Has Status Quo Joe Already Flamed Out... Again? When Will Mayo?

Post-Iowa, Biden dropped further behind in New Hampshire, a state he had pretty much given up on to concentrate on Iowa, Nevada the southern red states where Stockholm-Syndrome Democrats still think the way to win is to hue as closely as possible to a Republican platform. Real Clear Politics senior elections analyst Sean Trende concluded, after looking at the partial returns, that whether Bernie, the popular vote winner, or Mayo Pete, the establishment trick winner, is declared THE winner, Status Quo Joe was the loser. "Joe Biden," he wrote, "is on life support. We shouldn’t mince words here: Biden had an awful night. Yes, Iowa is a heavily white state, and it is a caucus rather than a primary, so it didn’t play to his strengths. Nevertheless, Biden is a former vice president to a very popular ex-president. He has universal name recognition and the implicit backing of large swaths of the Democratic establishment. Yes, he can still recover in South Carolina, although that is looking much less probable than it did Monday morning. If his African-American support remains solid, he will perform well in the South. But his weakness among Northern whites is a red flag for states where he will need to win-- and where he can’t rely on African-American support to push him over the top. If he’s coming in fourth place in Iowa, delegate-rich states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio are likely to be challenging for him as well. Looming over all of this is the question of money. All of the candidates spent heavily on Iowa, and Biden needs to replenish his coffers. Will donors stick with him through New Hampshire? Almost certainly. But how many underperformances can he turn in before they abandon him?"

It was a good night for Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s basic strategy is outlined here, and everything seems to be going according to plan. His gamble is that Biden at best limps out of South Carolina, and that the [corrupt, self-serving and most conservative segment of] the Democratic establishment will have nowhere to turn other than to him. A lot of things still have to fall into place, but Iowa couldn’t have turned out better for him.

It was a good night for brokered conventions. As with Bloomberg, there is a lot that has to take place to get to the end of the primary process with genuine doubt as to who the nominee will be. But one of the necessary preconditions is multiple well-funded candidates running on Super Tuesday. Right now we will almost certainly have Bloomberg and Sanders, with two of three of Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden (if not all three) sticking around, depending on how the early states go. Again, that isn’t sufficient for a brokered convention, but it is a big and necessary step. This was probably the best outcome people rooting for a brokered convention could have hoped for.

It was a good night for Donald Trump. Setting aside entirely the question of which Democrats can beat Trump (I tend to view Sanders as an absolute wildcard who could win comfortably or receive a McGovern-like drubbing), two things seemed to work in Trump’s favor. What Trump didn’t want was a candidate coasting to the nomination. A long, bloody battle is helpful for him, both in terms of draining the financial resources of his opponents and creating fissures within the party that take time to heal. 

Technically, this is Biden’s third presidential bid, although he tried running several more times than that, noticed that Democratic voters don't like him and pulled out before having made it official. So the media says he ran 3 times instead of 6 or 7. He was squashed like a bug in Iowa and will walk away from there with no delegates, not the fair share he told audiences he was sure to get.

Biden's fat cat donors are getting skittish about investing in a loser and he has a very small small donor base and very low cash reserves. And now Bloomberg, with his biggest money in history campaign, is threatening to bury him. AP reporter Bill Barrow wrote that all this "leaves some establishment Democrats, including some Biden supporters, questioning his contention that he’ll reclaim clear front-runner status in the race against President Trump once the primary fight moves beyond overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire to more racially diverse electorates. And it’s a reminder of how Biden’s previous presidential campaigns never advanced beyond Iowa." The partial results (75%) that I'm looking at as I write this, shows Bernie-- the top vote-getter-- with 11 actual delegates, Mayo Pete with 11 delegates, Elizabeth Warren with 5 delegates and Biden tied with Klobuchar, Yang, Steyer, Bennet and Bloomberg at zero delegates.

An effectively two-person race between Sanders and the former vice president, Biden confidants believed, would open the financial spigot, firm up his advantages among nonwhite voters and win over skeptical white moderates now aligned with Buttigieg or Klobuchar.

“That’s my conversation with people: If Bernie Sanders is the nominee, would you vote for him?” Morgan said. “If not, then back Joe.”

Biden took the same approach Tuesday on the campaign trail, hammering Sanders as directly as he has in weeks. “It’s time to get real about health care,” he said as he compared his proposal to expand existing insurance markets with a “public option” to Sanders’ “Medicare for All” idea. Sanders has been pushing single-payer insurance for “30 years now,” Biden said, and ”hasn’t moved it an inch.”

The problem, Freeman said, is that a lackluster start in Iowa makes the Biden-Sanders juxtaposition a much harder sell. “I don’t think any of those conversations are happening today” with potential new donors, he said.

Still, Buttigieg and Klobuchar have their own challenges if they hope to displace Biden as the presumed establishment favorite. They both have negligible nonwhite support, and Klobuchar especially has far more financial obstacles than Biden.

Clay Middleton, a South Carolina Democrat who worked for Clinton in 2016 and Cory Booker’s now-suspended campaign this presidential cycle, said that Iowa doesn’t have to bury Biden but that he and every other candidate faces a delicate path trying to amass delegates going forward.

“The conditions are not the same now,” Middleton said, referring to when Biden dropped his 2008 bid after Barack Obama won the 2008 caucuses. “But again, does he have infrastructure in South Carolina to win four out of the seven congressional districts, and does he have the infrastructure in Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, as part of his Super Tuesday strategy? That’s the real test.”

What about Mayo Pete, you ask? Corey Pein took him apart for Baffler readers this week and if you're at all anti-Mayo, his essay is not to be missed. Pein and Mayo have a few things in common. "We’re both cis white guys," he began. "We’re about the same age. We both graduated from expensive Ivy League schools, and we both know everyone cares. I trust we’ll prove equally successful at becoming President of the United States."

From there, slight differences emerge. Pete, though no giant on the political stage, appears to be slightly taller than me. I put this down to a lack of proper nutrition on my part. My father was frequently unemployed but always alcoholic. My mother is a stranger to me and has been homeless for most of my adult life. I’d like to think that with a little more support at home, I, too, might have picked up an extra seven or eight languages and a few inches of height. Pete and I have both had books published with our names on the front. If we ever get to chat, I’d love to talk to him about his writing process.

We’ve both traveled the world and seen the dirty business of American empire up close, albeit from slightly different perspectives. We both enjoyed Graham Greene’s The Quiet American as undergraduates. Pete wrote a thesis about it, which has been described as a total misreading that’s overly sympathetic to the titular character, a young CIA officer in Vietnam. My takeaway from Greene’s book was rather more traditional: colonialism is an evil inflicted upon the undeserving by the unctuous, overprivileged, and naïve.

Pete may have feared for his life at times while deployed with the United States military, but it is also true he signed up for that risk. I don’t remember anyone asking me if I wanted to experience childhood poverty.

With the help of psychoanalysis, I’ve come to conclude that perhaps the only reason I’m alive today is that I didn’t listen to people like Pete. When he speaks about education and opportunity, Pete reminds me of my high school guidance counselor. That guy was a jerk. He didn’t want me to go to college when I did. He thought I needed discipline and suggested service work or the military. I didn’t need discipline, but freedom and respect. And money. Mostly, I needed money.

Similarly, Pete says college isn’t for everybody. I agree, in principle. That doesn’t mean I want him-- or anyone of his class background, for that matter-- deciding who is and isn’t suitable for management, government, and other professions reserved for the literate and educated.

Still, off to college Pete and I both went. After leapfrogging from Harvard to Oxford, Pete quickly (and now infamously) found a job at McKinsey & Company. Though I did well academically, no one taught me how to job-hunt. After college I felt lucky to get accepted by a temp agency. They set me up as a hospital janitor. The crew, mostly older women, rarely wore protective gloves to handle the cleaning chemicals. Such precautions slowed us down too much to hit our quotas. Their joints were swollen and knotted.

Those kind women shielded me from the worst of the job, like a “code brown” in the operating room (use your imagination). It was the professionalized nurses who were always most snippy and pushy, in the way that people tend to be when capitalism grants them some slight power over others. Judging by reports from his forced march-style campaign events, these women were close to the Platonic ideal of Pete voters: Nurse Ratcheds administering a sedative to a political prisoner, humming “high high high high hopes” with a skip in their step.





But my comrades on the “housekeeping” crew did not need more paperwork, or whatever else Pete is selling. They needed free health care, housing subsidies, and a labor union.

Those aren’t items on Pete’s agenda. What’s worse, he acts like a management spy. The clearest illustration of this was last year when he showed up to a United Auto Workers picket line and awkwardly interrogated a man holding a sign how much money was left in the union strike fund. Recently The Intercept reported that his campaign was hiring workers through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a nefarious project to crush labor power forever by turning every imaginable job into soul-crushing, ultra-low-wage piecework.

When I look at Pete, I see the face of America’s rotten sham meritocracy, and I know I am not alone.

...The most delicious thing about Pete’s campaign is that, possibly for the first time in his life, his privileged class position is a liability, not an asset. It’s visibly crushing for Pete-- who recently had his own “please clap” moment at a rally full of geriatric whites-- but as for me, I’m lovin’ it. The recent, widespread stirring of class consciousness is the best news for American politics in decades.

I’m not the only person who has noticed how Pete tries, and fails, to slum it. Last month in Iowa, he touted himself as a Washington, D.C., outsider, “somebody who can actually walk from his house to the nearest cornfield.” Golly! Shawn Sebastian, an Iowan and Working Families Party member, tweeted in response that Pete was “the mayor of a small college town dominated by a massive private university. Pete’s dad was a Gramsci scholar and he went to private schools his whole life. Enough of this phony rust belt/rural signaling. Pete walks into wine caves, not cornfields.”

When the New York Times’ Binyamin Applebaum accused Pete of fixing bread prices in Canada during his consulting days, the candidate again sought refuge in slumming it, this time with the calculated use of profanity. “So the proposition that I’ve been on front lines of corporate price fixing is bullshit,” he replied. I was not impressed by his command of the vernacular. He sounded like Mister Rogers miscast in The Aristocrats.

When I surveyed my social media followers for their “Pete peeves,” they offered a laundry list of class cues. “He stands for nothing except his own career,” one person responded. Others noted the “self-righteous smirk whenever he’s criticized,” as well as his “vocal affect where he believes that taking a portentous tone makes his banal statements seem profound.” Another concluded, “he seems like a phony apple-polisher who volunteers at soup kitchens because it looks good on their resumes.” Reader, where is the lie?

This salt-of-the-earth schtick is profoundly annoying, beginning with the folksy nickname he has adopted to make himself seem more like a character from a Norman Rockwell painting. But it is a victory for the working class that someone like Pete feels compelled to downplay the upper-class cues he spent a lifetime mastering.

When I see Pete tense up and purse his lips, or take a hasty gulp of water when he feels pressured to explain some facet of his paint-by-numbers political career or his regressive, unpopular policies, it makes me want to barricade the street with burning tires and shut down a container port. If Pete is nervous, it means others like him are nervous. They fear that everything they have worked for in life-- not in the proletarian sense, mind you, but in the sense of writing ingratiating letters and leveraging connections-- is at risk. They’re afraid of the socialist movement. Good. It’s about time.

...While we’re on the subject of authenticity, it’s past time for a frank assessment of Pete’s most-touted qualification: his military service.

I’ve never met an enlisted veteran who talks about war or military life in the way that Pete does. I certainly noticed how, in the last debate before the Iowa Caucuses, he spoke of the plight of “enlisted people that I served with,” as though they were a separate species. Even for an officer, Pete seems especially smug.

I asked enlisted U.S. Army veteran-turned-author Joe Kassabian, an outspoken leftist and co-host of the podcast Lions Led By Donkeys, what he makes of Pete, a Naval intelligence officer on a direct commission. “Nothing about Pete Buttigieg seems genuine, least of all his time in uniform. His service is hollow and speaks of the weird caste system that America has,” Kassabian said. “Who the fuck leaves a highly paid consultant position to deploy randomly for six months? That simply does not happen. But whenever the wars are brought up, he immediately brings up his six-month rotation, like being a lieutenant on some forward operating base allows you some higher knowledge of the war in general. He clearly failed to learn anything, because he doesn’t want to end it.”

Even John Kerry, an unabashed blue-blood officer, had the decency to throw away his medals and march against the war when he returned from Vietnam. Prior to his commission, Pete toured the imperial occupation zones as a civilian profiteer. How patriotic is that?

...Stop talking down to the working class. Stop stealing our valor as veterans of poverty. Simply say, “I am a professor’s son. I am more conservative than my father was, and here’s why.” And then, Pete, you can start listening. Only then will you understand why your class act falls flat, even though you’ve ticked every box like the good student you always were.

Is “Pete” alright? Can I call you Pete? “Mayor Pete” doesn’t sound right, seeing as how you aren’t a mayor anymore. Let’s be honest, though: Wouldn’t you prefer I call you Mister President, Sir?