South Carolina Voters Need To Ask Themselves If Mayo Pete Respects African Americans?

I had dinner with civil rights icon Fergie Reid last night and we were discussing how both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had backed the 90for90 voter registration initiative but how Mayo Pete's team had refused. I noted that Mayo's racism was hardly something new or unknown. Oddly, after having tried to get him to embrace the initiative, he finally did-- just hours after our dinner and hours before South Carolina primary day! A creation of intelligence agency spooks, did the Mayo campaign have our table bugged? I doubt it but it does seem like an act of desperation or, at least, one that lacks a certain comprehension. His outsider imagine has been carefully constructed by spin-masters to obscure his deep establishment roots, such as the fact that his foreign policy adviser is a powerful Pentagon insider , Doug Wilson, who started mentoring him right out of college, the same man who encouraged once-peacenik Buttigieg to join the military, an important factor in his political climb. Russ Baker:

In a February 25 pre–South Carolina primary debate during which Sanders took fire from all five candidates, Buttigieg called attention to himself by the intensity of his attacks on the frontrunner.

At one point, an argument broke out between the two after Sanders took aim at US foreign policy for being responsible for overthrowing “governments all over the world in Chile, in Guatemala, in Iran,” and supporting pro-business dictatorships. Buttigieg responded that Sanders represents the “revolutionary politics of the 1960s”-- and hammers a recurring theme, that the Vermont senator is as divisive and dangerous as Trump.

Buttigieg was able to put his military service front and center at the debate. Responding to a question framing him as the only veteran on the stage, he brought up his first trip to the state, when he attended Fort Jackson for three weeks of special training before being deployed to Afghanistan in 2015. He recalled looking down at his uniform sleeve and feeling pride that “the flag on [his] shoulder represented a country known to keep its word.”

Since 400,000 vets live in South Carolina, and it has eight bases, representing Army, Navy, the Marines, and Airforce, military service carries special weight there.

How was the little-known mayor of a small American city (ranked 308th largest) transformed into a candidate deemed most qualified to handle some of the most complex decisions facing this country and the world, at a time perhaps more challenging than any in history?

The answer, research suggests, is that Buttigieg has benefited — like many politicians — from a career-long shaping, punctuated by repositionings and makeovers, until he had the right set of credentials and backers to make it to the top. But the particulars of the makeover are like no other.

The Buttigieg we think we know today came into focus over the course of about 16 years, as he was bundled into a package of appealing but vague impressions-- energetic, reformer, articulate, thoughtful, youthful, reasonable.

During his presidential campaign, his handlers have pivoted from difficult-to-prove and politically profitless assertions about his tenure in South Bend, IN, to equally vague but far more savvy branding as a healing national figure, a hardheaded realist, and seasoned man of the world: global businessman and traveler, and, not least, military veteran.

Perhaps paradoxically, he turns out to be backed by a mighty retinue from the very national security elite he says he hopes to “upend.”

Henry Davis, Jr., currently serving his third term on the South Bend City Council, and Jordan Giger, a school teacher and leader of the South Bend chapter of Black Lives Matter, are clearly not on Team Buttigieg. Yesterday the two had an OpEd published by one of South Carolina's biggest newspapers, The State: If black voters in SC support Pete Buttigieg, they will only re-elect President Trump. "Before South Carolina votes in Saturday’s Democratic Party primary," they wrote, "we feel a duty-- as black leaders who know former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg very well-- to issue a political warning to anyone who cares about defeating President Donald Trump in 2020." And did they ever!

Simply put, if Buttigieg becomes the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, his candidacy will be damaged by at least three ticking legal time bombs that are set to go off during the 2020 election-- all of which will serve to help Trump depress black voter turnout and win re-election.

Voters deserve to know that there is a pending special prosecutor investigation into the June 2019 death of Eric Logan, an unarmed black man shot by a white South Bend police officer while walking to his mother’s home from a family event. Buttigieg was still mayor when the shooting occurred, and he was forced to leave the presidential campaign trail to face the anger and anguish of our community. The Indiana attorney general’s office says that the special prosecutor’s report on Logan’s death will likely be released soon.

There is also a wide-ranging federal civil rights lawsuit into systematic racism in the South Bend Police Department while Buttigieg was the city’s mayor. Civil rights law gives plaintiffs broad discovery power to unearth the racist behavior that plagued our community during Buttigieg’s two terms leading South Bend-- and our former mayor may be among those subpoenaed to give a deposition.

That represents the second ticking legal time bomb hovering over Buttigieg’s campaign.

And here is the third one that voters deserve to know about: the South Bend City Council brought a pending lawsuit against Buttigieg to demand the release of secret tapes revealing racist and criminal acts, including white police officers plotting against the city’s first black police chief in an attempt to get him fired.

This controversy has drawn national coverage: the New York Times, for example, published an April 2019 bearing the headline “Pete Buttigieg Fired South Bend’s Black Police Chief. It Still Stings.”

During the 2020 election President Trump will try to suppress the black vote, possibly with help from the Russians. Now just imagine the field day they will have as these Buttigieg-related lawsuits, depositions, subpoenas, reports and other revelations become public throughout the 2020 campaign.

It could resemble the 2016 election furor over Hillary Clinton’s emails, only on steroids. And the furor over the Buttigieg material will be far more warranted, because the systemic racism Buttigieg appeared to tolerate is real.

Before they vote, South Carolinians deserve to know that Buttigieg’s problems with black voters will not go away anytime soon, and that these problems exist for good reason.

Thanks for listening to our voices.

Hard to understand how a completely fabricated empty suit like Mayo could be polling even 4th-- and at almost double what Elizabeth Warren is polling-- in South Carolina. The Real Clear Politics average for the state looks like this going into primary day today:

• Status Quo Joe- 39.7%
• Bernie- 24.3%
• Steyer- 11.7%
• Mayo Pete- 11.3%
• Elizabeth- 6.0%
• Klobuchar- 5.7%
• Tulsi- 2.3%

We'll see how accurate that turns out to be in a few hours but now consider this. Did Mayo Pete just expose South Carolina Blacks to whatever contagion prevented him from meeting Florida Whites? In South Carolina on Thursday afternoon, Buttigieg shook hands and greeted each of nine African American health care leaders. But in Florida Mayo canceled plans for two rich people-only fundraisers scheduled for Wednesday evening at private residences in Palm Beach and Wellington as well as two appearances scheduled for earlier Wednesday in Miami, citing an unspecified illness.