Mayo Pete Has Come Out Of The Closet Again!

Mayo Pete didn't come out of the closet until he was 33-- in 2015, when he was in electoral politics and there was no doubt he would be outed if he didn't do it himself. Last year, when he wasn't a top candidate, the New York Times' Jeremy Peters wrote the LGBTQ story on Pete. He doesn't talk about the inherent mental illness of hiding in the closet for years and how it turns someone into a compulsive liar. "The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s," wrote Peters (who is openly gay himself), "was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out-- all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too."

By the late 1960s, the stigma attached to being gay-- earlier than that a admission to being an outlaw if not a misfit-- had largely dissipated in many circles and was already starting to break down. When I told my mother-- a blue collar woman who may or may not have graduated from high school-- in the early '70s that I was gay, she asked me if that meant I would be borrowing her wig. Peters claims it was still professionally "unsafe" to admit being gay decades later. There have always been many more cowards-- like Mayo Pete-- than people with courage.

Peters writes that Pete "struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was 'a career death sentence,' as he put it in his memoir." When I ran first Sire and then Reprise Records, I helped many men and women struggling with coming out. Coming out, in my experience, never ruined any of my artists' careers. I know Mayo's type-- untrustworthy, sneaky, self-deceptive... completely unfit to lead. His coming out came almost 40 years after it was "safe" for anyone with a spine.

Many in his generation and in his college class decided to come out as young adults, whether they were confident they would be accepted or not, and had their 20s to navigate being open about their identity-- a process that helped make Americans more aware and accepting of their gay friends, family members and co-workers. Instead, Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

...He took a longer journey than his peers did, he has said, because of the inner turmoil he experienced over whether in fact he wanted to be known as the “gay” politician.

...One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

“His sexuality didn’t present as a really big thing in his life,” said Joe Flood, a classmate. “I think he always thought about himself politically,” he added, noting that Mr. Buttigieg would become active in the university’s Institute of Politics, an organization at the Kennedy School of Government that hosted big-name politicians like Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Howard Dean during their time in school. “You don’t end up there accidentally,” Mr. Flood said.

When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

Over the weekend, though, Mayo came out of a different closet-- the Austerity closet of conservatism which many Democrats have seen him oozing out of in the last few months as he tried deciding if he was progressive or reactionary, ultimately connecting the dots between the billionaires and multimillionaires who have been willing to fund him and leaving all pretenses of progressivism behind. He's now a full-on contender, along with Status Quo Joe, Klobuchar and Bloomberg, for the conservative lane in the primary.

NBC News' Sahil Kapur noted over the weekend that Mayo is calling on Democrats "to get more serious about lowering the national debt, portraying himself as the biggest fiscal hawk in the presidential field and taking a shot at chief New Hampshire rival Bernie Sanders for being too spendthrift." Phony Austerity is a hallmark of conservative politics and Mayo is embracing it as fully as he eventually embraced his long-hidden homosexuality.

Asked at a town hall here how important the deficit is to him, Buttigieg said it's "important" and vowed to focus on limiting the debt even though it's "not fashionable in progressive circles."

"I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable owning this issue, because I see what's happening under this president-- a $1 trillion deficit-- and his allies in Congress do not care. So we have to do something about it," Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said in a packed middle school gym, drawing cheers.

...Buttigieg's remarks are out of step with plenty of progressives who believe Democrats are easily duped by conservatives into focusing on deficit reduction at the expense of their priorities when they control the presidency.

The deficit has risen sharply under President Donald Trump, as it did under his GOP predecessors George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, all of whom enacted tax cuts and boosted defense spending. It fell under Democrats Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

But cutting the deficit has not been a focus of the 2020 Democratic field, leaving an opening for Buttigieg to claim that mantle. He echoed fiscal hawks Sunday in arguing that higher deficits strain prospects for investment.

"It's not fashionable in progressive circles to talk too much about the debt, largely because of the irritation to the way it's been used as an excuse against investment. But if we're spending more and more on debt service now, it makes it harder to invest in infrastructure and health and safety net that we need right now," he said. "And also this expansion, which I think of as, by the way, just the 13th inning of the Obama economic expansion. It isn't going to go on forever."

Buttigieg hasn't laid out a plan to significantly lower the national debt, which could require steep tax hikes or cuts in cherished programs like Social Security.

Asked to back up Buttigieg's claim to fiscal responsibility, a campaign aide pointed to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute that says the tax revenues Buttigieg has proposed to raise would narrowly exceed his new spending.

Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at Stony Brook University in New York who is a senior economic adviser to Sanders, fired back at Buttigieg.

The Sanders campaign responded by suggesting Buttigieg was in the pocket of big donors.

“In a blatant effort to appease his billionaire donors, Pete Buttigieg is now parroting the same corporate talking points to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare that have been used for decades-- cuts that Bernie Sanders has fought to block,” Sanders communications director Mike Casca told NBC News. “This is part of a pattern: Buttigieg used to support Medicare for All, then he raked in huge donations from top pharmaceutical executives, and now suddenly he's against Medicare for All.”

Predictably, scumbag billionaire Steve Rattner, who will do anything and everything he can to derail Bernie, purred that "Finally, a Democratic presidential candidate acknowledges that the deficit/debt is a huge problem that will need to be dealt with."

Is it any wonder that Russian oligarch Leonid Blavatnik-- a big-time Trump financial supporter-- is now helping fund Mayo?

Oops! Wrong oligarch