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Neoliberal Buttigieg Is The Democrats’ Flavor Of The Month. Just Don’t Ask What He Stands For

He’s a classic “empty suit”, a package without contents. He stands for nothing except his own advancement. 

By Nathan Robinson
The Guardian (4/16/19)

For being the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana, Pete Buttigieg has been shockingly successful in carving out a national political profile. Buttigieg has only just formally announced that he is running for president, but already he is placing near the top of some polls, and being given cover stories in national magazines, touted as a “wonder boy” and the “Democrats’ heartland hope”. But for all the buzz, an important question still hangs over Buttigieg: what, exactly does he stand for?

Himself, mostly. The New York Times says Buttigieg puts “storytelling first, policy details later”. Media coverage of Buttigieg dwells on what his favorite socks are or his dogs’ personalities. Pete is all about Pete: Buttigieg is frequently evasive about his actual substantive agenda, preferring rhetoric about “freedom”, “democracy” and “security”. His campaign’s branding and graphic design have been hailed as “radical”. As for his actual policies … he’s working on them.

Pete Buttigieg is a man with a lot of ‘gold stars’ on his résumé, but why should anybody actually trust him to be on their side?

Buttigieg represents the apex of a kind of “politics of demographics”. Why is the mayor of a small city suddenly on the national political radar? It’s not as if Buttigieg’s tenure in office has been especially noteworthy – his signature policies were technocratic improvements like improving sewer technology along with some fairly middle-of-the road, even conservative, development initiatives. Buttigieg is not attracting attention for anything he has done, but for who he is. He’s a man who checks all the right boxes.

The pitch

In fact, that’s even how he pitches himself. Asked what sets him apart as a candidate, Buttigieg says:

“You have a handful of candidates from the middle of the country, but very few of them are young. You have a handful of young candidates, but very few of them are executives. We have a handful of executives but none of them are veterans, and so it’s a question of: what alignment of attributes do you want to have?”

In every profile of Buttigieg, you’ll inevitably hear the following facts: he went to Harvard, he was a Rhodes Scholar, he served in Afghanistan, he became a mayor before he was 30, he’s gay and he speaks half a dozen languages. These, along with some impressively well-constructed stump speech rhetoric, are s Buttigieg’s sole claims to deserving the presidency. As he puts it, he has the right “alignment of attributes”.

But politics shouldn’t be about people’s attributes, it should be about their values and actions. …

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(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

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Buttigieg Joined Secretive Corporate Dem Establishment ‘Stop Bernie’ Meetings In NY, DC

By Ed Morrissey
Hot Air (4/16/19)

The message from Democratic activists supplying the New York Times with this warning is clear — stop Bernie Sanders. Sanders and his supporters could prevent the Democratic primaries from securing a nominee to face Donald Trump, Jonathan Martin reports, thanks to the large field and rules changes made by the party after 2016. And some Democrats are taking the possibility seriously enough to play right into Bernie’s hands.

Every cycle has media outlets wishing for a brokered convention. This wish might be a little more realistic…

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Buttigieg Equates Bernie Voters To Trump Voters

Jimmy Dore Show: Link to 20-Minute Video

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A Neoliberal’s Lament: What The Press Is Missing About Pete Buttigieg

By Rahmn Emanuel
The Atlantic (4/23/19)

After nearly every election, journalists and pundits bloviate during postmortems at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Aspen Institute about how there were too many “process” stories in their campaign coverage—too many articles and segments about the horse race, how big the crowds were, and how much money the candidates raised. Reporters promise to do more in-depth reporting during the next cycle, painting fuller pictures of the candidates and the choices Americans will face as they enter the ballot box.

The thing the American people ought to learn through the media is what in the candidates’ own life experiences—the good, the bad, and the ugly—has prepared and educated them to solve the problems the country is facing.

Well, we’re more than a year and a half out from the 2020 election, and they’re already screwing it up—again.

As an example, look at what’s happening with coverage of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s meteoric rise to become a top-tier candidate. Who is Mayor Pete? Voters relying on mainstream coverage to keep them informed probably know only three things about him. He’s a candidate for the Democratic nomination. He has a funny-sounding last name. And he’s gay.

I’ve rarely seen a group of people work harder to find different ways to focus on a single issue. …

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