Don't Be Misled By People Pushing Identity Politics To Make A Quick Buck For Themselves

Tom Guild & Kendra Horn-- guess which one is better on women's issues

Yesterday the LGBTQ Victory Fund endorsed 25 new candidates around the country, including 5 for state legislative seats. Presumably they're all Democrats, but who knows? The Victory Fund doesn't mention what party their candidates are running on, let alone whether they are progressives or conservatives. The only thing they care about is that these candidates are gay. This is so bizarre to me, especially since Congress has so many gay-- albeit closeted-- members who are no friends of the LGBTQ community. Like Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Adrian Smith (R-NE), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jason Smith (R-MO)...

And I don't mean to pick on the gays for this identity politics nonsense. Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article in the Jewish Daily Forward highlighting 8 candidates for Congress. Some of the candidates are Democrats and some of them are Republicans. All of them, though, are Jewish. All of them are also relatively conservative. The Forward seemed to boast that "Studies have long shown that Jews are not only more likely to vote in elections, but are also overrepresented in political office." They make no value judgement about why a candidate should be backed-- or opposed-- just they're Jewish. Example:

Renee Unterman, Republican from Georgia

Unterman, a health insurance executive and former mayor, is the only Jewish member of the Georgia state senate, where she’s represented parts of the Atlanta suburbs since 2003. She’s an outspoken conservative-- she wrote an anti-abortion “heartbeat bill,” supports a border wall and has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association. But she’s also shown she’s not afraid to buck members of her own party-- in 2018, she called for an investigation into then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, over questionable campaign donations he had received. After a Kemp spokesman called her “mentally unstable,” she opened up about her history of depression and her son’s death by suicide. “I feel like it’s unusual to be a Republican and Jewish,” she told the Atlanta Jewish Times later that year. “But because of my background, I can connect with certain social issues I may not have if I wasn’t Jewish.” The district is open due to the retirement of incumbent Republican Rep. Brad Goodall, who won the tightest congressional election in the country in 2018 by a margin of 419 votes; Cook rates the race a toss-up.

GA-07 is the most competitive congressional race in Georgia this year. As of December 31, three Democrats-- Carolyn Bourdeaux, Zahra Karinshak (the most conservative of the Dems in this race) and Nabilah Islam (the most progressive in the race)-- and 4 Republicans-- Unterman, Lynne Homrich, Richard McCormick and Lerah Lee-- had raised over half a million dollars each. It's worth noting though that 3 of the 4 Republicans are trying to buy the seat with their own wealth. Unterman's own $602,841 amounted to 63% of her contributions. Homrich's $338,410 was 37% of her contributions. And McCormick's $524,639 was 60% of his contributions. Only one of the Democrats-- Karinshak-- is a self-funder.

All of the Republicans are conservatives as are some of the Democrats. Presumably all that matters, though, is that one is sort of Jewish. (Unterman, who tries playing up her Jewishness, is a convert.)

Anyway, on and on it goes-- very profitable women's operations try to get voters to vote for women; very profitable black operations and latino operations want you to vote for blacks and latinos-- just like gays and Jews-- no matter if they're a Blue Dog like Kendra Horn (women), David Scott (black), Henry Cuellar (Latino), Charlie Crist (gay, albeit semi-closeted) or Josh Gottheimer (Jewish). Many of them are in or have been in primaries against progressives who aren't in the identity group but would be a far better representative of the identity group. Let's take Kendra Horn, one of the 5 most right-wing Blue Dogs in Congress. She's against everything remotely progressive-- virulently opposes the Green New Deal, a living wage and Medicare for All, as 3 painfully obvious examples-- and she's running against progressive educator and college professor Tom Guild in Oklahoma City. It is easy-peasy to make the case that although Horn is a biological woman and will be promoted by very profitable women's groups, Guild is, by far, a better candidate for women.

The national minimum wage is the minimum amount per hour employers can now pay most workers. It increases only if Congress passes a bill and the President signs the legislation into law. To the detriment of working people, it has risen slowly over the decades-- it was last raised in 2009, with 2020 marking a record 11-year gap in increases. An increase in the wage to $15 an hour passed the House in 2019, but shamefully Horn was one of a tiny handful of Democrats who voted against raising it. When adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is 17% lower than it was in 2009, and 31% lower than it was at its peak in 1968. In 1968 the minimum wage put American workers in a position to pay their bills and survive solely on their paychecks. The slow deterioration of the wage now leaves many families unable to pay for their basic necessaries to survive. A living wage regularly adjusted for inflation will bring workers back to a comparable position they were in back in 1968 when they were able to cover their basic expenses every month. Who suffers most? Women and children, of course. On top of that poll after poll shows that it is women who overwhelming support Medicare-for-All and who support an end to endless wars. Horn has a voting record that is shockingly pro-war and anti-healthcare, Guild is anti-war and pro-healthcare... the exact opposite. I spoke to him this morning and we discussed these things and I hope I have his quotes correctly below. Please, if you like what he has to say, consider clicking on the Blue America thermometer and contributing what you can to his campaign.

Under no circumstances, should American troops fight in Iran without prior congressional approval. I’m deeply disappointed that Horn voted twice to give the current volatile and impulsive president or any president carte blanche to start another costly endless war in the Middle East. Enough is Enough! Women tend to be much more reluctant to engage in military adventurism.  Women are especially protective of their families, and do not want them to have their lives prematurely ended in another endless war. Many women consider health care to be the single most important issue affecting their health and welfare and that of their family members and friends. Horn’s refusal to support any particular plan to bring universal health coverage to the American people is disturbing. Her opposition to the one serious plan on the table is baffling and particularly harmful to the women she is charged with representing.

Horn has no serious plan for addressing climate change and the comprehensive and reasonable plan now on the table, with majority support among Americans, particularly women, Horn opposes. Although Horn took money from labor, she voted with Republicans against raising the minimum wage, and has no plan to make sure that all of the people in the fifth district make a living wage. Since American women make up the vast majority of low paid workers, Horn’s position hurts women and their families in their struggle for survival and dignity. Horn also opposed labor’s biggest agenda item this year by voting with the Republicans in the House in an attempt to defeat the Protecting the Power to Organize Act. Women are often greatly benefited by the representation of organized labor. With friends like her, labor and women do not need enemies.

What can we do to make people’s lives better, now and after the pandemic has run its course of destruction? We can provide clean water and air by seriously pursuing ambitious climate action. By pursuing a path of renewable energy, we can create millions of good paying jobs as we repair and restore our environment. We can provide paid family leave and childcare. Rising costs in this area were eating family budgets alive, even before the current health and economic crisis. We can ease the burden on hard working parents and help them care for their most important assets, their children. Seniors are overwhelmed by the skyrocketing price of prescription drugs. By lowering drug prices, we can ease the strain on their finances and improve their peace of mind.

You Can Tell A Lot About Candidates By Who Endorses Them-- And That Includes Status Quo Joe And Bernie

Biden has a shit load of endorsements and-- most of them are shit. They include corporate whores, Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. His congressional endorsers include some of the worst Democrats in Congress and nearly every one of them has a voting record with a ProgressivePunch "F" score. Here's a list of garbage behind Biden:

• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)
• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)
• Cindy Axne (New Dem-IA)
• Vicente Gonzalez (Blue Dog-TX)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)
• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)
• Stephen Lynch (New Dem-MA)
• Tony Cárdenas (New Dem-CA)
• Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL)
• Brad Schneider (Blue Dog-IL)

At the heart of the Biden campaign are his false claims to be a fighter for working families. That's never really been true. He's mixing "families" up with "banksters" and "big corporations." And many of his endorsers are fakers just like him. Kurt Schrader, certainly one of the worst members Biden looked to for backing, is a good example. His progressive 2020 opponent, Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba, wrote yesterday that "The Neoliberal policies of the last half century have included efforts to erode the power of the unions at every turn. As a result, they have achieved their desired result of concentrating wealth at the very top and creating insecurity within the middle class. No one can argue that the majority of Americans are not as well off as their parents were and become less well off with each passing year. HR 2474: Protecting the Right to Organize act of 2019 Is a critical step towards repairing the damage that anti-worker corporations and politicians have done to our working families. The middle class only exists because workers organized and demanded fair and safe working conditions and pay. If we hope to continue to have a middle class, then we must support our union brethren when they fight to regain workers rights. My opponent is the only Democrat in our federal delegation that is opposed to the PRO Act, which is outrageous given that our district has one of the highest membership rates in the U.S. Much like his cynical vote against the $15/hour minimum wage, he is looking out for the interests of giant national corporations instead of the working folk here in the 5th congressional district." And Gamba made that statement as he was heading off to Salem "to stand with our union brothers and sisters on their picket line in front of Representative Schrader's office.The 5th has some of the highest union membership in the U.S. and it's high time that Schrader is taken to task for voting against the people he was elected to represent."

On every single issue facing the country, from war and peace healthcare and Wall Street, these people are more a part of the problem, not part of the solution. They're supporting a delusional hack who still thinks he can put together a conservative coalition with Republicans to accomplish something for working families. Watch this interview with Savannah Guthrie the crazy old coot did Sunday on the Today Show:





Bernie has a very different kind of endorser, men and women looking towards the future, from AOC and Pramila Jayapal to AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib-- and virtually most of the best 2020 congressional candidates. Yesterday, another remarkable woman stepped forward to endorse him, just before caucusing in Iowa began. Writing for The Root, Terrell Jermaine Starr, explained who Barbara Smith is and why her endorsement of Bernie is worth more than any dozen Biden endorsements combined. "Barbara Smith, founding member of the black feminist Combahee River Collective that coined the term 'identity politics,'" he began, "has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president." Starr interviewed her about the reasons why.

“Of all of the people who are running, Bernie Sanders is the person whose political commitment most closely reflects and align with political commitments that I’ve had throughout my life,” she said. “He has a much deeper understanding of what the situation is, why we have injustice and inequality and oppression and discrimination or whatever words you use to describe a society that isn’t functioning the way that it should be functioning. He is the most incisive, sharpest understanding of where all that comes from.”

Briahna Joy Gray, national press secretary for the Sanders campaign, told The Root that the campaign is “enormously proud to have earned the endorsement of one of the preeminent black feminist activists in American history. Barbara Smith’s work highlighting the interlocking oppressions of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and class has helped to empower millions of people in the fight for substantive equality. That fight is central to this campaign, and we’re humbled to have earned her support.”

In addition to her scholarly work, Smith has also served in elected office. She served two terms as a city councilwoman in Albany, N.Y., between 2005 and 2013. Her endorsement comes just as voters in Iowa begin caucusing here, where Sanders is one of the favorites to win.

Sanders has long been criticized for not having a race analysis. But Smith strongly pushes back on that narrative, adding that he fits within the framework of identity politics and cautions against misusing the term from its intended purpose.

“The way it’s been used in the last couple of decades is very different than what we intended,” she said. “The Combahee River Collective has a race, class, gender, and sexuality platform and analysis. We wrote in our statement that all of the systems of oppression are interlocking, she said.

“When we use the term ‘identity politics,’ we are actually asserting that black women had a right to determine our own political agendas. We, as black women, we actually had a right to create political priorities and agendas and actions and solutions based in our experiences in having these simultaneous identities-- that included other identities via the working class, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc. So that’s what we meant by it. That didn’t mean we didn’t care about other people’s situations of injustice. We’d absolutely did not mean that we would work with people who were only identical to ourselves. We did not mean that. We strongly believed in coalitions and working with people across various identities on common problems. I think that the Sanders campaign and the candidate himself are absolutely consistent with what we meant by identity politics.”

I Sure Hope Elizabeth And Bernie Join Forces To Crush Conservatives Biden And Trump

The Bernie's Back Rally in Queens yesterday was massive-- 25,872 in the park and what looked like almost as many outside. People were watching from the bridge and there were so many people trying to get to the park that the blocks around it had to be closed to traffic. Watch AOC's inspiring and heart-felt endorsement of his campaign:





A few days ago, Leila Ettachfini, writing for Vice slammed Hillary-brand feminists-- who helped brings Trump-- who are whining that AOC's, Ilhan's and Rashida's endorsements of Bernie "isn't feminist." She wrote that some women "saw the decision to support Sanders as a betrayal of the progressive ethos. Among them was Jane Eisner, the director of academic affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, who jumped to criticize the representatives’ decision in a since-deleted tweet. 'I find it fascinating that women of color overlook female and minority candidates to endorse a white guy,' Eisner wrote." I don't wonder why she decided to delete the tweet.

Even as Sanders and Warren themselves have taken great pains to treat each other cordially in public, some of Warren’s supporters have been especially vocal in their criticism of the democratic socialist’s supporters so far this cycle. Political pundit Emily Tisch Sussman, for example, argued in September that anyone supporting Sanders over Warren was inherently sexist because Warren’s “plans have evolved” and are “more detailed” than Sanders’.

But it’s safe to assume “The Squad” doesn’t need white feminists to help them understand which candidate best supports their feminist principles. The criticism is especially rich, considering Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Pressley have each achieved numerous milestones when they were elected in 2018. Collectively, they represent the first Muslim women in Congress; the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress; the first Somali-American in Congress; the youngest woman in Congress; and the first Black women elected to Congress by Minnesota and Massachusetts.

To decry their or anyone’s support for Sanders over Warren as anti-feminist is less than helpful to the greater cause of gender equality, and more of an oversimplification of what feminism actually is—or is supposed to be. By removing the agency of these women of color to choose a candidate that best aligns with their political ideology, critics are reducing complex politicians to one-dimensional figures.

That is not how any of these women see themselves. Omar, in a video explaining her endorsement, said she had decided to endorse Sanders because he “built a movement and continues to build a movement that transcends gender, ethnicity, religion.”

Like Sanders has been for decades, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib all identify as democratic socialists-- a fact that places them in stark contrast with Warren, a self-described “capitalist.” All three representatives have been supportive of Warren and many of her policies throughout the campaign trail. Ocasio-Cortez and Warren have worked together as lawmakers to usher the Green New Deal to Congress. Just last week, Tlaib and Warren put out a video together about the impact of environmental racism in Detroit.

But to act as if Warren is inarguably the evolved form of the Vermont senator is simplistic at best. Sanders’ policy proposals on many issues that affect women could be considered more progressive than Warren’s—specifically when it comes to addressing low-income women of color. While Warren wants to reduce rents for Americans by 10 percent, Sanders supports national rent control. While Warren only recently changed her previously unwaivering pro-Israel views, Sanders has condemned the Israeli occupation of Palestine since the 1980s. And while Warren’s newfound support of Medicare for All has left some questioning her commitment to the issue, Sanders has supported single-payer healthcare for decades.

“It’s good to see [Sanders and Warren] working together to push the national conversation further left,” Moumita Ahmed and Kat Brezler, co-founders of the group Feminists for Bernie Sanders, said in a statement to VICE. “Still, he is anti-capitalist, she is not. We don’t see a future for true feminism without a future that is no longer burdened by capitalism.”

Considering their politics, the congress members’ decision to support Sanders over Warren shouldn’t surprise anyone. As the people with the most progressive records in Congress, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib’s endorsement of the candidate with the most progressive policy proposals makes sense, even if that candidate doesn’t mirror their own identities.

“Voting for a woman doesn’t mean voting for policies that support women,” said Ahmed and Brezler. “Conflating the two is a dangerous display of identity politics.”

Warren is trying hard to find another progressive woman or group of progressive women to counter the move by AOC, Ilhan and Omar. Katherine Clark (MA) and Deb Haaland (NM) already have and they are both solid progressives, but few people have heard of either and fewer will be swayed by their endorsements. My dream ticket is Bernie/Elizabeth for 2020 and then Elizabeth at the top of the ticket in 2024. The real nightmare would be if Bernie and Elizabeth splits the progressive vote and we wind up with Status Quo Joe as the nominee, the only Democrat Trump would be able to beat. Biden's reactionary negative attitude towards Medicare-For-All helps explain why many progressives don't want anything to do with him and won't vote for him-- and not just at primary time. Ben Palmquist tackled it for readers of In These Times last week. "Biden and other centrists," he wrote, "are deploying cynical arguments to defend the for-profit insurance system. We shouldn’t buy it... While Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have defended a Medicare for All system that would guarantee healthcare as a right, other more centrist candidates have sought to undercut such a plan-- and they’ve been led by Joe Biden... [T]he Biden campaign has been testing messages designed to undercut support among Democrats for Medicare for All. The survey, commissioned by Wall Street-funded Democratic think tank Third Way, road-tested fear-mongering rhetoric that was crafted by the for-profit health insurance industry-- and sounded a lot like Republican talking points. Biden isn’t alone. In the last debate on September 12, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris and Beto O'Rourke all joined him in falsely suggesting that people would lose choice and freedom under a Medicare for All system.

This portrayal of private insurance plans as bastions of choice and freedom isn’t just misguided, it serves to defend profit-hungry companies at the expense of the millions upon millions of Americans who would benefit from guaranteed health care and financial security provided by a single-payer, Medicare for All system.

Biden and his ilk make the critical mistake of conflating coverage with care. They assume that people “covered” by subsidized private insurance plans can actually get care, and can do so without going broke-- but that’s simply not true.

From 2005 to 2018, some 60 million Americans per year-- including one half of the insured population-- were forced to skip or delay medical care. In 2016, a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in partnership with the New York Times found that 85 million Americans were in medical debt. Of those, roughly 6 in 10 were insured.

The government can help extend private coverage to more people, but insurance companies will keep pushing costs onto us, keep dropping treatments, medicines, and doctors from their plans, and keep denying our claims. The only real solution is universal, guaranteed healthcare.

The attacks on Medicare for All also betray an impoverished understanding of freedom as a choice between insurance products. But people don't want a choice between Aetna and Cigna. They want the freedom of guaranteed healthcare; the freedom to choose their doctor, hospitals and treatments; and financial freedom from insurance, hospital and drug bills.





The flip side of freedom is coercion, and while centrist Democratic candidates may raise alarms about government coercion, they ignore the countless ways that insurance companies coerce people every day. They force people to pay ever-higher premiums, deductibles, out-of-network fees and copays. They force people to forego dental, reproductive and mental healthcare, as well as prescriptions. They force people to stop seeing the doctors they want to see by narrowing networks. And they force people into poverty by denying insurance claims and refusing to pay medical bills.

While claiming to recognize healthcare as an inviolable human right, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Harris and O'Rourke also ignore the deep inequities produced by the multi-payer insurance system they defend. The plans put forward by Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar would leave millions of people uninsured, and though Harris and O’Rourke’s would get everyone coverage, none of these plans would guarantee all medically necessary care.

The current fractured insurance system carves people into categories according to their economic and family characteristics, favoring some while denying care to others. By selectively imposing coverage restrictions and cost sharing, the system grants different people different access to different plans that cover different doctors, different hospitals, different medical conditions, different body parts, different treatments and different medicines.

Such a system favors people who live in areas with high employment over those where there’s low employment, workers in big firms over workers in small firms, workers in full-time jobs over those in part-time jobs, and workers in formal employment over workers who are self-employed or do informal work. It favors people older than 65 or younger than 26 over those in the middle, people with high incomes over people with middle-and-low incomes, people with family wealth over people who don’t have savings, and people who are married over those who are single.

Rationing care on the basis of these non-medical economic indicators is incompatible with guaranteeing healthcare as a right, and also reproduces racial and gender inequities. Because the most robust coverage is reserved for those with formal full-time employment in lucrative economic sectors, comprehensive care is disproportionately denied to Black and brown communities facing high unemployment, immigrants working in low-wage industries, and women working in part-time jobs and unpaid domestic labor.

Separate-and-unequal coverage doesn’t just hurt those at the bottom. By accepting and institutionalizing the notion that some people are more deserving than others, tiered coverage is precisely what makes U.S. healthcare both precarious and vulnerable. This vulnerability breeds fear of losing one’s coverage, which for decades has been exploited to stifle reforms and feed relentless attacks on public programs and social solidarity.

Medicare for All, in contrast, would guarantee a single standard of care to everyone. The plan introduced by Sanders in the Senate would provide all medically necessary care, comprehensive long-term care, mental health, reproductive, dental, vision and all other care people need. Everyone in the United States would be guaranteed seamless care from cradle to grave, freeing us up to move in and out of jobs and relationships without worrying about medical care, and we’d never have to deal with an insurance company or medical bill again. Healthcare would be provided to all of society as a public good like fire protection rather than as an individually rationed commodity. What’s more, Medicare for All would do all this for less than it would cost to keep propping up the private insurance system.

While Biden and Third Way may be polling language to attack such a Medicare for All system, the case is clear: the “freedom” to “choose” for-profit insurance is a false choice. Medicare for All is wildly popular because it would finally provide comprehensive healthcare to everyone. Democratic leaders should stop using insurance industry talking points and Republican fear-mongering to tell people otherwise.

Gay Identity Politics-- McKinsey Pete

Monday, I responded to a tweet about some random guy primarying Jan Schakowsky (D-IL): "Jan Schakowsky is one of the best members of Congress & is one of the few who has NOT failed us." Notice what I didn't say: Jan Schawkowsky is one of the best female members of Congress" or even "Jan Schawkowsky is one of the best Jewish members of Congress"-- although she is both. But doesn't it sound better that she's just flat out one of the best members of Congress? You know where I learned that? Listening to Joni Mitchell explode when a reviewer would refer to her as the world's greatest female songwriter. From her reaction, you might think the reviewer had written that she has no songwriting ability at all. In her world, her rivals were always Bob Dylan and Neil Young and she sees herself as the best songwriter in the world. It wasn't uncommon to see Joni work on a song for longer than it took Neil to write and record an entire album.

If you read DWT much, you probably know how much I hate identity politics. Picking a candidate for any reason other than their qualifications sickens me and makes me worry for the health of a Democratic Party that is riven with leaders who are all about aggressively choosing people based on extraneous characteristics, even if it means winding up with less qualified-- or even unqualified-- people in positions. Many of my friends disagree with me on this'd I've been through the pros and cons countless times. Monday morning, a weak L.A. Times reporter, Janet Hook, wrote that McKinsey Pete is inspiring pride among gay voters.

I'm a gay voter and I don't feel a twinge of pride in that. I'm glad an openly gay person can run for office but...





My "but" is different than the but Hook wrote about. But but is that he's a crap candidate who spent much of his life in the closet, developing an ability to lie and deceive-- which is what people in the closet do-- and then fit in perfectly with the world's biggest-- and worst-- consulting firm, McKinsey, which trains its robots to lie flawlessly and without blinking. Hook says the but for gay voters is that they fear he can't win. Thank God for small favors!

Win or lose in the 2020 presidential race, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is energizing LGBTQ Americans. With his surprisingly strong run for the Democratic presidential nomination, he is helping a long-marginalized community advance in political stature and pride in a way some compare to the effect Barack Obama’s presidency had on African Americans.

“Mayor Pete Buttigieg is transforming America’s perception of LGBTQ people,” said Annise Parker, president of the Victory Fund, an LGBTQ political group that endorsed Buttigieg in June, the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate.

Buttigieg does not put his sexual orientation at the center of his campaign, but he is not hiding it either. In recent weeks, as his campaign gained prominence, he has made high-profile appearances before predominantly gay audiences.

When he traveled to Provincetown for a campaign event and fundraiser Friday, Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, received a hero’s welcome from a town that, after the 2010 census, had the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the country.

It was a long way from Iowa, where Buttigieg was heckled by antigay activists this year. In P-town, as the city is known, a popular eatery painted a welcome message to the Buttigiegs in its window. An art gallery displayed an enormous portrait of Buttigieg. He met with students attending a local summer camp for LGBTQ youths. Throngs gathered during a morning stroll through town.

“It felt like our own little parade,” Buttigieg said at an afternoon event where hundreds in the hall-- and hundreds more in the overflow crowd outside-- waved “PETETOWN’’ signs. “It reminds me of what it is to be in a place that celebrates inclusion, that celebrates belonging.”

Buttigieg and his husband have become the most high-profile gay male couple in America. Images of the pair kissing at campaign events have been broadcast across the country. They have appeared together on the cover of Time magazine.

Asked about potential backlash, Buttigieg cites his experience coming out as gay in the conservative state of Indiana in 2015 just before running for reelection as South Bend mayor.

“I came out not knowing what the consequences would be and, in the end, got reelected with 80% of the vote,” he told reporters in Provincetown. “You have to give people a chance to show they can move beyond prejudice.”

But that could be a risky political bet in a campaign against President Trump. Many of Trump’s supporters are among the 31% of Americans who oppose gay marriage, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, and even some of Buttigieg’s admirers question whether the country will accept a gay man as president.

“Homophobia is a very real thing; however, it is not as visible as racism,” said Damian Archer, a gay African American man at Buttigieg’s Friday rally who is undecided about which candidate to support in 2020.

Rufus Gifford, a gay former Obama administration official, who admires Buttigieg but has not committed to him or any other candidate, says: “I do worry with the stakes as high as they are, I ask myself every day: Is the U.S. ready to elect an openly gay president? I still question it. I’m scared to death we’ll reelect Donald Trump.”

Still, the response to Buttigieg’s candidacy is a remarkable sign of one of the fastest shifts in public attitudes ever measured in the U.S.: the growth in acceptance of homosexuality to the point that, at least among Democratic primary voters, Buttigieg’s orientation has ended up a political asset, not a liability.

Some 61% of Americans support same-sex marriage-- double the share in 2004, when only 31% did, according to the Pew Research Center.

Even within the Democratic Party, in 2008, none of the leading presidential candidates supported gay marriage. The ban on gays serving openly in the military ended only in 2011. It was just four years ago, 2015, that the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage could not be banned by states.

“I heard a woman from Alabama call Pete Buttigieg wholesome,” said Richard Holt, a board member of the Victory Fund. “I never thought I’d hear a Bible Belt mother refer to a gay guy as wholesome.”

Buttigieg often appears with his husband. With an active social media presence, Chasten Buttigieg has gained outsize celebrity and embraced the “candidate’s spouse” role with humor and style.

When the pair emerged from a black SUV for a June Victory Fund event in Brooklyn, attendees seemed almost as excited to see the spouse as the candidate.

The event, like the Provincetown visit, was a respite for Buttigieg, who has been battered by criticism for his handling of racial tensions in South Bend after a black man was shot by a white policeman. The fund’s endorsement had been scheduled for earlier in June but was postponed when Buttigieg returned to South Bend to cope with the crisis.

It was rescheduled to a propitious day-- the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a landmark in the history of the LGBTQ rights movement that occurred after police raided a gay bar in New York City.

“We haven’t seen equality come to the land, not by a long shot, but think about what it means that 50 years after Stonewall, we could be gathered in a room with a top-tier candidate for the American presidency and be in a room with his husband,” Buttigieg said to cheers.

Buttigieg rose implausibly fast in the party’s big 2020 presidential field in part because he is gay. That fact helped him stand out from the pack and garner media attention, and drew a big infusion of early campaign donations from the LGBTQ community. He went on to raisean impressive $24.8 million in the second quarter, more than any of his rivals have announced so far.

Los Angeles political consultant David Wolf said Buttigieg has received significant fundraising support from Hollywood’s LGBTQ community, including TV producer Ryan Murphy and prominent agents Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane.

Buttigieg added to his coffers Friday at the Provincetown fundraiser organized by Bryan Rafanelli, a major Democratic donor who also hosted a Buttigieg event this year at Fenway Park in Boston.

For many Democrats-- gay and straight-- Buttigieg’s biggest liability is not his sexuality, but that he is too young, too inexperienced or not liberal enough.

“I’m still concerned about his ability to beat Trump,” said Mitchell Katine, a Houston lawyer who helped win a landmark 2003 Supreme Court ruling that decriminalized gay sex. “I want him to be in the running and continue this education process. But he’ll have to convince me he can beat Trump.”

Antigay sentiment is still a powerful force. There are only 20 states where LGBTQ people are protected against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations. Just 46% of Republicans say they are open to electing a gay president, an April Quinnipiac University poll found.

Nor does Buttigieg have a monopoly on LGBTQ voters. Former Vice President Joe Biden earned the allegiance of many with his 2012 endorsement of gay marriage-- getting out in front of Obama on the issue. Sen. Kamala Harris of California enjoys strong support in San Francisco’s gay community.

A group of 47 LGBTQ activists and elected officials announced their endorsements of Harris last weekend ahead of her participation in the city’s Pride parade.

A June poll of LGBTQ voters by Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News found a noteworthy gender gap. Buttigieg was the top choice among Democratic gay men, with 27% saying they were likely to support him.

Among lesbians, however, Buttigieg was fifth choice, with just 13% saying they’d likely support him, behind Harris, Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Some lesbians are torn between their interest in Buttigieg and a desire to elect a female president. But Kate Wise, a gay woman from Cleveland who was in New York for the World Pride celebration, said she was all in for Buttigieg from the minute he announced.

“We landed a bro on the top of the pile,” Wise said. But she added, “He would be my guy even if he was not gay.”

Whether he wins the party nomination and goes on to the White House, gay activists hope Buttigieg will help inspire other LGBTQ candidates running up and down the ballot.

“He can have coattails,” Holt said. “We have to have representatives at all levels.”

Harvey Milk was an incredible person who I spent great deal of time with when he was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. When I arrived in San Francisco, penniless, he staked me the darkroom equipment I used to set up a photography business and later became his campaign photographer. Many of the unacknowledged photos you see of him were pictures I took. (The Times of Harvey Milk film credits me for my pictures by the rest are just routinely stolen. Sorry for the tangent.) I remember once sitting with Harvey in the back of his photo shop on Castro Street. He had a mail sack filled with letters from all over the country. I remember one from a kid in Kansas or Nebraska. My eyes still well up with tears, around 4 decades later, when I think about it. This kid read about Harvey's election and it made him revaluate his own self-worth and to rescind his decision to commit suicide. Harvey was an inspiring figure. It wasn't just because he was the first openly gay person to win elective office; it was because of who he was. That's not who McKinsey Pete is.

Cheri Bustos May Be Too Thick To Understand Why, But Primaries Are A Crucial Component Of American Democracy

AOC, Ayanna, Rashida-- 3 perfect voting records + more

Now that Congress has been taking some tough votes, there are just 13 freshman members left with crucial vote scores that give them “A” grades. And only 6 are left with perfect 100% crucial votes scores: Jahana Hayes (D-CT), Andy Levin (D-MI), Joe Neguse (D-CO), AOC (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

There are 28 non-freshmen who are also in the 100% category this cycle, several of them voting way better than usual because of fear of being primaries from the left— Adam Smith (New Dem-WA), Pete DeFazio (OR), Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY), Frank Pallone (NJ), Danny Davis (IL), Suzanne Bonamici (OR), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX) and Yvette Clarke (NY).

Of Massachusetts’ 9 members of Congress— all Democrats— 5 have primaries: Richard Neal, Joe Kennedy III, Katherine Clark, Seth Moulton, and Stephen Lynch. One who doesn’t is Ayanna Pressley, a freshman in the 7th district (Boston’s Back Bay, East Boston, Fenway and Roxbury and south through Dorchester and Hyde Park as far as Randolph, and north through Brighton, Cambridge, Somerville and Chelsea as far as Everett). It’s the bluest district in Massachusetts— by far, D+34. In fact, it’s the bluest district in New England.

Pressley had a very tough case to make against incumbent Democrat Mike Capuano, largely because he was one of the most progressive members of Congress. But she beat him pretty handily:

It wasn’t so much because Capuano was ideologically out of sync with the district; is was more because he was just out of touch with much of a district that grew younger while he grew older. I was less than generous about her primary win:

Mike Capuano, a sterling progressive, was at a disadvantage being a long-time incumbent as well as white and male. The fact that he's probably further left than she is-- and certainly further left in the largely unexamined area of foreign policy— where he's for peace and she's... an AIPAC supporter, doesn't matter to the folks looking for another scalp and without the discernment to fully understand the difference between a corrupt conservative like Joe Crowley, who earned disdain and defeat, and Mike Capuano, who was steamrolled by identity politics.

In their intercept piece, Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani hit all the right questions. "The challenge to Capuano raises a slew of political questions in the Trump era: Under what circumstances does a member of Congress deserve re-election? In a race between two similarly positioned politicians, how important is identity? How important is a progressive track record?"

There are some similarities between Ocasio-Cortez’s and Pressley’s bids: Pressley is black, meaning that, like Ocasio-Cortez, she is a women of color running to unseat a white man in a majority non-white district. But, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and [Kara] Eastman, both of whom ran with sparse political resources— few campaign dollars and virtually no major establishment endorsements— Pressley is backed by major donors and powerful figures within the Democratic Party’s elite. According to Politico, Pressley, a former aide to then-Sen. John Kerry, was urged by the “donor class” to make her run. Federal Election Commission reports show she has raised over $1 million, more than double the amount raised by Ocasio-Cortez and more than triple the amount raised by Eastman before election day.

While Ocasio-Cortez and Eastman won by sharply criticizing the moderate voting records of their primary opponents, Pressley has demurred repeatedly when asked to point to major policy areas in which she disagrees with her opponent.

Pressley has garnered some support from establishment forces: Her campaign contributors include Boston-area megadonor Barbara Lee; Minyon Moore, a so-called Democratic National Committee superdelegate and principal of the corporate lobbying firm Dewey Square group; and [establishment] Super PAC strategist Guy Cecil. She also appears to be gaining momentum among progressives. She has been endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez and Democracy for America. Meanwhile, progressive groups are seizing upon the Pressley campaign as an opportunity for change.

“Congressman Mike Capuano has been a fine, progressive member of Congress, but having an experienced progressive like Ayanna Pressley on the ballot is an unmissable opportunity for Massachusetts to both ensure a leading woman of color represents its only majority-minority district and add the voice of just one person of color to New England’s currently all-white congressional delegation,” said Jim Dean, chair for Democracy for America, in a statement. Jonathan Cohn, co-chair of Progressive Massachusetts, explained that his group also endorsed Pressley over Capuano because of the “need for more diverse representation in Congress and the need for more activist leadership from Democrats in Congress.”

Justice Democrats, the new advocacy PAC spearheading progressive primary challenges across the country, endorsed Pressley over Capuano. Alexandra Rojas, a spokesperson for the group, said the group “would like to see fresh leadership, especially from women and people of color, in one of the few majority-minority districts in the country represented by a white man.”

...Capuano, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, blazed an unusual path on Capitol Hill. He has championed “Medicare for All” for over a decade, helped establish the influential Office of Congressional Ethics, and, as Congress has increasingly abandoned its corporate oversight responsibilities, has made a name for himself dressing down the chief executives of big banks, airlines, and other industries for engaging in fraud and abuse.

For some activists on the left who have supported Capuano’s policy stances, the prospect of challenging the progressive stalwart is a misguided venture. Robert Naiman, policy director of the progressive think tank Just Foreign Policy, said he has cheered on the wave of progressive insurgent candidates, but was surprised to see Capuano— who is known for his progressive foreign policy stances— facing a challenge. Naiman, a watchdog on foreign intervention, rattled off a list of foreign policy stances Capuano has staked, agitating for peace even against his own party, from leading the opposition to the war in Yemen to maintaining a lonely battle against President Barack Obama’s war in Libya.

“Taking down Capuano? That would be terrible,” Naiman said. “He’s a progressive champion.”

In the few areas in which Pressley says she presents an alternative to Capuano, the contrast is nonetheless muddled. Pressley said she pledged to decline corporate PAC money, while Capuano has not. That may be true in the 2018 Democratic congressional primary, but Pressley fundraised from corporate, police, and lobbyist-run PACs while a member of the city council, ethics disclosures show, before taking the pledge this cycle. (Pressley’s campaign did not offer comment for this article.)

Records show that the Pressley Committee, the registered entity for Pressley’s municipal campaigns, received donations from several corporate lobbying PACs, including the Nelson Mullins Riley Scarborough and Nixon Peabody. Individuals from the powerful Massachusetts corporate lobbying firm Dewey Square Group have donated 18 times to Pressley’s campaigns.

...Another area where Capuano’s long national record stands in contrast to Pressley’s local profile is on foreign policy-- particularly American wars abroad. Questionnaires sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, a grassroots pressure group focused on curbing the power of the Pentagon and ending military adventures overseas, provide one of the few windows into the candidates’ views in this area. But, in her responses, Pressley declined to take a position on whether she would “vote to terminate the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan” or whether she would support legislation to prohibit “stationing military forces [in Syria], and providing assistance and training to insurgents.”

Explaining her non-answers, Pressley wrote that she would seek to exhaust other diplomatic and nonmilitary options, but wanted to avoid closing the door on the possibility of supporting future military solutions to ending the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan. Capuano, in contrast, answered “yes” to both questions in the survey. He also noted that he introduced legislation to require congressional authorization for the use of force in Syria; was one of only 11 lawmakers to file a lawsuit against Obama for using military force in Libya without congressional approval; and has voted on several occasions to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

While local Massachusetts media has largely ignored foreign policy in its coverage of the primary race, the issue looms large among those who have served with Capuano.

“I have long looked to my Progressive Caucus colleague Mike for his leadership and principled advocacy on U.S. foreign policy,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Given the Trump administration’s constant warmongering, progressives in Congress need Mike Capuano’s unwavering moral courage, now more than ever.”

This week, after careful consideration of the two candidates, Massachusetts Peace Action decided to endorse Capuano.

Celebrate Pressley's win for what it is-- not for what it isn't. I have no doubt that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is going to be a huge upgrade from Joe Crowley. We'll see if we can say the same thing about Ayanna Pressley and Mike Capuano next year.

I would have much rather seen Brianna Wu beat right-of-center, anti-Choice Democrat Stephen Lynch, also in Boston (MA-08)— but progressive activists largely ignored that race. And Lynch rolled right over her.

That said, I'm sure Ayanna Pressley will be a much better member of Congress than most-- even than most from Massachusetts. Or, at least, I have reason to hope so. On the other hand, is Barbara Lee safe in her seat? Mark Pocan? Jim McGovern? Raul Grijalva? Jerry Nadler? Alan Lowenthal? Do their records as fighting progressives count for anything?

Blue America is backing progressive challengers this cycle against conservative Democratic incumbents— Marie Newman against Blue Dog Dan Lipinski (Chicago), Shaniyat Chowdhury against New Dem Gregory Meeks (Queens), Michael Owens against Blue Dog David Scott (suburban Atlanta) and Eva Putzova against Blue Dog Tom O’Halleran (Arizona). We’ll be endorsing one of the candidates running against Steny Hoyer and we’re vetting several others around the country as well. All of the incumbents have earned primary defeats and all of the candidates we have endorsed will make much better representatives in Congress. (Please consider contributing to their campaigns by clicking on the Primary a Blue Dog 2020 thermometer on the right.)

But primarying a progressive against a challenger— even a good one— is still a path we haven’t been willing to go down. This week our candidate in Queens, Shaniyat Chowdhury, introduced me to a progressive activist not far from where I live— young woman who is eager to beat a strongly progressive member of Congress I had once helped win. His voting record is fine but he hardly turned out to be an AOC or a Rashida Tlaib. She made her case like this:

I'm challenging Representative X because while he calls himself a progressive-- he falls short in many ways.

While I've been organizing against war profiteers, he's been taking money from them, as well as private prisons, Monsanto, pharma, insurance companies, etc.

While he's constantly out in the media bashing Donald Trump personally, he is silent on many of the policy reasons we should be countering Trump: His provocations of war with Iran, coup attempt in Venezuela, and the slew of corporate execs he's been appointing to top government positions.

I fault Democrats in general for not providing an alternative to the Neo-conservatives' foreign policy agenda, and believe it's important that Members of Congress play a leading role creating a vision of what real diplomacy looks like.

To date, for instance, many Dems have simply discounted diplomatic attempts with North Korea as impossible with Trump in charge. As unfortunate as it is that he's our President, I believe our pursuit of peace must be non-partisan and maximize any and all openings for diplomatic engagement.

Mr. X has also repeatedly supported efforts to suppress dialogue and peaceful protest of Israel's occupation of Palestine, which I find offensive and unconstitutional.

In one of the most progressive districts in the country, I believe we deserve a real progressive, who will put the people's priorities above all else. I know I can be that leader.

I would love to discuss the matters in greater depth, if you are interested.

I’ll meet up with her next week and blog about how that goes, OK? I'm probably more eager than you are to see how this turns out-- and this isn't the only instance of this nature looming.

The Freshmen: What About Sharice Davids?

And, so far... a waste of a House seat. Better than Kevin Yoder, though

Kansas' 3rd district (Wyandotte and Johnson counties and some of more rural Miami County) flipped red to blue in 2018. Basically, the district is Kansas City and it's suburbs, a swing district that Obama lost narrowly twice but that Hillary won, also narrowly (one point), in 2016. The district is 72.8% white, 11.6% Latino, 8.6% African-American and 4.2% Asian. The area is prosperous-- and it has the 83rd highest medium income of the 435 congressional districts. The PVI is R+4. Blue Dog Democrat Dennis Moore had served as congressman from 1999 until 2011. Moore, suffering with Alzheimer's disease, retired in 2010 and the Democrats ran his wife. She lost to a Democrat-turned-Republican, Kevin Yoder in the 2010 Republican wave election. The DCCC then insisted on trying to replicate Moore by running Blue Dogs and losing each time.

Democrats sensed Yoder was weak in 2018 and there was a fierce 6-person winner-take-all primary. Davids ran as a moderate identity politics candidate and her closest rival was Brent Welder, a progressive Berniecrat. She eked out a narrow 23,379 (27.3%) to 21,190 (33.8%) win. Welder and the rest of the Democrats rallied around Davids for the general and she kicked Yoder's ass:

Sharice Davids is a native American, a lesbian, a mixed martial arts fighter and an attorney. When she got to Washington she joined the right-of-center, Wall Street owned-and-operated New Dems and quickly ran up a solid "F" voting record, tied with 5 other Democrats as the 212th "most progressive" in the House, according to ProgressivePunch. Not a promising start.

Over the weekend, the Kansas City Star ran a piece on her first 100 days by Bryan Lowry about how the establishment loves her for being a nice quiet backbencher who doesn't make any waves the way AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib do. "[W]hile her personal biography is barrier-breaking," wrote Lowry, "Davids’ approach to her first 100 days in office has been exceedingly traditional, marked by deference to leadership and studious attention to the details of legislating. As other members of her freshman class, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have made big headlines with proposals like the Green New Deal, Davids has quietly been laying the groundwork for a longer game." And, predictably, all the worst assholes in Congress just love her.

“I would put her toward the top of the freshman class in terms of doing things the right way,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-IL), the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“She’s not a showoff,” Bustos said. “She’s an athlete and if you’ve known any high-level athletes, they’re disciplined, they’re methodical… nailing all the fundamentals.”

“You have to build relationships and learn what are the things that are of interest to other members of Congress, what are the things that folks have been taking a lead on for a really long time,” Davids said. “And what are things [where] there’s space for me to contribute to the conversation that’s been going on or to ask questions to spark a new conversation.”

This approach has helped her build clout with party leaders, who see her as rising star. Davids will be one of two freshman Democrats speaking at the Center for American Progress’ ideas conference in Washington next month, a sign of her growing status.

“I like people who are team players. Sharice is a team player. I like people who are first going to listen before they speak up at the microphone,” Bustos said.

Bustos has been engaged in a public dispute with Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives, about the DCCC’s efforts to protect incumbent Democrats against primary challenges.

[Emanuel] Cleaver noted that Ocasio-Cortez, who he referred to has “the congresswoman from New York,” came to Kansas last year to campaign on behalf of Davids’ primary opponent Brent Welder. Cleaver complained that Davids, a centrist from the Midwest, hasn’t gotten as much attention as some of her more progressive, coastal peers.

“Congresswoman Davids may be the most brilliant and thoughtful member of the freshman class who nobody has noticed. And a lot of that is if you’re from the East Coast or the West Coast… the media just automatically fawns over you,” Cleaver said.

“If you’re in flyover territory people tend to overlook, but I can guarantee you-- because I hear it at home-- the people at home aren’t overlooking her.”

...Cleaver said Davids takes the same meticulous approach when deciding how to vote on legislation, regardless of the bill’s importance.

“Sharice Davids may be the only person that reads every sentence of every bill, of every amendment… I mean, everything,” said Cleaver, who joked that he sometimes tells her that she doesn’t have to do that because Democrats are in the majority.

After her careful parsing of bills, Davids has still aligned closely with Democratic leadership in her votes, a fact that has been noticed by her supporters and critics alike.

“She for the first 100 days here has been incredibly loyal to Nancy Pelosi and her leadership, voting in lockstep. She’s not creating headaches. She’s shown no independence,” said Bob Salera, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is targeting Davids’ district in 2020.

Davids also faces pressure from a vocal minority on the left that want to see her back progressive policy goals, such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.


During the campaign, Davids was open to supporting a single-payer health care system as a long-term objective, but emphasized more incremental legislation as realistic policy. At her recent town hall in Olathe, a few attendees booed when Davids said she wasn’t ready to commit to supporting Medicare for All, because she had not finished vetting it. This week, she told The Star that she will not support the Medicare for All bill in its current form because it would phase out employer-based insurance.

“That’s a pretty big sticking issue. I’ve talked to a lot of people who are not only satisfied with their employer plan, but are actually very pleased with it,” Davids said.




“And those folks aren’t saying I’m opposed to us figuring out a way to get universal access to affordable, quality health care for folks, but they are saying I don’t want to lose the insurance I have now. So that’s a sticking point on there.”


Matt Erickson, a 32-year-old Prairie Village resident, was among those who booed Davids’ answer in Olathe. Learning that Davids has officially come out against Medicare for all was even more disappointing, he said.

“Arguments like ‘people are tied to employee sponsored health insurance,’ I don’t find convincing,” said Erickson, who volunteered for Welder during the 2018 primary.

“People like their employer provided insurance because the alternative is they don’t have insurance at all,” he said. “In Medicare for all, the alternative is never having to change insurance plans again, no premiums, no deductibles, and no financial barriers to healthcare. You don’t lose your insurance if you leave your job or you get laid off.”

But Davids’ centrist approach may serve well in her suburban district, where Republicans outnumber Democrats. She’s instead focused on more incremental steps, such as advocating for her home state to expand Medicaid.

Davids is so weak and worthless-- and so determined to appeal to Republicans and be seen as willing to spit in the eye of progressives-- that she's one of only 30 House Democrats who hasn't co-sponsored Bobby Scott's livable minimum wage bill, H.R. 582, to which 205 Democrats have signed on. So far there is no primary challenger, nor is there a Republican challenger-- just an identity politics incumbent who is already proving herself to be about as bad as any Democrat can be... before switching parties. Perfect for Cheri Bustos.

Is Mayor Pete Setting Off Alarm Bells For You Yet?

One thing Pete's got is the killer p.r. consultant, Lis Smith 

If you've never heard me railing about identity politics, you're probably just discovering DWT. If I were running for office I would tell people to vote for me because I support the Green New Deal, Medicare-For-All, a livable minimum wage, fair taxation, the re-institution of free state colleges and universities... and other policies aimed to reduce extreme income inequality. Or I could appeal to voters by saying "I'm gay" or "I'm Jewish" or-- if I were a Republican-- "I'm a white middle-aged male."That would be identity politics. Which I absolutely hate. People should be elected based on-- what did Chris Hayes say again?-- who they'll fight for, what they'll fight for and on who can be trusted. "Everything else is noise."

Is Mayor Pete's campaign for the presidency just noise-- more identity politics gaslighting? Christina Cauterucci addressed it over the weekend for Slate: Is Pete Buttigieg Just Another White Male Candidate, or Does His Gayness Count as Diversity? Pete's the newest Democratic political celebrity-- out of the blue and currently 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 on Sunday 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 on Monday. '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."

She asks if Mayor Pete is "a run-of-the-mill white male candidate, or does his sexuality set him apart?" Me, I'd love to see a gay president-- if he's the best candidate. Otherwise... not. Getting into an arguement over which marginalized identities are more or less marginalized, is precisely what Hayes meant when he said "Everything else is noise." Furthermore, 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.

But even as invalidating Mayor Pete's claim to an identity politics badge, Cauterucci seems to be a big fan of identity politics herself-- but for women, people of colors and, perhaps, LGBTQ-centric candidates-- so, sorry to say, just more noise. In the essay about Mayor Pete we're going to look at below, the author mentions that "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, cosmopolitianism, '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?'"

A couple of days ago, I read the definitional essay about Mayor Pete by Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs, All About Pete. He's not at all convinced and, in the subtitle, warns his readers to "only accept politicians who have proved they actually care about people other than themselves…" I don't get the idea that Robinson is an identity politics kind of guy. Still 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."



In the Vice video interview above, the reporter seems eager to get a specific policy agenda out of Mayor Pete. Mayor Pete's not playing along. "Part of where the left and the center-left have gone wrong," he tells the reporter, "is that we’ve been so policy-led that we haven’t been as philosophical. We like to think of ourselves as the intellectual ones. But the truth is that the right has done a better job, in my lifetime, of connecting up its philosophy and its values to its politics. Right now I think we need to articulate the values, lay out our philosophical commitments and then develop policies off of that. And I’m working very hard not to put the cart before the horse."

Robinson doesn't like the way that smells. "This is extremely fishy. First, while there’s a valid argument that 'technocratic liberal wonkery' disconnected from values is uninspiring and useless, the left is not usually accused of being too specific on policy. Quite the opposite: The common critique is that behind the mushy values talk there are too few substantive solutions to social problems. Why does Buttigieg think telling people your values and coming up with plans are mutually exclusive? Why does he think having a platform means you believe you’ve got it 'all figured out on Day 1'? Why treat policy advocates as 'dishonest'? Why mention the extremely low bar of being 'more policy-oriented than the current president?' And what use are values statements if you don’t tell people what the values mean for action? I’ve seen plenty of progressive policy agendas that don’t sacrifice values (e.g., Abdul El-Sayed’s plans, the U.K. Labour Party’s 2017 manifesto). A candidate who replies to this question with this answer should set off alarm bells." In explaining Mayor Pete's book, he notes that "Here is one thing I keep noticing about Pete Buttigieg: When asked why he wants to hold an office, he talks much more about who he is than what he will do... I do not see anything suggesting Pete Buttigieg is an organizer, activist, or really a left-winger of any kind... Buttigieg is one of those people who thinks Republicans are good folks whose values you can respect, even if you differ with them."

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.

It also treats America as an innocent blundering giant with “the best of intentions.” Buttigieg quotes Graham Greene: “Innocence is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” This is the Ken Burns line: We mean so well but we make terrible mistakes. It excludes the possibility that American leaders know full well what they are doing but simply do not care about the lives of non-Americans. And, in fact, it implicitly accepts the devaluation of non-American lives. Discussing the dissolution of Iraq into “chaos” (note: a word that obscures culpability), Buttigieg writes of “a reality on the ground that could no longer be denied amid rising American body count.” The Iraqi body count (over 500,000) is unmentioned, just as he leaves out the Vietnamese body count (in the millions). The phrase “reality on the ground” is used without any discussion of what that reality was for those who actually lived on the ground.

...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.

...Here’s another remarkable thing you’ll notice throughout Shortest Way Home: When Pete Buttigieg reports having meetings with people, it’s usually party bosses and advisers rather than ordinary voters, around whom he often seems uncomfortable. In a city that is ¼ Black, the most visible encounter he has with a Black constituent is an extremely telling one:

A big man who was also a deacon at Mount Carmel, the fastest-growing black church in town, he leaned back in his seat and shifted between knowing glances at his fellow firefighters and piercing stares at us. He seemed interested but skeptical. ‘I like what I’m seeing, and I like what you’re saying. But how do I know you’re not just another sweet-talking devil trying to get my pants off?’

It was hard to think of a good answer to that, so I kept on with the pitch. ‘I don’t know about that, but you’ll be able to hold me accountable for what we achieve from day one…’ You could never be sure, but I felt our case was convincing…

The fireman gets it: Pete is a skilled rhetorician trying to get people’s pants off. How do you know the fireman is right? Because Pete can’t even think of an answer to this extremely simple question. If someone asks you “How do I know you’re not just some bullshitter?” and you’re not just some bullshitter, you can say “Because I have done X, Y, and Z. I have shown that I’m a person of my word. I have clear plans, and I can tell you why they’ll work, how they’ll help you, and exactly what I’m going to do to make sure they come about.” If, on the other hand, you are just some bullshitter, and your entire life experience up to this point has been going to Harvard and working for one of the world’s worst companies, you will flounder. You have no plans, no ideas, you have no record of good deeds and community service. He’s got you figured, and all you can do is “keep on with your pitch” and stammer the word “accountability.”

One thing I find remarkable is that when Buttigieg listens to other people, he’s not actually listening to them. Check out this little gem from when he’s figuring out if he can run:

I sat listening to anyone who would give me time-- the redevelopment commission [first on the list, of course], the head of the local community foundation, the most respected black pastors on the West Side-- to see what they thought of the city’s future, and to gauge what they might think of me.

Okay, true, he wants to know “what they thought of the city’s future” in addition to their thoughts on him, but note what he’s not asking them: What do you need from a mayor? What should a mayor do and can I figure out how to do it? He listens to gauge whether he should run, not to find out what community concerns were. Lest you think I’m being unfair to the passage, read the book: Try to find out what those Black pastors’ political priorities were. Try to determine what the Black fireman wanted from a mayor. Pete wasn’t curious enough to find out, so you won’t either.

  ...As mayor, he says, he was “tech-oriented.” He was “fresh from a job in management consulting and eager to unlock whatever efficiencies could be found.” He wanted to “follow the data where it leads.” What does that mean? Buttigieg cites “app for pothole detection” and his “smart sewers” that used wi-fi-enabled sensors to more efficiently control wastewater flow. He was even willing to “follow the data” toward layoffs. He found that it would save money to put robotic arms on city garbage trucks and fire human trash collectors. Buttigieg was “prepared to eliminate the jobs,” in part because the robots “led to lower injury rates” (fewer injuries being the predictable consequence of fewer jobs). Buttigieg’s ruthlessly quantitative approach to municipal government leads an acquaintance to compare him to Robert McNamara, which leads to another musing on the folly of well-intentioned planners.

...I didn’t realize the whole way through Shortest Way Home that South Bend actually has a serious poverty problem! Over ¼ of its residents are poor. It’s not just that Buttigieg is interested in hooking the sewers up to wi-fi. (I’m a “sewer socialist,” I like progressive wastewater management.) It’s that he spends zero time in the book discussing the economic struggles of the residents of his city!

Did you know there’s a giant racial wealth gap in South Bend? You won’t if all you read about South Bend is Shortest Way Home. Oh sure, he takes us on an ambling tour through the city, shows us people kayaking on the old industrial canal, wanders under the railroad bridge, takes us to see live music in an abandoned swimming pool. He tells us about twilight on the river, the fish-stealing heron on his running route (“To some he is a villain… but to me he is an elegant bird.”) But have a look at Prosperity Now’s “Racial Wealth Divide in South Bend” report and see if you think these should really be the mayor’s narrative priorities.

South Bend African Americans make ½ of what South Bend whites make. They’re twice as likely to be in liquid asset poverty as whites. Their unemployment rate is nearly twice as high... [T]he situation for Hispanic residents of South Bend is similarly disturbing.

What did Mayor Pete do about this? Well, to do something about it he might have had to care about it, and there’s no evidence from his book that he’s ever even thought about it. In fact, as I started reading about South Bend after getting through Shortest Way Home, there was a lot Buttigieg had left out. The eviction rate has been nearly three times the national average, a “crisis” among the worst in the country. If the word “eviction” appears in Buttigieg’s book, I did not notice it. The opiate crisis, homelessness, and gentrification are all serious issues in South Bend, but Buttigieg mentions them offhandedly if at all.

...Mayors can’t solve all problems. What’s disturbing about Buttigieg is that he doesn’t even seem very interested in the problems at all. Someone should ask him: Why does his book spend less time talking about poverty than about the time he played Rhapsody in Blue on the piano with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra? (“Technique sometimes took precedence over expressiveness” was the review of Buttigieg’s performance in the local paper, which sounds fitting.)

...[During his time at war in Afghanistan] "he did not apparently meet a single Afghan who he thought worthy of naming in his book, and the people of Kabul appear as anonymous pieces of scenery. (In this respect they are like the Black people of South Bend or the homeless people of Harvard Square: nameless nonentities whose opinions Buttigieg has never sought.)

Buttigieg spends a lot of his time in Afghanistan googling things and meditating on why soldiers must die in wars that are largely over. He doesn’t have any serious criticisms to make of the military itself, and one can see how he’s the type of person who would pronounce himself “troubled” by Barack Obama’s clemency for Chelsea Manning. (Remember that Manning publicly exposed U.S. war crimes, a misdeed for which she was imprisoned and tortured.) The scope of Buttigieg’s self-awareness can be seen from the fact that, in recalling his ambivalence about deployment, he quotes a friend quoting G.K. Chesterton to him: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.” A morally serious person would realize that one American person’s inconvenience/adventure is another non-American person’s incinerated wedding party. Considering Buttigieg’s stance on Israel, totally oblivious to the mass killings and the brutality of occupation, we might worry about his commitment to restraining militarism.

...In the last five minutes of his political life, Buttigieg has started making some radical noises, as is necessary to compete in a Sanders-dominated primary. Buttigieg is smart, and I think people should be warned: He’s probably going to say a lot of good stuff. He’s probably going to sign on to major left initiatives, or even try running to the left of Sanders somehow. (“You want to put two more justices on the Supreme Court? How about twelve?”) You’re going to nod, you’re going to cheer, you’re going to say “Wow, he’s really speaking our language.”

But here’s a fact about Pete Buttigieg: He picks up languages quickly. He already speaks seven of them, and you can find stories online of him dazzling people by dropping some Arabic or Norwegian on them. The lingo of Millennial Leftism will be a cinch for Pete. He will begin to use all the correct phrases, with perfect grammar. The question you should ask is: What language has he been speaking up until now?...

Mayor Pete is fresh, he’s untainted… He has an entirely different story than any other politician in our lifetime.” -- a wealthy Upper West Side Democrat, quoted in the New York Times

Mayor Pete does not have an entirely different story than any other politician in our lifetime. He has the same story they all have. David Axelrod has gushed: “His story is an incredible story.” Is it? The son of two professors at an elite university goes on to several different elite universities, serves an uneventful seven-month tour of duty in the Navy, and then becomes the technocratic mayor of the city his parents’ university is in? Ilhan Omar has an entirely different story than any other politician. So does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This man is the story of the American elite.

The myth-making here is going to be intense. The profiles are already streaming forth. The New York Times covered his wedding by wondering if Buttigieg would be president. You will be sold Buttigieg’s small-town milliennial neoliberalism the way they’re trying to sell you Beto O’Rourke’s skateboard neoliberalism. Hey kids, you like Medicare For All? So does this guy! But he’s young and from the Midwest and likes Hamilton! Bernie is old. You don’t need an old man. You need young hip progressivism.

Do not be deceived by this. 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.

A Plea for No More Petes

Why? Why have I spent so long talking about the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, an underdog candidate for the presidency? Why have I been so relentlessly negative? Because I see what this is, and I see how these things go, and we can’t afford to make this mistake again. No more Bright Young People with their beautiful families and flawless characters and elite educations and vacuous messages of uplift and togetherness. Give me fucked-up people with convictions and gusto. Give me real human beings, not CV-padding corporate zombies.

If we are lucky, Buttigieg Fever will dissipate quickly when people realize this guy is the same rancid wine in a new wifi-enabled bottle. “Hah, remember when Pete Buttigieg became a thing for a hot second?” It will be remembered as neoliberalism’s last gasp, a pitiful attempt at co-optation that was met with a unanimous reply of “Nice try.” Let’s hope to God that’s how this goes.

...Pete Buttigieg is all about Pete Buttigieg.