaign hires to Pete Buttigieg.
On his lack of support among African-Americans:
Buttigieg’s polling firm had conducted focus groups with black voters in South Carolina and written a memo concluding that Buttigieg’s “being gay was a barrier for these voters, particularly for the men who seemed deeply uncomfortable even discussing it.” This was instantly interpreted as an effort to shift blame for Buttigieg’s failings with African-Americans to their supposed discomfort with gay rights. The campaign circulated a letter of support for its racial-justice plan, the Douglass Plan. Named after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, it promises a wide range of criminal-justice reforms and education, jobs, health, and housing programs. The campaign’s letter had been signed by more than four hundred South Carolinians. But the online publication the Intercept found that nearly half the signatories were white, and spoke to one “signatory,” Johnnie Cordero, the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party’s Black Caucus, who said that he had not consented to have his name attached. “It’s presumptuous to think you can come up with a plan for black America without hearing from black folk,” he said. “We’re tired of people telling us what we need. You wanna find out what we need? Come and ask us.” (The campaign later removed Cordero’s name from the letter.)
GQ: The Audacity of Pete Buttigieg
On his meteoric rise:
Indeed, Buttigieg has become so recognizable, so fast, that it’s almost easy to forget just how unusual his arrival was — or gloss over just how deeply his impact may be felt for years ahead. It’s how Mayor Pete has fashioned himself into a serious contender for the White House that has made his campaign so consequential. Embracing his age as a reason for, rather than an obstacle to, his bid, Buttigieg has articulated a generational vision of change that’s been particularly welcome in a race that has been dominated by a quartet of septuagenarians. “There is no such thing as an honest politics that revolves around the word again,” Buttigieg said when he formally entered the race in April. “It’s not just about winning an election — it’s about winning an era.”
On his sexuality:
Buttigieg hasn’t sought to downplay his sexual identity. When Chasten joined him onstage at his campaign kickoff speech in April, they kissed. It was something countless straight politicians have done with their spouses, but to have a gay politician do it with his spouse, as Tim Miller, a gay Republican political strategist, later wrote, was “a signal to people out there who, without it, might not have the confidence to win their internal wars.” And in a Democratic debate in September, when the candidates were each asked to describe a moment of personal resilience in the face of a professional setback, Buttigieg — who’d become the mayor of South Bend at 29, without ever mentioning his sexual identity — unspooled an answer that was brand-new to a presidential-debate stage. “I had to wonder whether just acknowledging who I was, was going to be the ultimate career-ending professional setback,” he said. “[I] realized that you only get to live one life. And I was not interested in not knowing what it was like to be in love any longer, so I just came out.” The result of all this has been a candidacy unlike any other in the 2020 presidential field.
On his attempts to engage with African-Americans:
Indeed, after the events in South Bend, Buttigieg became more introspective about race and began talking about it in a way few white politicians do. He wanted to reframe the conversation, he said, around more holistic solutions. In July, he announced what he’s called the Douglass Plan, which would attack racist politics in the health care, education, and criminal-justice systems. But the plan has done little to win over African-American voters. A Quinnipiac poll in mid-November found that in South Carolina he had zero percent support among black Democrats — a key demographic in that state’s crucial primary. Adding insult to injury, The Intercept reported that three prominent South Carolina African-American politicians complained that the Buttigieg campaign had implied in a press release that they’d endorsed Mayor Pete when, in fact, they’d endorsed only the Douglass Plan; and that a photo of a black woman kneeling and talking to a child that the campaign had used on its website to promote the Douglass Plan was a stock photo of a Kenyan woman. The campaign removed the photo from the website and blamed the mistake on a contractor.
