Mayo Pete: Manufactured Candidate-- But By Who And For What Reason?

I know the value of good a good p.r. and publicity operation. When I moved to San Francisco after my years abroad, the first job I got was in a p.r. firm and I learned about it from the inside. When I started my own indie music label the only way we could compete with the majors was p.r. since it was a relatively inexpensive too. And when I was running first Sire Records and then Reprise Records, p.r. was a major factor in breaking cutting edge artists that radio generally avoided. Few American politicians seem to understand how valuable p.r. and politics are. With just a very few exceptions (Ro Khanna, AOC and Ted Lieu are examples) few House members have publicists worthy a bucket of warm spit. And among the presidential candidates this cycle, the only campaign that has a first class p.r./publicity operation-- so much so that it has been almost entirely p.r.-driven-- is Mayo Pete, who has the best political comms person in the country, Lis Smith. It's hilarious that for the all the millions of dollars of his own that Delaney had wasted, he has the worst p.r. of any campaign and is generally loathed by a public that had never heard of him before and is polling 0.5%, compared to Mayo's 6.5% (according to the latest RealClearPolitics national polling average). In the most recent favorability poll of the 2020 candidates Mayo is unknown by 39% of Democratic voters while Delaney is unknown by 58%.

But it was all Lis Smith. Last week the Center for Public Integrity released a report by Lateshia Beachum and Jonathan Larsen, Meet The Lobbyists And Special Interests Who Helped Launch Pete Buttigieg's Political Career. There's a reason he refused to swear off filthy big money in elections while all the other credible candidates were doing so-- even after Biden was pretending he wouldn't take money from lobbyists! A bit of a slime ball, "Buttigieg has since reversed his stance and now promises, albeit unconvincingly that special interests would have no influence on his candidacy or would-be presidency. But Mayo, they wrote "has nonetheless continued to rely on wealthy and well-connected “bundlers” to help him fundraise-- and to great effect, raising more money of late than most other 2020 presidential candidates. A clue as to why Buttigieg has engaged in the traditional trappings of campaign fundraising comes from early in his political career: his first mayoral campaign."

At least 19 names on Buttigieg’s mayoral 2011 pre-primary filing were those of former or current registered federal lobbyists who have tried to influence lawmakers on issues ranging from the environment to construction.

According to the Buttigieg campaign, those lobbyists, “include some of his friends from college and grade school, the former Director of Harvard’s IOP [Institute of Politics]-- which Pete was involved in as a student-- as well as people active in Indiana Democratic politics.”

Although Indiana does not require lobbyists to disclose their specific contacts with public officials, the 2011 campaign filing shows that Buttigieg did receive money from at least one lobbyist whose firm later did business with the city of South Bend.

In March 2011, a lobbyist named Brad Queisser gave Buttigieg $250 for his mayoral campaign. Quiesser was from Indiana, and had been active in the state Democratic Party.

The Buttigieg campaign told Public Integrity and TYT that Queisser “is very well-known in Indiana politics and has been an active supporter of a number of candidates over the years.” The campaign said Queisser beneficiaries included former Sens. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) and Evan Bayh (D-IN), Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) and former Rep. Baron Hill (D-IN).

In 2011, however, Queisser was based in Washington and working for a lobbying firm called mCapitol, (where Hill had also worked from 2004 to 2006). On March 31, 2011, the same week as Queisser’s donation, the federal political action committee for mCapitol and its parent company-- an engineering firm called MWH-- gave Buttigieg $1,000.

MWH had given to Buttigieg before, when he unsuccessfully ran for state treasurer in 2010. During that campaign, MWH’s PAC gave an in-kind contribution, valued at $2,577.82, as well as $1,000 cash, according to state and federal campaign finance records.

MWH PAC’s federal disclosure forms show it made subsequent contributions to Buttigieg of $1,000 in May 2011 and $1,000 in July 2011.

On Oct. 1, 2012, mCapitol registered to work as a federal lobbyist on behalf of Buttigieg’s mayoral administration. The registration form lists Queisser as the sole lobbyist expected to represent South Bend’s interests to federal officials in Washington, D.C. Over the next three years, South Bend would pay mCapitol $230,000 for its work lobbying the federal government.

MWH, mCapitol’s parent firm, also got work from South Bend. Just before Buttigieg took office in 2012, the city had agreed to overhaul its sewer system, in response to pressure from both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department.

In September 2014, the city’s Board of Public Works retained MWH to find as much as $200 million in potential savings in the city’s half-billion-dollar sewer-rehabilitation plan. The contract was worth $2 million.

In 2013 and 2014, the MWH PAC donated another $6,000 to Buttigieg’s 2015 re-election campaign. That was followed by $2,000 in 2015.

By March 2016, MWH had identified $315 million in possible cost cuts. Four months later, MWH won an additional $430,000 from the city for its sewer work.

The Buttigieg campaign said the city hired MWH “under pressure from the Common Council” to reduce costs. The Buttigieg administration “worked with MWH Global after it was selected to reduce the flow of raw sewage into the river by more than 80% while saving the city more than $500 million.”

The MWH sewer contract included subcontracted work performed by a company called American Structurepoint. The 2011 filing obtained by TYT shows that Marlin Knowles, a part-owner of American Structurepoint until at least 2014, gave Buttigieg $1,500 in March 2011.

The Buttigieg campaign cited industry recognition American Structurepoint has received for its work on the Smart Streets project. Neither American Structurepoint nor Bose Public Affairs, which bought mCapitol, responded to requests for comment.

From what I've seen, Mayo Pete's presidential campaign has been just noise-- more identity politics and slick garden variety McKinsey bullshit. Christina Cauterucci addressed it in late March for Slate: Is Pete Buttigieg Just Another White Male Candidate, or Does His Gayness Count as Diversity? At the time, Mayo was the newest, shiniest Democratic political celebrity-- and polling, on at least one serious poll, better than anyone other than Bernie and Biden in Iowa... leading Elizabeth Warren, Kamala, Booker, Beto, let alone one-percenters like Gillibrand, Klobuchar, Frackenlooper, Inslee, Castro. Cauterucci channeled some of them: "[W]ith momentum comes backlash, currently in the form of frustration that the well-qualified female and black candidates in the race are getting shoved aside for another white guy. When, for instance, economist Alan Cole tweeted that Buttigieg 'seems head-and-shoulders smarter than the other candidates running,' a characteristic response, this one from writer Jill Filipovic, was: 'Warren, who taught at Harvard, was one of the most well-regarded law professors in the country and one of the most intelligent people to serve in the senate, but we don’t politically reward, let alone even identify, that kind of fierce intelligence in women.' But Buttigieg faces his own structural disadvantages in the race. 'Buttigieg is the first gay candidate in history,' film journalist Mark Harris tweeted. 'So no, you don’t get to use him, of all candidates, as the 'typical white guy the media always falls for. He doesn’t deserve a free ride, but let me assure you: Gay people in America aren’t given free rides.' These aren’t just random tweets; the conversation is at the heart of a broader debate on the left about identity and representation."

Getting into an argument over which marginalized identities are more or less marginalized, is precisely what Hayes meant when he said "Everything else is noise." Cauterucci, an out lesbian, happens to see Mayor Pete as "someone whose affiliation with the gay community only goes so far as his own gay relationships, who can seemingly only conceive of homosexuality as a value-neutral or negative-- certainly not positive-- aside in a person’s biography." She sees his reluctantly shared gayness-- big closet case for much of his life-- as an "ultimately unimportant distinction-- 'like having brown hair,' his coming-out essay said... Part of this emphasis on background and credentials is a kind of 'demographic politics,' by which the demographic boxes a person checks are taken as indicative of their political potential. This is how Tim Kaine was selected as Hillary Clinton’s Vice Presidential candidate: He was from Virginia, went to Harvard, spoke Spanish, played the blues. Swing state appeal, competence, cosmopolitanism, 'cool dad' factor: a perfect mix. Pete Buttigieg is trying the same thing. Look at the number of boxes he checks. He’s from the Rust Belt so he’s authentic, but he went to Harvard so he’s not a rube, but he’s from a small city so he’s relatable, but he’s gay so he’s got coastal appeal, but he’s a veteran so his sexuality won’t alienate rural people. This is literally the level of political thinking that is involved in the hype around Buttigieg... Buttigieg himself is quite explicit about pitching himself this way. Asked about why anyone should vote for him over other candidates, he did not cite a superior governing agenda. Instead he said: '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?'"

More devastating to the case Mayo is trying to make was Nathan Robinson's definitional essay in Current Affairs, All About Pete. Right off the bat, he warns his readers to "only accept politicians who have proved they actually care about people other than themselves…" Introducing his essay, he wrote that "If you know only one thing about Pete Buttigieg, it’s that he’s The Small-Town Mayor Who Is Making A Splash. If you know half a dozen things about Pete Buttigieg, it’s that he’s also young, gay, a Rhodes Scholar, an Arabic-speaking polyglot, and an Afghanistan veteran. If you know anything more than that about Pete Buttigieg, you probably live in South Bend, Indiana. This is a little strange: These are all facts about him, but they don’t tell us much about what he believes or what he advocates. The nationwide attention to Buttigieg seems more to be due to 'the fact that he is a highly-credentialed Rust Belt mayor' rather than 'what he has actually said and done.' He’s a gay millennial from Indiana, yes. But should he be President of the United States? When he is asked about what his actual policies are, Buttigieg has often been evasive. He has mentioned getting rid of the electoral college and expanding the Supreme Court, but his speech is often abstract." Later in his essay he mentions that "A labor organizer friend of mine has a test he uses for politicians: When they talk, is it all about themselves, or all about the causes they care about? Do they talk incessantly about their Journey and their Homespun Values, or do they talk about people’s needs, the power structure, and how to build a more just world? Pete’s book is, for the most part, all about Pete. That’s not what you want... The common critique is that behind the mushy values talk there are too few substantive solutions to social problems."

Robinson recommends that anyone considering supporting Buttigieg read his new campaign book, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, "from from cover to cover. It is very personal, very well-written, and lays out a narrative that makes Buttigieg seem a natural and qualified candidate for the presidency." That said, Robinson wants to make sure his readers know his biases before he gives this his analysis of Mayor Pete's book. "I don’t trust former McKinsey consultants. I don’t trust military intelligence officers. And I don’t trust the type of people likely to appear on '40 under 40' lists, the valedictorian-to-Harvard-to-Rhodes-Scholarship types who populate the American elite. I don’t trust people who get flattering reams of newspaper profiles and are pitched as the Next Big Thing That You Must Pay Attention To, and I don’t trust wunderkinds who become successful too early. Why? Because I am somewhat cynical about the United States meritocracy. Few people amass these kind of  résumés if they are the type to openly challenge authority. Noam Chomsky says that the factors predicting success in our 'meritocracy' are a 'combination of greed, cynicism, obsequiousness and subordination, lack of curiosity and independence of mind, [and] self-serving disregard for others.' So when journalists see 'Harvard' and think “impressive,' I see it and think 'uh-oh'... I have lots of friends who are the products of elite institutions, but became critical of those institutions after being exposed to their inner workings. If Pete Buttigieg is one of those, great! Pete Buttigieg is not one of those... Calculated folksiness runs through the whole book... He doesn’t mention seeing injustice [in Cambridge]... Talking about politics on campus, Buttigieg says:

In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure-- Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another-- had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters.

Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests […] but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House [Zuckerberg et al.]

I find this short passage very weird. See the way Buttigieg thinks here. He dismisses student labor activists with the right-wing pejorative “social justice warriors.” But more importantly, to this day it hasn’t even entered his mind that he could have joined the PSLM in the fight for a living wage. Activists are an alien species, one he “strides past” to go to “Pizza & Politics” sessions with governors and New York Times journalists. He didn’t consider, and still hasn’t considered, the moral quandary that should come with being a student at an elite school that doesn’t pay its janitors a living wage. (In fact, years later Harvard was still refusing to pay its workers decently.)

If you come out of Harvard without noticing that it’s a deeply troubling place, you’re oblivious. It is an inequality factory, a place that trains the world’s A-students to rule over and ignore the working class. And yet, nowhere does Buttigieg seem to have even questioned the social role of an institution like Harvard. He tells us about his professors, his thesis on Graham Greene. He talks about how how interesting it is that Facebook was in its infancy while he was there. But what about all the privilege? Even Ross Douthat finds the school’s ruling class elitism disturbing! Buttigieg thought the place fitted him nicely.

...Buttigieg’s thesis [on war] was in part about Vietnam, which he calls a “doomed errand into the jungle.” The liberal vocabulary on wars like Vietnam and Iraq should trouble us. It says things like “doomed” and “mistaken,” (“a lethal blunder” that “collapsed into chaos,” to quote Buttigieg) its judgments pragmatic rather than moral. In doing so, it fails to reckon with the full scale of the atrocities brought about by U.S. government policy.

...If you are Pete Buttigieg, at this point in your life [a graduate of Harvard and Oxford] you have the ability to take almost any job you want. These schools open doors, and you pick which one you go through. (Ask yourself: If I could do anything I wanted for a living, what would I do?) Pete Buttigieg looked inside himself and decided he belonged at… the world’s most sinister and amoral management consulting company.

McKinsey is in the news almost every week for some new horrendous deed, from advising Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales to counseling dictators worldwide on how to build more efficient autocracies.

...Pete Buttigieg does not recall his time at McKinsey with a sense of moral ambivalence. Today he says it might have been his most “intellectually informing experience,” and by that he doesn’t mean that he saw the dark underbelly of American business. No, he was “learning about the nature of data.” It was a thoroughly neutral experience, “a place to learn.” The most critical thing he will say is that he was “sympathetic” to those who think consulting careers less worthy than “public service.” But ultimately, Buttigieg only left McKinsey because it “could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.” His sense of purpose. Have a look at the book: See if you can find a single qualm, even a moment’s interrogation of the nature of the company he worked for.

In fact, Buttigieg was asked in an interview what he thought of the company’s misdeeds. On the work pushing OxyContin, he replied that he “hadn’t followed the story.” On collaborating with the murderous Saudi government:

I think you have a lot of smart, well-intentioned people who sometimes view the world in a very innocent way. I wrote my thesis on Graham Greene, who said that innocence is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

The dumb leper again! Man, Buttigieg never misses a chance to cite that thesis. Vietnam was poor innocent America wandering the earth and accidentally causing a million deaths. McKinsey consultants are poor, innocent, leprous invalids, too sweet and unworldly to notice that their client is Mohammed bin Salman.

...Look into the actual records of these candidates. Get their shitty books and scrutinize them closely. A lot of money is going to be flowing toward tricks like this, as frantic Democratic elites try to push someone like Buttigieg in order to prevent a Sanders nomination. They know Buttigieg is one of them; they see “McKinsey” and realize they’ll come to no harm. But they hope you don’t see what they see. It has been the same over and over: Hey kids, Tom Perez isn’t any different from Keith Ellison! No need to do anything rash now! At every turn, bandwagon-hopping frauds are going to mouth the latest slogans. Abolish ICE? Yeah dude! I’ll abolish the fuck out of ICE.

...Demand the evidence. Examine the record. We have got to learn to see through this stuff. You have to look at what they did and said before it was politically opportune to say what they’re saying now. Five minutes ago, Pete Buttigieg was “the management consultant making the South Bend sewers run on time.” Now he’s suddenly a radical who want to pack the Supreme Court. From Mitt Romney to Eugene Debs in a single news cycle.