Showing posts with label 2020. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2020. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 04, 2020

Biden's Momentum Now


Joe Biden is in the lead now, and the favored to win the nomination. He wants to strengthen Obamacare, add the public option to it, a tall task in itself, and keep the private insurers in the game. Medicare For All makes too many people jittery. That is a slogan, that is no plan, they think. They hear Bernie say, we will blow up the building first before we build a new one. And a lot of people go, but where do I live in the meantime?

I have noticed since the beginning, Bernie is doing worse this time than he did in 2016 on all sorts of metrics. And as AOC went away, so did the young voters.

Coronavirus will beat Trump. Biden might benefit. He will also benefit from the Bloomberg infrastructure, which is formidable.

Does the number two spot go to Warren or Bloomberg? Or could it be Bernie?

Joe Biden was another one who sat out in 2016 because he thought it was Hillary's year.

Bloomberg considering dropping out after Biden rout
What Went Down On Super Tuesday
Bloomberg on Warren: 'I didn't realize she's still in'
Democrats Decide That Joe Biden, as Risky as He Ever Was, Is the Safest Bet The former vice president had the Super Tuesday of his dreams, winning in places he hasn’t even set foot in recently. ....... But a week ago, the result would have been something close to unthinkable. ...... Lifted by a hasty unity among center-left Democrats disinclined toward political revolution, Mr. Biden has propelled himself in the span of three days from electoral failure to would-be juggernaut..... tactical voters who think little of Senator Bernie Sanders and fear that his nomination would mean four more years of President Trump. ..... Bloomberg’s first brush with national voters yielded meager returns on a colossal financial investment...... When it mattered most, though, the judgment came swiftly from Sanders-averse Democrats. ...... All right, we’ll take him. ...... “John Kerry, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton,” said Rebecca Kirszner Katz, a veteran progressive strategist. “All safe choices.” ....... Certainly Mr. Trump would appear to have his preferences: Last year, he was impeached after trying to enlist a foreign power’s help to damage Mr. Biden. ...... That Mr. Biden’s fortunes have changed says more about the context of this primary than the content of his campaign......... Mr. Bloomberg flailed on the debate stage as he stepped out from behind the reputational curtain of his ubiquitous advertisements. And many in the party have remained uncomfortable with the kind of unswerving progressivism that Mr. Sanders demands. ...... a Biden-Sanders matchup is the logical venue for the party’s foremost ideological debate about the proper scope and ambition of government

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Tuesday, February 18, 2020

A Mike Warren Ticket



Right now it is looking like it is going to be a Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren ticket, and it will be a fair ticket, fair in that Warren represents the Bernie wing of the party and Mike represents moderates like Pete and Klobuchar, and it is going to be a strong ticket because I trust Warren more than Mike on being able to go toe to toe to the inevitable pettiness of Donald Trump. With Mike Bloomberg clocking at 20% to Bernie's 30, for the first time I am breathing easy that Trump will be out. The fucker lacks basic decency. Get him out. (Robert De Niro on Trump has been one of the great comedies of the past four years.)

Right now the arithmetic is in Mike's favor. Even in the best-case scenario, even if he leads, Bernie is looking at 25% of the delegates at the convention. He is going to do worse this time than last time when he lost. And that is assuming Mike stays at 20 and Bernie at 30. That needle will move. It is easy to imagine a scenario where most of the non-Bernie delegates switch to Mike and he clinches the nomination.

I thank Bernie. Four years ago Mike Bloomberg was worried the country might not be ready for a "Jewish divorcee." Bernie put that to rest. His Einstein hairstyle gives away his Jewishness. And he is right up there on the Trump scale on divorces and remarriages. Bernie pushed Mike into the ring and I thank him for that.

I wrote a 20-page memo late in 2015 that I hand-delivered to the Bloomberg Foundation Offices urging Mike to run. He did not. He did the Elizabeth Warren thing of thinking that was Hillary's year. And so it would be fair to blame Mike for Trump. Will you please wipe away this mess you gave to us? The blame is on you.

The big news today is not climate change. The big news today is the Age Of Abundance that is right around the corner. 2,000 years ago (and every year since) Jews rejected Jesus because they had been waiting for a messiah who would sit on a throne like David and usher in an Age Of Abundance. Like a rabbi said recently about that abundance, "I look outside my window, I don't see it!" Instead they saw a guy helplessly dangling from a cross.



Mike deserves to win because he is the only Steve Jobs in the race. And I mean that literally. He is not as big as Steve Jobs, but he is like Steve Jobs. He is a tech entrepreneur. It was a West Coast East Coast thing like among rappers. The Bloomberg Terminal has a PC form, and the PC form while pedestrian today was cutting edge when it came out. To start from zero and take it to 50 billion is something.

Some people ask, how old is Mike? Well, how old is Donald? How old is Bernie? Moses had seniority, so does Mike.



Mike Bloomberg has been spending a lot of money. Is that a billionaire buying an election? If it is, it is at least a self-made billionaire. But this is not a billionaire buying an election. This is someone who believes in campaign finance reform so much he is taking zero special interest and lobbyist money.

Mayor Mike was a Republican. But before that he was a Democrat. He saw what a mess the Democratic primary was going to be, and so he ran as a Republican and served three terms: best business move he ever made. It is the power of branding that the market value of his company went up substantially when he was doing nothing at the company except being in news all day long. That brings me to why Warren needs to be on the ticket. She understands the power of branding. She has been speaking for some of the same things as Bernie, but nobody can call her a socialist. I don't know what it is about this country, but the word socialist is toxic. It is like the gun laws. People in other countries scratch their head.

Mike was a partner at a firm on Wall Street. And his partners kicked him out. The guy was a troublemaker, always coming up with new ideas, giving everyone headaches. So they kicked him out. He did not choose to launch Bloomberg. He was forced into it. But that is not my favorite Bloomberg story. My favorite story is, after he had managed to build the Bloomberg Terminal, he needed people to buy them. So he would show up. But you can't get into those tall buildings unless you work there. And so he would buy coffee. When some of the top guys came along, he would say, "I bought you coffee." And I guess free coffee is appreciated in all income brackets. He would sneak into those buildings with them to sell his Bloomberg Terminals.

When he was Mayor I was in the city. What was most perplexing to me was Al Sharpton never saw a white politician he did not suspect. But here was Al getting along just fine with Mike. What is going on, I thought.



Stop and frisk is controversial because racism is America's original sin. Okay, so I have been stopped and frisked. I speak from experience. This was in Ridgewood, Queens. It was not even that late. I was walking from a friend's apartment to mine. Just when I crossed the street, I heard the police car siren and saw the flashing light. I turned around on instinct before I could figure out what was going on. A young, good looking woman police officer came straight towards me and reached for my pant pocket. She pulled out the pen. "Oh, it is a pen?" She thought the flash was that of a knife. She gave it back to me and equally swiftly went back to the older male police officer waiting by the car.

Better stop and frisk than shoot and kill. Because before Bloomberg, there was a Giuliani, and it was shoot to kill. Giuliani's slogan was, "We own the night."



It has to be situational. Great effort has to be made to make sure the sting of racism is taken out of the equation. It has to be data based. Collect all crime data in the country. And go by the crime rate. At particular crime rates, stop and frisk would make sense. On the other hand, that same community, once the crime rate has gone down enough shoud no longer be seeing stop and frisk.

Not to say there were not excesses. But let that who has not sinned cast the first stone. Who would you rather have? A guy who will apologize? Or some dude who never once apologized for his relentless racist comments? And is in the White House. Donald Trump is racist. Mike Bloomberg is not racist. I went to school in the South. There racist meant you said bad things about people like Mike.

When you are Mayor, even of NYC, it is not about ideology. It is about management. Mike brought good management skills to the table. His first act was to rearrange the furniture. The setup he asked for was more like Mark Zuckerberg has at Facebook. Anyone can readily come over to the boss.

This country has become so divided and hyperpartisan that alone might be a big enough reason to elect Mike. This guy is officially bipartisan. He was a Republican Mayor. Now he is a Democratic candidate. What do you do after you have held the second most visible political office in the land? You go for the most visible one.

Who conducts foreign policy as Mayor? This guy has. He got together lots of Mayors around the world on climate.

Talking about climate, I think a big part of the solution is that we need 10 Elon Musks. When Trump heaped praise on Musk about how he was a great American entrepreneur, Musk shot back: "I am from South Africa, you idiot." Musk is likely to see a fellow entrepreneur in Bloom and respect him. Only Kanye thinks Donald Trump is some sort of an entrepreneur.

A country where the Chancellor of Trump University can become president is not a country that is doing well. The guy is a scam.

Full disclosure: I have applied for a job as a political strategist. I have met Mike in person.









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Thursday, January 09, 2020

A Glass Of Water Can Be A Lot Of Water

Hello Nancy
But
A glass of water
Can be 
A lot of
Water
Depends on
If
The Glass is
Full
Or Half Empty
If
It
Is
Half full
Well, 
That is 
A lot of water
At the 
Bottom 
But
If 
It
Is
Half
Empty
That is
Still
A 
Whole
Lot of
Water
At
That 
Bottom. 








Could It Be Bernie?

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Sunday, December 15, 2019

Bloomberg's Political "Innovation:" Money Heavy

"Money talks."
-- Mike Bloomberg

‘Mayors for Mike’: How Bloomberg’s Money Built a 2020 Political Network Michael Bloomberg is relying on powerful city leaders as allies in his presidential campaign. Several have received grants, training and support packages totaling millions from his foundation. ...... Mr. Tubbs had reason to feel kinship with Mr. Bloomberg. Last year, he graduated from a mayoral training program that Mr. Bloomberg sponsors at Harvard University. Mr. Tubbs had attended a conference co-sponsored by Mr. Bloomberg’s philanthropic foundation in Paris in 2017, and was featured in its 2018 annual report. And this past June, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation donated $500,000 to an education reform group based in Stockton, a struggling inland city in Northern California......... Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has assets totaling $9 billion, has supported 196 different cities with grants, technical assistance and education programs worth a combined $350 million. Now, leaders in some of those cities are forming the spine of Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign: He has been endorsed so far by eight mayors — from larger cities like San Jose, Calif., and Louisville, Ky., and smaller ones like Gary, Ind., representing a total of more than 2.6 million Americans............

the extraordinary nature of Mr. Bloomberg’s candidacy

...... After an onslaught of self-funded television ads, he reached 5 percent support in two national polls this week........... Mr. Bloomberg is one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth estimated at more than $50 billion....... “Unlike Donald Trump, Mike Bloomberg has a real foundation that does real work addressing people’s serious needs ........ One graduate of the Bloomberg program at Harvard is a leading opponent in the presidential race — Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., whose city also received $1 million from a Bloomberg program in 2018.



To skip the first four contests entirely, that is something. That has never been attempted before.

When you are Mayor of NYC, you are already holding the second most high profile political office in the land.

He was a Democrat. Then he was a Republican. Then he was an Independent. Now he is a Democrat. The claim to being "basically nonpartisan" rings true.

He is formidable. No doubt. As to how this will play out, we will just have to wait and see.

Mike Bloomberg’s money buys him a very different kind of campaign. And it’s a big one. After two weeks in the presidential race, Mike Bloomberg now employs one of the largest campaign staff rosters, has spent more money on ads than all the top-polling Democrats combined and is simultaneously building out ground operations in 27 states........ with the Bloomberg campaign, it is not at all clear what established rules apply, if any. Everything he is doing is so unlike what has been done for decades that it is difficult to decipher how voters will react............ Rather than focus on the early states, he is campaigning for votes deep in the 2020 calendar, in places where voters are less tuned in to the nominating process. Rather than worry about a budget, he has put no limit on the money he is prepared to spend. Rather than run in a Democratic primary by appealing to ideological die-hards or partisan flag bearers, he describes himself as “basically nonpartisan.” ........ As a former three-term New York mayor, he comes to the race with more executive governing experience and has represented more voters than most of his competitors, as well as a philanthropic record he has emphasized in campaign ads while pushing several core liberal priorities, including increased gun regulation and the reduction of carbon pollution. His campaign message is focused on his own competence and electability............ no one has ever run a national primary campaign since Kennedy in 1960.” ........ there are hundreds of staff members working remotely or out of the temporary campaign headquarters in one of Bloomberg’s Beaux-Arts limestone mansions on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the blinds rise and fall with time of day, the food is free ......... The campaign has been offering field organizers salaries of $6,000 a month, a 70 percent premium from the going rate of $3,500 paid by the campaigns of ........ and Gary Briggs, a former top marketing executive for Facebook and Google......... Since his campaign launch on Nov. 24, Bloomberg has spent or reserved about $60 million in television and radio ads, with no sign of slowing down. Taken together, the top four polling Democrats in the race — former vice president Joe Biden; South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sanders and Warren — have spent about $28 million on similar ads all year.......... He has also purchased $4.6 million of Google ads ...... On Facebook, his spending over the past week ran at more than $170,000 a day, 2½ times the level of President Trump’s reelection campaign and about three times more than Tom Steyer, the other billionaire Democrat seeking the nomination. All of his digital ads are focused on increasing his support and recruiting staff........... When he entered in November, he decided to skip the first four contests, which tend to pick presidential nominees by showing early momentum and redirecting the national focus.......... Instead, his operation is aimed at the 25 states that will award nearly two-thirds of the available convention delegates over a 15-day period that begins March 3........

it is something no one has ever tried to do before.”

......... Rival Democratic strategists remain skeptical of the effort, as they focus on finding a way for their candidates to catch fire in the early states. Bloomberg’s campaign skills are rusty ....... The Trump campaign, by contrast, has chosen to attack Bloomberg early, with Trump tweeting about “Mini Mike Bloomberg” and announcing he would bar reporters for Bloomberg’s eponymous news organization from his campaign events....... Through the Bloomberg campaign and a separate anti-Trump digital effort he is funding, a campaign adviser said, Bloomberg has already spent more than $8.3 million in television and digital ads in six core swing states: Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina............ since then, Bloomberg, who has always cast himself as a competent manager able to build and run large organizations, decided that Biden and the rest of the field were not up for the job of beating Trump........ “He is not afraid of them winning,” said Howard Wolfson, another top political adviser. “He is afraid they are not going to win.” ......... In 2018, he said, he gave away $767 million. Recipients have included groups such as Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, smoking-cessation efforts and a number of grant projects for cities and mayors around the country........

Bloomberg used the platform to assail Trump — saying he was the only New York billionaire in the race

....... “The way I see it, Texas is the biggest battleground state, and I’m going to fight like hell to win its 38 electoral votes,” Bloomberg said.



P.S. I got to meet him once. Him, and one other billionaire standing next to him. This was an event at the Bloomberg Foundation on the Upper East Side where the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was the featured speaker. Curiously the person I talked to most at the event was Arianna of the Huffington Post, a sleep specialist and crusader.



Late in 2015, I wrote a long memo that I dropped off in person at that same location urging him to run. About 20 pages.
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Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Pete Buttigieg: Videos



Pete Buttigieg: First Impressions



Googling Pete

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Pete Buttigieg: First Impressions



After you have read four articles on Pete Buttigieg, it is fair to say you are no Pete Buttigieg expert, and I make no such claim. For a guy who was Barack Obama's first full-time volunteer in all of New York City - me - I am proudly a detached spectator this election season. And so, considering yesterday was the first time I looked into Pete ought to tell you. People are not paying attention just yet. Those who worry Pete is lagging in South Carolina don't remember Hillary was leading Obama by a wide margin in South Carolina at this stage of the game. South Carolina was talked of as Hillary's "firewall." That wall collapsed overnight, literally, when Obama won Iowa. To me it is a foregone conclusion that should Pete win both Iowa and New Hampshire, he will very likely be the nominee. I would give him a 95% chance.

So what are my first impressions? First of, this guy is not policy timid like the media makes him out to be. I found him anything but. He comes across as less policy timid than everyone who made a go at it over the past four decades. And it is partly him, mostly that Reagan, as he points out, has run out of steam.

The biggest lie about him is that Bernie and Warren are for Medicare For All, but Pete is not all that. He is very much for Medicare For All, but he thinks it needs to be phased in. And when phasing in if people who have private insurers wish to keep it that way, why not? If you listen to Pete, he is basically criticizing Bernie and Warren for not having thought this through. There is definitely anxiety among the 150 million-plus who have private insurance. They are not opposed to others having health care. But they hear Medicare For All and they hear, looks like Bernie wants me to take off my oxygen mask. That anxiety is real. And it is a symptom that Bernie has not done a good job of selling whatever it is that he is selling.



Pete is policy bold. I was surprised to learn. I should not have been. On politics, he is both agile and steel. More surprising than his policy boldness is that this guy is tough. Of all the Dems running, Donald Trump, if it is him and not Pence for some reason, would have the hardest time pushing Pete around. And he pushed everybody around in 2016.

Pete is the polar opposite of Trump on good manners and basic decency. Donald Trump gives you the impression his mother taught him table manners which he forgot at his mother's dinner table. I mean, the guy was discussing his penis size at a presidential debate during the 2016 cycle. Children are supposed to learn civics lessons from their president. Not from Donald though. Pete is amazingly decent. And after a few years of Donald, you thought that had gone to disuse.



Trump is fake tough. Trump is stupid tough. It is immigrants not automation. Pete is genuinely tough. He is comfortable enough in his toughness that he is not worried decency will cut him out to be a loser.

And Pete is young. That is no small detail. Half the field is way past retirement age. That makes Pete stand out. There is a freshness to his appeal.

I have yet to watch videos of Pete. I would like to watch a few hours of him. I have not yet watched even 10 minutes, I don't think so. YouTube makes you feel you can always look him up, so why rush!

If I had to take a guess, I'd say Pete might pick Andrew Yang for running mate, or someone who is not even running. If AOC were old enough, she would have been great, but she is not yet 35.

My first impressions of Pete Buttigieg are that he is a great human being, a great politician, and a remarkable policy guy. He would make for an excellent nominee.





Googling Pete
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Two Out Of Three: Kamala, Andrew, Pete
Kamala Pete 2020

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Googling Pete

Instagram

View this post on Instagram

Never stop serving others.

A post shared by Pete Buttigieg (@pete.buttigieg) on





11/27 The Woke Attack on Pete Buttigieg “woke” white people are “woker” than most black people. ...... “woke” black people in academia and media are “woker” than a great many black people who don’t have the privilege of a byline. .......

Millennial Buttigieg

...... mayor of a town with a large black population ....... Buttigieg was speaking out of informed sympathy, as anyone familiar with American sociopolitical discussion should have noticed. Our antennae must go up when notions of what an insult is become this strained. We must heed our inner blip of confusion instead of suspending logic when we grapple with race issues. ........ It is as if Buttigieg gave a Christian sermon without mentioning God or Jesus, or listed only five Commandments. ....... Yesterday, Buttigieg was large enough to actually telephone Harriot, upon which they had what The Root billed as a “productive” conversation....... Buttigieg has made it glaringly obvious in countless ways that he understands structural racism.



11/15 Could Pete Buttigieg win the Democratic presidential nomination?

Mayor Pete is surging in Iowa polls.

........... Since a well-received televised town hall last February, he has made an excellent impression, both in retail campaigning and in debates. His crowds, war chest and organized support have all grown. ....... Buttigieg is new, younger and an outsider. ....... smart. .... flexible. ....... a more incremental Medicare-for-all-who-want-it. ...... the only top candidate with military experience and, by all accounts, scandal-free. ......... If elected, he’d be the fifth straight inexperienced president, though hardly as ill-prepared and unknowledgeable as Trump. ........ So far, polls show more worry by voters about the age of some candidates than his youth. ......... “Being gay was a barrier for these voters, particularly for the men who seemed deeply uncomfortable even discussing it”



11/22 Pete Buttigieg, Failure Pete Buttigieg’s polling strength is, as far as I can tell, based on one factor only: He’s a smooth talker. He speaks the kind of fluent Ivy League-technocrat-consultancy lingo that makes a certain kind of highly educated white liberal’s heart melt, especially when combined with an appealing sense of reasonableness and youthful, forward-thinking optimism. Alas for him, he can’t talk much about the wonderful improvements he made as two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, because they aren’t there. ........ More than a quarter of the city lives at or below the poverty line, well above the national average of 14 percent. A USA Today survey called it the 40th worst city in the country, noting it is “one of the most dangerous cities in America” and has depressed property values. The median South Bend home is worth $77,400.



4/3 Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign and policies, explained How the mayor of South Bend became a surprisingly serious contender in the Democratic primary race. ........ “As far as I’m concerned, one real thing has happened [in 2020],” the New York Times poll analyst Nate Cohn writes. “Buttigieg has emerged.” ........ he’s a graduate of Harvard and Oxford ...... Liberal Democrats see in Buttigieg an intellectual who could be President Trump’s polar opposite, and whose focus on political reforms like abolishing the Electoral College channels their frustration with a system that feels rigged in the GOP’s favor. ....... right now, it’s clear that Pete Buttigieg is, as improbably as it seemed just a few months ago, one of the leading candidates for the Democratic 2020 nomination. ......... “He’s got the swoon factor, the young factor, the honest-to-the-point-of-vulnerable factor, and he’s great on the stump” ......... Born in 1982, near the beginning of the millennial generation, he graduated from Harvard and won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. He went on to work at McKinsey, the giant consulting company, then enlist in the military — as a gay man — before the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He did a seven-month tour in Afghanistan as a naval reserve officer. He reportedly speaks seven languages, and he apparently learned Norwegian for the sole purpose of reading an interesting-sounding book. ......... On his way out of office, President Barack Obama named Buttigieg as one of several future leaders of the Democratic Party.......... Buttigieg’s bid in 2017 to be the chair of the Democratic National Committee failed — he dropped out just before the first round of ballots — but that did little to dampen the party’s enthusiasm for the young mayor. And in 2019, he almost seems lab-engineered to appeal to a variety of Democrats looking for a clear antidote to Trump. ..... Moderates look at his biography and see someone they aren’t scared of; the liberal partisans that make up much of the party’s base look at his positions and rhetoric and see someone who’s their kind of fighter. .......... Despite Buttigieg’s reputation as a big-thinking candidate, he’s often strikingly unwilling to commit to specific policies. But cobble together his policy positions from various public appearances and it’s clear that he’s solidly progressive in a way that could satisfy the Democratic base’s hunger for a bolder, less centrist approach to policy. ........ Buttigieg has endorsed a single-payer health care system, although he proposes starting out with a transition policy like a public option or all-payer rate setting. He’s said the Green New Deal is a “sound framework” for tackling climate change and called for a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. He has defended Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for a 70 percent effective marginal tax rate, though he stopped short of openly committing himself to a particular rate........... Buttigieg supports abolishing the Electoral College. He’s also endorsed automatic voter registration and statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, and signaled openness to abolishing the Senate filibuster. ........ radically overhaul the Supreme Court. ....... “One solution that I’ve been discussing in recent weeks is structuring it with 15 members, but five of whom can only be seated by a unanimous consensus of the other 10,” he said to Hasan. “Anything that would make a Supreme Court vacancy less of an apocalyptic ideological struggle would be an improvement.” .......... a party willing to play hardball in pushing voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and the theft of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat........ Buttigieg might be a quiet and reserved guy, but he embodies a kind of political boldness. Rather than forge a policy compromise with Republicans, he wants to transform ideas and structures that define American politics. If Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a class warrior, Pete Buttigieg is a partisan warrior......... “I think we’re in a tectonic shift in America such that even now we may be underreacting to how deep this moment is. I mean, you have basically a 30- or 40-year-long Reagan consensus that that held sway over this country. ... And that’s, that’s done,” he told my colleague Ezra Klein. “I think it’s a moment that’s really crying out for big ideas and for us to pay attention to just really profound things happening.” ............ a competent executive whose vision directly addresses their Trump-era anxieties and partisan anger. ........ set up the Court so that it has more people thinking for themselves ....... Buttigieg is able to both be a partisan warrior for the base and present an attractive image for moderates: a kind of “everything to everyone” appeal that resembles no one more than Barack Obama......... Buttigieg is positioning himself as the opposite of Trump — a competent, qualified executive who knows how government works. But he’s also appealing to liberal America’s anxieties about winning over the white working class and rebuilding Hillary Clinton’s so-called “blue wall” in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the states that were supposed to hold the presidency for Democrats but instead handed it to Trump. ........

“My impression is that in South Bend, he has been quite a spectacular success,” Gerald Wright, the chair of Indiana University Bloomington’s political science department, told me.

.......... When Buttigieg took office in January 2012, South Bend had been experiencing slow but steady population decline. For the past five years, there’s been small but noticeable population growth. On Buttigieg’s first day, unemployment in the South Bend metro area was at 10.2 percent — 1.6 points higher than the Indiana state average. As the end of 2018, it was essentially even with the statewide average (3.7 percent versus 3.5).......... Buttigieg turned Route 31, the big thoroughfare that ran through South Bend’s previously moribund downtown, from two different one-way lanes into a series of two-ways to encourage people to stop and spend. Roughly 1,000 people live in downtown South Bend today; that figure was “effectively zero when Buttigieg took office” .......... Buttigieg wanted to move South Bend, the home of the University of Notre Dame, away from its industrial past and toward an economic model designed for an overall US economy centering on tech and jobs requiring more education. This kind of vision is often criticized for ignoring deeper structural inequalities: Development can often entrench inequality or price out poor and minority residents altogether.......... And Buttigieg did come in for some criticism on that front, particularly during his push to demolish 1,000 unlivable and uninhabited homes as part of a broader development scheme. But what was striking, according to the experts, is how responsive he was to these concerns. Stacey Odom, a resident of the heavily black LaSalle Park neighborhood, heard that her area was being targeted for redevelopment. She asked him for help, including a $300,000 grant for home repairs for local residents. Buttigieg gave her $650,000. ......... becoming the breakout insurgent star of the Democratic field based on his perceived intelligence and policy chops ........ And if somebody is saying that I had it easy, I would invite them to join the military and enter Indiana politics in 2010 as a gay person.” .......... Robinson writes. “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.” .......... “We need to actually see the furthest boundaries of our idea space. If the debate is just between a center-left and a center-center-left, then we’re not really exploring all of the different possibilities right now,” he told me. “Most of the boldness in American politics in my lifetime has come only on the right, and it’s refreshing to see that change — even if some of what’s coming on the left leads to policies that I would approach differently.”



10/17 Pete Buttigieg Talks Impeachment, Health Care, and the Political Spectrum At the latest Presidential-primary debate, on Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was notably pugnacious. Challenging Elizabeth Warren on health care, he said, “Your signature, Senator, is to have a plan for everything. Except this.” He had a contentious exchange with Tulsi Gabbard about Syria, and, in a back-and-forth with Beto O’Rourke about gun control, he told the former congressman from Texas, “I don’t need lessons from you on courage, political or personal.” The Washington Post described Buttigieg’s performance as “uncharacteristically fiery.” ......... depends on whether there is enough of a threat to the power of the Senate Republicans that they would be reunited with their conscience, which, obviously, they’ve taken a holiday from. ............. this is about accountability when the President has admitted to an abuse of power. ............ The rubble of our norms and institutions? And our population, our families, maybe, our communities, even more torn apart by politics than we are now, if you think about everything we’ve been through and everything we’re about to go through? ............... And we’re talking about my neighbors. I’m from the industrial Midwest. There are a lot of people where I live; they don’t think he’s a good guy—they’re not stupid. But they voted, effectively, to burn the house down. ...............

for me and anybody younger than me, we’ve lived our entire lives in the Reagan era.

And I would argue that that era—you could call it the neoliberal era—continues almost to this day, and now it’s collapsing, because none of the prescriptions that were offered in this so-called consensus around how to create growth—none of them worked. ............. I led the field in proposing Democratic reforms that, to this day, some candidates supposedly on my left haven’t embraced......... create a public alternative that the private sector is then forced to compete with. ......... things like Internet-service providers—my fellow-mayors had been doing it. And it’s remarkable what happens in the private sector when you have a public challenge. ........... The core principle for me is not whether or not the government is your health-insurance provider. The core principle for me is that you get covered one way or the other. That’s what Medicare for All Who Want It entails............... my mentality, as a mayor, is that you should only make promises that you’re prepared to keep, and you’re actually going to be in charge of doing the thing you said you were going to do. ........

what I’m proposing, just to be really clear, is the biggest, boldest transformation of American health care in more than fifty years.

......... there’s been an idea that age equals wisdom. And, certainly, wisdom comes with age. But, you know, the current President is the oldest we’ve ever had. . . ........... while I was there, it was increasingly difficult to understand what our goal was. And the thing that has made me feel a greater and greater sense of urgency about moving on is the fact that I thought I was one of the last troops leaving. Like, turning out the lights and wrapping things up. Years ago, when I left. And we’re still there. ......... I can tell you exactly what Governor Pence was like, because I dealt with him a lot. And what you had was somebody who I disagreed with ferociously on many things, although we also found ways to work on economic development in other areas. But my sense was, even though he believes things that are completely fanatical, he really believes them. Now, it’s very hard to understand what he believes, because the President that he has supported to be the political and moral leader of this nation is somebody who offends not just my values but his own. And it raises the question of what is left in there. ............... Mike Pence had lost the respect even of the business conservatives in Indiana, over his anti-L.G.B.T. agenda. And the one way that Donald Trump would have lost is if he had been unable to unite the Republican Party. So he needed that legitimacy from the religious right. So the—from a cynical political perspective, it’s actually a brilliant pairing. ..................... The idea that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves turns out not to be true. The idea that, if we deregulate banks and so forth, nothing bad will happen. The idea that climate change isn’t real, or, now that we know it’s real, that it’s happening on its own, so we can’t really do anything about it. The idea that society’s integrity depends on making sure people like me can’t get married. The idea at one point that, for some reason, we had to invade Iraq. I mean, all of the core tenets of conventional Republican politics have really collapsed in terms of their ability to serve the American people. And so, if you have only that and none of the dazzle of the chaos of this Presidency, then I think it actually accelerates the process by which the Republican Party as we currently know it is dying..............

I would much rather be debating whether the progressive approach to a carbon-neutral economy was better than the conservative approach to a carbon-neutral economy, instead of debating—if you can even call it debating—whether this fundamental reality is in fact a reality. We need conservatives to come to their senses.

......... We have to advance policies that are bold enough to get the job done, which is why we can’t go with too safe of a choice. We can’t pretend that the Trump Presidency is this weird anomaly that we can just kind of recover from by returning to the old normal. We are where we are because normal didn’t work. .......... Part of it’s my personal story as somebody who saw, for example, the Afghanistan War, not just in terms of the theoretical debates going on about U.S. foreign policy but the simple fact that it changed the course of my life. As somebody whose marriage exists by a one-vote margin on the United States Supreme Court, I think about politics not in terms of its own internal dynamics and the excitement of the game and the show but in a very grounded way. ..................

whether it’s President Trump or President Pence, I represent the opposite of what we have just had.

....... South Bend. .. the per-capita income in our city just went above twenty thousand dollars for the first time in a long time. .......... your job is not just a source of income; it is a source of community, a source of identity, and a source of purpose............. if you don’t have some source of those things, something ugly will fill the void. Something ugly like substance use, or something ugly like white nationalism. ........ an antiracist policy agenda that is more, I would argue, systematic and comprehensive than any of my competitors’.

The Douglass Plan is designed to be as ambitious as the Marshall Plan, but right here in the United States, for dealing with systemic racism.

........ the Douglass Plan is intended to be a systematic, intentional, and well-funded response to the problem of systemic racism in this country. Of all the things we’ve been up against as a country, only one of them actually came convincingly close to permanently ending the American project, and that was white supremacy during the course of the Civil War. And I am now convinced that, if we don’t tackle that in my lifetime, it could wreck the American project in my lifetime........ I think where this is going to shake out is, if you really do want the candidate with the most years of Washington experience, the most familiar face possible, then you’ve got your choice. And, if you want the most ideologically conventionally left candidate you can get, then you’ve got your choice. Most Democrats I talk to are looking for something else, and that’s where I come in. ........... I really am convinced this will be one of those epochal moments where one chapter in American history ends and another one begins. ....... I came out with the most selfish agenda, which is I just wanted to start dating, and I couldn’t figure out a way to do that if I didn’t come out, so I came out..... I was thirty-three......... I’m a grown-ass man. I own a house. I’m the mayor of a city. I’m a war veteran. I’ve got no idea what it’s like to be in love. Like, when a love song comes on the radio and I’m trying to relate to it, I’m just extrapolating........

It’s not unusual for somebody to come up to me in an airport or on the street and begin to cry and not get a word out.

...... when somebody protests you just for existing, it’s just, like, come on, man. Like, you’re protesting the wrong thing....... I got eighty per cent of the vote—after coming out. There was such a long part of my life where I assumed that this one thing could multiply everything else by zero, in terms of my chance to have an impact—at least an impact through public life—and learned to accept that and accept that that might happen...........there’s an outright war on transgender Americans going on right now, and it has to end ........ One of the best moments on this whole campaign was a teen-ager—I think she was maybe sixteen—came up to me and let me know that that my candidacy—this was in Iowa, in a back yard—she said my campaign let her go to school and be who she was and stand up for herself and not be ashamed of having autism. .......... politics, fundamentally, in my view—it’s not always about what people think. It’s about what people feel.



Pete Buttigieg on Bernie Sanders This essay was first published in 2000 by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. That year, Buttigieg was the winner of the library’s annual Profiles in Courage Essay Contest................... One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only independent congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders....... It is the second half of Sanders’s political role that puts the first half into perspective: he is a powerful force for conciliation and bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy wrote that “we should not be too hasty in condemning all compromise as bad morals. For politics and legislation are not matters for inflexible principles or unattainable ideals.” It may seem strange that someone so steadfast in his principles has a reputation as a peacemaker between divided forces in Washington, but this is what makes Sanders truly remarkable. He represents President Kennedy’s ideal of “compromises of issues, not of principles.” ........... I have heard that no sensible young person today would want to give his or her life to public service. I can personally assure you this is untrue.



10/16 Pete Buttigieg wins the night Buttigieg’s big moments were important for several reasons. They established him as a forceful presence, they expanded his distinctive ideological space, they distinguished him from the top tier candidates, and they reinforced his persona as a political pragmatist. ..... Billionaire Tom Steyer seemed hugely pleased not just with himself but with his each and every answer, though why that was so remained very much a mystery. ......

judged by who did best in delivering smart, distinct, candidacy-clarifying moments, this was clearly Pete Buttigieg’s night.





What’s Really Behind Pete Buttigieg’s Lack Of Support Among Black Voters? Lately, Buttigieg is doing great in Iowa polls and pretty well in New Hampshire polls, but he’s still behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in many polls of Nevada and South Carolina, and in most national polls. ........ Buttigieg is relatively weak with voters under 30 and those with incomes below $50,000 a year. “Why are Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire (basically all of whom are white) so enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?” is just as valid a question as “Why are black voters so not enthralled with Pete Buttigieg?” ......... black Democrats as a group are not as supportive of gay relationships or gay marriage as white Democrats. ......

My expectation is that if Buttigieg were nominated, he would get around 90 percent of the black vote in a general election, as Democratic presidential nominees typically do.

......... maybe three or four candidates (say Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren) remain viable through much of the primary season, dividing up the black vote so Biden is not getting 80 percent of it. Secondly, maybe Buttigieg’s efforts to appeal to black voters pay off in the next few months and his numbers rise........ A candidate’s issue may not lie with any single group, but with their strength overall.

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