Not only Mr. Buttigieg was not eaten alive by the corporate machine, he exploited it. He brought $900 millions private investment to his city; revitalized South Bend, yet keeping the cost of living the 2nd lowest in the US, and achieved the distinctions such as a finalist for Smart City North America, a High Performing Race Informed City by Governing Magazine, etc. South Bend now offers equitable utility rate based on residents' ability to pay. This is among many progressive policies Mr. Buttigieg managed to implement within budget constraint and in a red state. For more, see wikipeteia.com
Mr. Buttigieg's records speak to his authenticity.
The relentless attack on Mr. Buttigieg's fundraising practice is hypocritical - Senators Sanders and Warren both have well established donor network: https://vtdigger.org/2019/09/30/many-sanders-big-money-2016-donors-now-backing-warren/
Mr. Buttigieg's healthcare proposal seeks to offer immediate relief to people at risk of going bankrupt for getting sick because it targets areas unable to attract insurance companies to establish ACA market. What we need is universal access to affordable healthcare, which may take the form of Medicare, or not. The insistence on nothing but single-payer is counterproductive.
Corporate has been made a villain by some campaigns. That's effective populous messaging, but the main culprit is ineffective government. Making corporate our enemy helps no one.
10
How can people take Buttigieg seriously? Yes, he's smart, but he has no record of improving people's lives. None. In South Bend, he focused on trying to get middle class people to move there, instead of improving the lives of local residents. He did nothing to improve policing, schools, housing, or recreation.
He acknowledges that he didn't even know that the schools were segregated. That's an amazing admission from someone who grew up there. He turned a bliind eye to reality in the hopes that his sincerity, charm, and intelligence would be enough to launch him out of Indiana and into national pol
Buttigieg's "accomplishments" are all of a personal nature: Ivy League, McKinsey, etc. Is it asking too much of Democrats to nominate someone who's made a real effort to improve the lives of all Americans?
4
Mr. Manjoo, this is not a bad article and I commend you on it. Yes, Pete is non-electable, but you forgot to mention Andrew Yang, he has been talking this since the beginning of his campaign, Yang is the one this conversation is happening-- and even when Paul Krugman attempts to smear him by refuting his account on twitter. Yang did invite Krugman for a debate, but the latter refuses to response, shows how conceited one can be. So the article part:
"a lot of the jobs are low-wage, high-toil jobs. It’s a country in which every nearly every economic sector trends toward monopoly and oligarchy, and in which regulators let companies call the shots." It is not Warren. Please do your research properly and deeply, Yang's videos are everywhere online, and ignoring Yang's contribution on this topic, shows how unaccountable some media is. In the end people read journalism to learn the truth.
2
The mayor has drawn the ire of the plugged-in progressive left??? That's great news!!! I consider that an excellent reason to vote for Buttigieg. The plugged-in progressive left is clueless. If they were ever given power they would cause a horrific stock market crash. The mere fact that they can't stand that the economy is doing well should give any rational person pause. Their influence on the Democrats such as it is might facilitate Trump winning a 2nd term without the need for Russian interference. Moderates are sensing a favorable shift towards reality. November's election results are in. You have to be blind to not be able to read these tea leaves. Voters, especially swing voters are rejecting Trumpism but endorsing centrists. The Dems who won in red & purple states ran as moderates. There's no progressive majority in the U.S. & never will be. The numbers are not there. There certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in the U.S. that could get to the needed 270 votes. This point can't be emphasized enough: almost every progressive candidate in whom Dems invested tremendous time, money, & emotional energy in 2018—O’Rourke, Gillum, & Abrams— lost. If this election is about kitchen table issues: jobs & affordable education there's no way the Democrats lose. If it's about reparations & illegal immigration there's no way we win. We can win without progressives. We can't win without swing & centrists voters. A moderate candidate gives us the best chance in 2020.
9
This is the problem with Democrats. They are clueless. There is nothing special about the Trump economy. It is still growing at the same 1-2% rate that the GOP whined about under Obama. The market is up about 40% since Trump took office....far behind the returns under Obama. If the Democrats had any brains and savvy they would point this out to counter the phony Trump narrative about the “great economy.” But they don’t.
2
Let’s be serious!
The worst aspects of capitalism have taken over the government and the culture.
Money controls most politicians, not their constituents.
Trump is supported by big money and the Republican Party has entirely sold their soul to that money which is why he will not be convicted in the Senate.
Once a capitalistic country has been captured politically by big money there is no turning back. The carrot and the stick principle applies.
When your soul is stolen by greed, both the country and the citizen have lost their moral compass.
Once your soul has been stolen how do you get back?
1
You list me with the “mayor of McKinsey” term. Before politics the man pursued top studies and a great and remunerative career. What is wrong in this? This is America, land of opportunities. Being a Rhodes Scholar and an ex-McKinsey consultant doesn’t make a bright guy ineligible for the top job in the nation. In fact, Pete has the best chance to dump Trump: articulate, brainy, center-left, rational, avoiding extremes, young, minority, and with positive hands-on policy experience as a city mayor.
7
I am so so glad you get the message Bernie and Liz have been delivering so consistently. I personally know young people who feel as though their eyes have opened and they see the light! Thank you Bernie. Thank you Liz. It is a great service and may they succeed in embracing more hearts and minds.
Thank you Manjoo.
Here's what Democratic voters don't get: a vast portion of the electorate - those whose views are generally not reflected by op-ed columnists - know that the game is rigged. They know that as a country we operate under a system designed to primarily benefit the powerful, and if the rest of us are exploited, well, that's just collateral damage. A whole lot of Americans absolutely loathe that this is the way things are.
You know who gets this? Trump voters. Yes, many of them were seduced by crude racism and xenophobia, which is a tried-and-true playbook. But they primarily responded to a man who saw a system that was rigged against them and spoke unequivocally about his contempt for such a system.
Clearly Trump was lying and has governed in service of our oligarchy, but that contempt toward an economic system heavily tilted toward the rich remains, and is shared by millions.
Democrats simply do not get this, and in their rush to find a "safe" candidate such as Buttegieg are essentially promising the voters more of the same stuff they rejected back in '16. I don't know if a leftist like Sanders can win, but I am almost certain a Biden or a Buttegieg will suffer the same fate Hillary did.
If Farhad thinks that, if the Democrats nominate Warren or Sanders, either will beat Trump in 2020, he is delusional. All Trump has to do is label them as “socialists” and we are in for another four years of the dotard’s chaos. Say what you will about Pete Buttigieg, of all the leading candidates, he is the only one most appealing to moderate Democrats, independents and disgruntled Republicans. In other words, those voters who are essential to Trump’s defeat.
7
Thank you Farhad Manjoo. I really appreciate your columns. Keep it up!
4
It seems that Mr. Manjoo seeks to lead the circular firing squad that is taking down one Democratic candidate after another. The result; Whoever wins the nomination will be so tainted by columns such as this one that they will lose before the campaign gets underway. Just think of what an easy target JFK would have been in 1959 had well-meaning critics singled him out as a rich young man whose father had essentially brought his seat in the Senate. No doubt the earnest Tom Steyer will be the next one to come under criticism for the money made as a hedge funder even though he has spend millions in an effort to shine a true light on Trump.
7
Perfectly said. Thank you Mr. Manjoo.
2
Yeah, but first you gotta get elected.
2
Congratulations. I believe Buttigieg is a holograph of Hillary; put there by the same people who put her in a position where they - and she - believed she could not possibly lose. They, she, and this journal were disastrously wrong and this small town Mayor who would do the bidding of his masters is also a sure loser.
The idea of saying what the Democrat voters want to hear, what Wall Street, the MIC, the CIA, etc. also want to hear is merely an argument of an attractive, but hollow vessel.
I would love to know the who and how This guy was chosen by those who put forth the Democrats's candidates since 1988 - and why the Times backed him from Day One until he made the same gross errors as she did: being really backed by a small list of billionaires and super-rich.
2
Buttigieg's values are shaped by his Ivy League and McKinsey experience, not by working with or fighting for working-class people. His job was never outsourced or downsized or replaced by a non-union worker. He was on the other side of the axe, the one that gets to decide who gets cut. His data-driven McKinsey-like approach as mayor of South Bend displaced many black families as he pushed for his “1000 Homes in 1000 Days” gentrification plan.
If Hillary Clinton couldn't get enough votes in Milwaukee, how does Pete intend to do it? So far he has ginned-up black support with false claims: He claims he reduced the black poverty rate in South Bend by half when it was actually 6%. He claims he raised the minimum wage to “nearly $15” when it was actually $10.10. He claims 400 black prominent community leaders endorsed his Douglass plan when 40% were actually white, and most were duped into it by not “opting out.”
Who can trust him?
A student activist asked Buttigieg: "I wanted to ask if you think that taking big money out of politics includes not taking money off of billionaires and closed-door fundraisers.” Buttigieg responded, "No" and walked away. Buttigieg has previously called small donor money “pocket change.”
After pressure from the NYTimes, he finally relented to releasing the names of his clients at McKinsey as well as his fundraising bundlers. But he omitted 20 names from that bundler list. One wonders if he actually disclosed all of his McKinsey clients?
1
Pete could never ever defeat Trump!
It’s amazing how the money behind PB disses the core democratic voter. You are working to turn Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania into permanent Republican wannabes. PB is not this country’s future but just the oligarchy’s latest permutation of white male power.
Sorry progressives, you are not driving the train. Look to England for a record of your “success”.
5
It’s interesting to see the readership of NYT perspective. He has no path forward after NH so why is anyone defending him this much?
He won’t be the nominee
Good , spot on article.
1
Mayor Pete has considerable strengths....the most obvious one being his military service which will enable him to constantly portray Trump as a draft dodging coward, his intelligence which will enable him to highlight in debate how stupid the President is, his calm presence compared to the President’s narcissistic temper tantrums, and his age which will signal that decrepit old white men need to step aside. Being part of an oppressed minority in regards to his sexual orientation and marriage makes him morally stronger than Trump and his true Christianity and easy familiarity with its tenets will enable him to make Trump look like the phony he is. He has the ability to problem solve as a good midwesterner and mayor will appeal to the nation.
28
As the saying goes: if you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while you count your money.
My biggest issue with Buttigieg is that Greenpeace only gave him a B on his climate action and climate justice plans.
Bernie got an A-plus. Warren got an A-minus.
Buttigieg says he is the most invested in addressing climate change because he is the youngest candidate. So why doesn't his plans get higher marks? I'm confounded that he is not taking this crisis as seriously as Bernie and Warren.
And for a Rhodes scholar, B is a dismal score.
12
As you said, he'd most likely make a fine President. Stellar resume, beautiful intelligence, but what does he really stand for ? Policies are meh, rather non-committal. He lacks authenticity. Also too cozy with Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Buttigieg exercises the politics of the nineties. On top of that, he doesn't relate to the Black community or the working class. He will not win the nomination.
16
1. Smarter than most - check
2. Veteran (volunteered) - check
3. Great orator - check
4. Long-term planner - check
5. Witty - check
6. Charismatic - check
7. Cool under pressure - check
8. Multi-lingual
9. etc.
But, you get a "sense" when he speaks... Perhaps Mr. Manjoo wants someone who yells, lies, cheats, and doesn't read...you know, a "fighter" for the cause. This anti-intellect commentary suggests that we should dumb down leaders so they feel chummy, and in the past it has worked. Call me a snob, but I'm all for an intelligent, articulate one to lead America.
15
Mr. Manjoo, you write as if Mayor Pete is the unwitting dupe of the corporate interests. He's not, he's one of them. He is one of many technocrats who think data and technology have pretty much all the answers. Whatever they don't have answers for is made up by his giving sops (at present, these are mostly verbal) to "the disadvantaged," for which he counts on his being gay to give him the necessary credibility.
If he was authentic, he would have found a way by now to connect with the black community in his hometown (South Bend is 40% black). That he hasn't speaks volumes. I was enthused at first about Mayor Pete, but perhaps he is more Alfred E Neuman than he is Alfred Kinsey.
2
This argument fits the times, I suppose. Buttigieg worked briefly in a junior position for a top management consulting firm while just out of graduate school, so Mr. Manjoo brands him as "the Mayor from McKinsey." But: Mr. Manjoo had a prominent job as tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, owned by none other than Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News. Should Mr. Manjoo take the label as "the columnist from the Murdochs"? Buttigieg commits the crime of following Obama in trying to be electable. He may or may not be successful, but if Mr. Manjoo is really so concerned about it, then he should be making a stronger case for his favored candidates. This column is not a good look for what passes for progressivism these days.
11
Lol...BRAVO~!!!
Farhad knocks it out of the park.
Well said sir.
2
Lacks "authenticity." Sorry Mr. Manjoo. I know politics isn't your main beat but you should know better. Making voters feel like they're being listened to is a key political skill. Buttigieg is good at it. So is Biden. So is Warren. None of these candidates is authentic. If authenticity is the most important metric then Sanders is really the only choice. Or maybe Yang. The rest of these candidates pander to the crowd, at least as much as Buttigieg.
3
Oh my goodness. Are Pete Buttigieg and the New York Times freshmen dating in high school? There seems to be a spat of love and hate notes being passed back and forth.
Please. I’d like to see this level of thought and commentary extended to other second tier candidates, like Booker and Klobuchar.
1
I'm not convinced that Manjoo is representative of the opinion of the "plugged-in progressive left" here... he never once calls Buttigieg a Republican.
2
Warren is a highly-cited national expert on bankruptcy law and former Harvard professor, with experience in national government.
Sanders has nearly 5 decades in politics and is a iconic leader of a youth-driven movement that sees him garnering the under 35 vote by a 52-17 margin. His politics represent the future of the Democratic party. He leads the field in non-white support, and has the most individual donors. He leads Trump in almost every national poll.
There is no need for Pete in this race. He's under-qualified and his presence in the campaign is a byproduct of cis white male privilege.
50
@fan cis? He’s a gay man in a catholic city. He is able to cross boundaries
7
I was intrigued by this argument until the end, put off by "the mayor from McKinsey" insult. It seemed a gratuitous, cheap shot. Is anyone defined by 3 years experience? Is Elizabeth Warren a hypocrite because she was both a Republican and consultant to some really scummy corporations until quite recently?
Are you a front and a fraud because you work for a publication that is, at best no more moderately liberal than Buttigieg? Is the NY Times to be disparaged because it happily takes ad money from those corporations and CEOs you disdain and use to smack Buttigieg?
Tone down the "holier than thou" and you have a better argument, Mr. Manjoo.
16
What a lazy article. If Pete is the Mayor from McKinsey, is Warren the senator from Dow Chemical and Enron? (see NYT reporting) The cognitive dissonance boggles the mind.
15
He’s smart, young, sympathetic, dependable, conservative, cautious, a well-ordered Midwesterner and a family and military guy who believes in G-d.
Everything Trump is not.
His lacking greater experience on the national scene should be regarded as a bonus, not as a deal breaker for blacks or anyone else.
The country is in crisis and is in enormous need of a fresh deck of cards.
Someone capable of taking an in-depth look at our divisions and problems and giving us a badly-needed make over.
Let's shuffle the cards and go on to a new day and time.
14
Correct. But more damning than his keen interest in catering to the rich is his lack of substantial political accomplishments. This man has a huge ego.
2
First, I will vote for the Democratic nominee, whomever, short of Cruela Deville or Rasputian.
Nevertheless, I disagree with Mr. Manjoo. A Democratic plank that includes ALL the dramatic progressive initiatives is a loser in a national election. Mayor Pete has wisely avoided such defining traps.
I do believe that one or two progressive initiatives, like universal health care could be a winning formula for Democratic candidates whether Bernie or Warren or Mayor Pete.
Unfortunately for many candidates like Bernie and Warren, they have jumped in the tank for ALL the initiatives, most of which are sure losers and fodder for Trump and the Republicans. Things like: reparations, decriminalization for illegal border crossings, and promises that they will decapitate the capitalists until the blood of the plutocrats runs in torrents down Wall Street.
Mayor Pete has the real intelligence to debate and defeat Trump. He is not threatening the middle class.
Note to Progressives: You must realize that any drastic change to the status quo seems like the 1917 Revolution to to the middle class.
Such thinking may be somewhat irrational, but as I have learned in my 42 years in business, just because people are irrational does not mean you cannot get positive results if you don't accentuate your differences.
It is a lot of work to work with partisans, but if you want a result sometimes you gotta suck it up.
7
I don’t care about the economic numbers; they’re meaningless when stacked against my personal experience and those around me. No one I know has a steady, predictable job or income except one university professor. Everyone’s spending over their earnings so as to enjoy life before the pain hits. No one has a pension or retirement plan beyond selling their main residence for a hopeful million or two. All these people have master’s degrees or more but fear of the future dominates. Conclusion: the economy from my perspective sucks, and the employment numbers are an illusion. My guess is that’s because it’s no longer true that employment today means employment tomorrow, let alone next week.
1
I am really looking forward to tomorrow night. Buttigieg has been taking a beating from the left end of the Democratic Party and appears to be handling it with poise and resilience. I predict that we will see the grit that has propelled this young candidate forward. He is so damn smart. He is so damn tough. That means something. And I think he smart and tough enough to ride out this storm. If I was in the middle of trouble, this is the guy I would want at the helm. This is a sharp and compassionate guy I would want on my side. I think the country needs him now. If he can take all the punches being thrown at him, I think he'll prove a lot to the American electorate. Farhad, I understand your argument, but I think Mayor Pete is full of surprises and capable of the extraordinary. I think if we need bold, this guy will give it.
9
There is a reason why Buttigieg leads in the Iowa polls. He displays the bandwidth and intelligence needed to both improve and develop new services. Government is a combination of streamlining what you do and creating new services and rules to solve problems. No candidate has spoken out and said I can draw the best talent -- they all tend to say and show they know it all and can do it all. But they can't. Each will need a team of rivals. Mayor Pete is a standout to fill this role. I think the electorate will see this too and not get hung up on the narrowness of Sanders and Warren. Said another way Mayor Pete is not a one-act pony. That is what Obama did and what Trump cannot do.
22
Frahad,
Great to see you responding to comments. I wish more folks would follow your example. That said ....
We just won the House and the people who won it for us are Chrissy Houlihan, Abigail Spanberger, Connor Lamb, Elissa Slotkin etc. They did not do it by calling for radical economic change. The idea that the way to beat Trump is to go hard left is entirely contrary to what actually works.
On a separate note, you complain that "he’s trying too hard to please everyone," This is a super odd comment given that the news room of your paper is right now running a piece titled, "Pete Buttigieg quit playing nice, and it's working." Sure, he's trying not to alienate swing voters, that's usually how you win in November.
28
Warren or Sanders "ain't it" either. I'd rather leave the ballot blank than have to vote for either of them. I've had enough of angry, outraged demagogues who vilify groups for society's problems. They rant about the wealthy and corporations the way Trump rants about illegal immigrants. Only the far left of the Democratic Party thinks a comparison to Obama is negative. And I don't think someone who has spent the majority of his adult life in public service, including serving in the military, deserves to be characterized as a corporate lackey.
9
Have you thought fora moment that your ideas are out of step with the majority of what Democrats want.
You say....
“Yet every time I hear him speak, I get the sense that he’s trying too hard to please everyone and that — in a way that recalls some of Obama’s worst tendencies toward misguided centrism — he’ll end up pleasing no one in the process.”
Sorry, Obama didn’t please you. I loved him as President and he made me proud. Do you even recall how hard it was to pass The ACA? clearly you were not paying attention. It barely passed and now is completely shredded and hangs in the balance.
Pete is a voice of calm reason that takes into account what the more than 150 million people may want, which is to possibly keep the current insurance they have. Do you care about them? It’s your leanings and far left ideas which will help elect Trump.
20
Is Pete the guy? I'm not sure. However, anyone able to speak at the level of a typical high school graduate and avoid spewing constant lies and nonsense would be Mr. Trump's superior.
I assert that more as fact than opinion.
3
Sick of listening to Democrats undermine each other. What happens when Pete wins the nomination? You all stay home because you are convinced he isn’t pure enough? What happens when Pete loses the nomination? Pete’s supporters stay home because they feel like the candidate they liked the most was unfairly attacked? Vote blue no matter who, and until then, stick to bolstering your favorites and not degrading the favorites of your natural allies.
7
A lot of people in this comment section are talking about “bubbles.” Here’s a bubble for you—the white bubble. Buttigieg has had a terrible record with race relations in South Bend. People of color who are aware of that record distrust and don’t tend to support him. He seems unable to address their concerns. Do you imagine a candidate can or should win the Democratic nomination with very little support among African-Americans or Latinos? The fact that virtually no one here is even alluding to this major problem amazes me.
1
I bet some of the misgivings against Mayor Pete have to do with the fact that he's gay. Same thing happened to Hillary and the fact that she's a woman.
Bigotry disguises itself in many, many different ways, and progressives are not blameless LGBTQ-loving people. Their fear of the "gay lifestyle" lurks around, even if Buttigieg is certainly one of the most heteronormative gay men in the public eye right now.
4
You call out Boeing and Google. Did you forget PG&E, the regulated utility that wasn’t regulated, and whose operational malfeasance and incompetence burned the town of Paradise in northern California. Resulting in 85 deaths...
Thank you for your intelligent and truthful opinion piece. I breathed a big sigh of relief when I read it. I do disagree with you on his being a good president. Naw, he has sold himself to the rich. He is their guy. He will not be allowed to serve regular people. He is Wall Street Pete now.
He is tone deaf to blacks. He put out the Douglass plan to attract blacks with out any input from a black person and put the names of prominent southern black leaders on it as if they endorsed the plan and him, with out their permission, shooting them an e mail to make it their responsibility to ask to have their name taken off.
Warren called him on hiding his big donors forcing him to own up to them but he only put out a partial list and got caught and had to also put out 20 more donors names.
He is lying about giving people a choice,his fake Medicare for those who want it would still have co payments and high deductibles and be run by insurance companies who give him huge donations. Real M4all gives everyone choices, of doctors and hospitals and treatments with no out of pocket or deductibles and covers dental and eye care. And cheaper.
Giving people a choice is a big lie insurance companies make the politicians they buy tell voters.
Pete's one job is under investigation by the city council in South Bend for covering up racist policies carried on by his local donors and police officers and evidence is on tape which Pete will not release.
3
Gosh, I am a huge longtime fan of Farhad Manjoo, but seriously disagree with this. Pete lacks authenticity? That is a subjective projection. Worried about being like Obama? Obama won two elections. Using phrases that link Pete to McKinsey feels similar to those on the left that peg him to Wall Street. Last I checked on 538, Biden, Klobuchar and others proportionally get more support from big donors than Mayor Pete. He is being singled out.
25
Color me whatever, but Pete just seems like the basic white guy who thinks he can run the country based on what? Mayor of a popular college town? I mean, who is the mayor of Boulder, CO? Would she be a viable presidential candidate? What about the mayor of DC, a larger city? No. Let Pete get some more experience.
2
Yep, no experience, way to young and associated with McKinsey.
However the Democrats may indeed pick another loser. They are as divided as the Republican/Democratic divide.
So, Mr Manjoo, you really think Pete has a shot? I know the thrust of your piece is anti Buttigieg but the very fact that you wrote it suggests that you think he actually could become the nominee. That’s so interesting. I do like him. I may not vote for him in the primary but his candidacy has been a breath of fresh air. I always thought there was no chance for him whatsoever. But your column and Finland’s recent election of a thirty-four year old Prime Minister has completely changed my mind. Thank you.
18
My sentiments exactly.
Are we so normalized by Trump’s crudeness that we find a decent intelligent man like Mayor Pete A wimp? Sad indeed.
6
Mayor B reminds a lot of Carter, another ineffectual optimist with a Calvinist streak. Yuck.
"A funny debate has been roiling the online left..."
Yes, let's talk about the online left. And to all who believe that Buttigieg is a corporate shill and in the pocket of billionaires, keep this in mind:
When I watched Buttigieg interviews on Youtube prior to the last few weeks, they wouldn't generally garner a lot of attention. Mostly Pete supporters, and maybe a few supporting comments for Yang thrown in, but it was all pretty benign.
Yesterday, I happened upon an NBC interview on Youtube. There were thousands of comments, the vast majority of which were anti-Pete, but not a 'deep-dive into policy anti-Pete', rather they were personal and viscous, they were venomous, they were homophobic, and if I tried to repeat them here I wouldn't get past the censors. It's obvious there's now a laser like concerted effort to delegitimize him.
I don't think it's coincidental either that many of these attacks are said to come from Bernie supporters, but keep in mind too that Bernie has the highest number of false twitter followers (approx 30% are fake per Twitteraudit.com)
So when you believe that Pete is a corporate shill in the pocket of billionaires because it's the accepted narrative of the day, ask yourself if you're being manipulated and keep in mind that it's a narrative pushed by the same people (or bots) who are sewing division on social media with vulgar homophobic attacks.
6
I agree with Mr. Manjoo on all points. And neither of us are millennials.
Step off.
"[Buttigieg] lacks authenticity.????
I got news for you -- Buttigieg is authentic as they come. All you have to do is listen to him. More important than talking the talk -- he walks the walk. But what do you know about that?
I love how you pundits always gloss over his military service in a quick items in a series. He may lack authenticity by your standards but he's the real deal.
"The Mayor from McKinsey. . ."
Cute. Did you come up with that yourself? Congratulations. Just like the impeachment, it won't stick because people know it's not true. You're obsessing on an entry level job. Mayor Pete is the balance that this country needs. Have you been paying attention to events in India and the United Kingdom? And you're pitching a more liberal candidate?
Good luck.
7
A guy who chose to campaign for DNC chair and now President, instead of doing anything substantial to lift his city out of poverty, is not a guy who will project strength on the economy.
If I was Donald Trump, all I'd need to crush Pete is to say that South Bend was poor when he came in and just as poor when he left it.
Here is my problem. I simply don't want to have a president who is over 70. These folks had their chance.
So come rain or hail Buttigieg is my man. Besides I like the fact he went to Afghanistan and I really do not care where the money comes from to help him or who he is married to.
4
It's not hard to explain why Buttigieg doesn't convince: he has had NO experience in governing beyond the local level. Would you let a surgeon who had never conducted a major operation be in charge of opening you up to remove a dangerous cancer? I sure wouldn't.
Dear Mr. Farhad Manjon,
Agreed!
Sincerely,
The working class, poor and elderly.
1
Mr Manjoo excels at attacking anyone who moves up too far or too fast. Mr Buttigieg's actual main problem is that he has a husband, not that he's too moderate - whatever that means; everyone's a moderate on something. I guess he left McKinsey to be mayor of a "tiny" town and become a billionaire.
Let's be honest, the likeliest candidate standing come April is Joe Biden whether you want him or not. This is the source of the radicals' gripe - and Manjoo's.
3
"Mayor Pete seems like a lovely man." And that, of course, is a sure fire road to victory. In a Mister American contest. The Presidency, not so much.
Think of the last competent, decent, honorable President we had: George H. W.
And he replaced a mummer and was defeated by a sleaze-ball.
Among the innumerable talents and virtues required for a candidate in this great nation, "lovely" falls just below "left handed" on the list.
This is the major issue for the Democrats. To win, we need to win in states and localities that are centrist or center right, because of our electoral system, particularly the senate, and gerrymandering. This means fielding a candidate who will appeal to centrist voters, who promises to tinker at the edges but can't be portrayed, as s/he will surely be, as a "communist" by the Republicans. We need to recognize that they will try to demonize anyone-look at Clinton--how much more centrist can you get? But promising to radically change the system--not just raising some taxes on the rich and enforcing anti-trust laws-- may frighten some voters away. So, we have to find a strategy to keep our enthusiastic young progressives who like Bernie and campaign like Klobuchar or Castro or Booker or Biden or .....
You've hit on the very definition of Clintonian triangulation with this:
"he wants to be seen to be doing something without really doing much at all"
Please,Democrats, let's not make THAT mistake again.
4
Your criticism of the tech set is that they "promise big, disruptive change while refusing to accept the full costs of achieving their idealism".
You propose that we need a "bolder candidate", "The only way to reverse the trend toward inequality is to reform the way America does business. A politician who pushes for these reforms needs courage, because the forces arrayed against structural change are powerful."
Both mindsets worry me since they seem to ignore possible (likely) collateral damage while they blow up and experiment with the economy.
When given these choices a moderate, incremental candidate that listens to all sides and tries to achieve a balanced compromise is very compelling to me.
But while Mayor PFor them, there’s always an easy, slapdash, cost-free revolution: Just use the right hashtag on Instagram and you, too, can spark regime change in the Arab world.
2
Unfortunately I could see American capitalism is leeching into campaigns. A candidate’s success is measured by how much money is spent on campaigns. Multimillion dollars spent on ads and campaign administration does not speak anything about the caliber of the candidate. We need to change the Motto -Money speaks.
2
First of, Congress makes the laws and holds the purse. If you want to see real change, you have to flip the Senate and hold the House. Winning the White House ain’t it! In fact a number of left demands require near constitutional reform so you better swing the country.
Second, there are very significant issues with septuagenarians. Why did it take them so long to show up? Ride into the sunset and sit on a board aka Senate, we need fresh blood to actually run the country and execute.
Third, bureaucracy and administration are real and lethargic, which is why Trump has not done as much damage yet, as he would have liked, and why his success isn’t his but systemic stagnation. It needs managers to operate that. Buttigieg actually has that experience, Senator’s don’t.
2
I'm for a TEAM of Pete and Amy or Pete and Cory. But they have to announce NOW to get more traction. Both teams would bring senatorial experience along with Pete's quiet, centered, MORAL intellect and integrity. Centered for a LOT of America right now is JUST FINE!
9
This is not the time to indulge in utopian ideology. Why even during the impeachment debate just yesterday there were Republicans throwing around the terms radical left, far left, socialist and socialism in order to paint their skewed portrait of the Democrats. I am old enough to remember the landslide victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern. He won only one state and it wasn't even his own. His views were just too radical and thrusting him into the limelight was sorely misguided. Now is the time to be reasonable and smart. Yes the economic landscape is brutally unfair. But this is not the time to fulfill all dreams. The first step is to defeat the current occupant of the White House.
4
10,000. That is how much the Dow is up under the Donald. The Fed forced me from CDs and Treasuries into the stock market and I am reaping the rewards of my savings.
3
Great. Another my-way-or-the-highway far leftie. We the Dems are certainly good at eating our own, so let's keep stoking the centrist/moderate--progressive/far left divide. We'll end up with another four years of this monstrosity and a divided-at-best Congress. Remember, Jill got 1.9 million votes, and her totals in the electoral swing states were greater than Trump's pluralities.
8
After Trump we need a decent competent leader. We need someone who is careful with their words and respectful of opposing views. We need someone a Republican might be able to work with or even vote for. In the real world most change is incremental. I think Pete is just what we need.
11
Socialists love to tear down success; their own included.
The American dream is a capital we all own and want to believe we could own by dreaming big and working hard. The American economy is the envy of the world, and instead of celebrating its prowess and enormous benefits to society, liberals want the government to be in control of its wealth distribution.
Confiscating the American success, through taxation, is a singular weapon in the progressive arsenal of ideas, which is now turning one liberal against another, will eventually turn Americans against them this and every election.
6
@GulGamish .......as a seventeen year American expatriate in Europe I have been struck by how many people say they have never visited America.
My village has many expats from other European countries who move here at retirement for the warmer weather, so I have the opportunity to get their impressions of America.
The advent of Trumpism has changed the perception of America for Europeans who now indicate that they are taken aback at how an American president like Trump can behave so rudely when visiting allies in Europe.
3
I am frustrated by the arguments made by the author. Essentially they boil down to Pete is a very decent, moral guy, who sacrificed for the county and is proposing several ideas that are lean quite progressive, but he is too mainstream to be sincere about his proposal. After Trump decency is what is needed. The only way Warren, who I like, and Sanders get their agenda through is via executive order, much like Trump. As hard as it is to swallow, the appropriate way to move any large institution along is by building consensus. Among Trump’s many sins, ironically, is inability to make a deal. Deals involve give and take, not imposition upon those who would reject such policy, just because you have the power to impose. Be it the cooperate world, or the head of the country, imposing ones policies on others when nearly half of the constituency does not support such policy is oppressive. The goal is not to trade power impositions every four to eight years, but to get the US back to a place where good analytic debates with shared goals and give and take rule the day. What I despise about Trump, a view shared by many progressives os his mean spirited imposition on lives across the country. Make no mistake, progressives have no more right to claim a monopoly on the truth than do Trumpians. It is the best interest of the US and the world for the US to move forward judiciously using a leader who knows how to negotiate and compromise and not try to impose just because he or she have rule.
13
@Seth so you were happy with Obama’s “pen and a phone” style of governing though? Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
While I agree with you that Mayor Pete is not the right man for the job right now, I don’t think it’s about McKinsey or moneyed elites. I think it’s a matter of what sells in this country politically. And that is money which helps to explain how Andrew Yang gained a bit of a following by proposing to send you and me a grand a month. It seems that all the candidates fail to understand that voters want to see economic justice take the form of use of public funds in the public interest rather than in the interest of the special. We, the people, will be served best by a huge investment in our skill set, and the lack of imagination where education is concerned may be the biggest failing of the Democrats who need to convince voters that their kids can be prepared a future that scares many of us.
5
Unfortunately, the inequality in the economy has grown worse in the last few years, and the political nightmare is not just about Trump. This author is right. The kings of the corporate world will not cede their power without a fight. This is reality. Pretending we can all just get along and be united is foolish.
The style a candidate uses matters. I liked Obama, but he often gave away the farm before even beginning the negotiation. We need a candidate who has personal power, who is not afraid to use it. We need Eleanor Roosevelt. Or Colin Powell, as he once seemed. Or Lyndon Johnson.
Warren has the chops, so does Sanders. Together they could work. But we have to stop letting others define who we are. Stop apologising. Fighting is required to save the planet. They won't go quietly.
11
OK, so go with bloomberg -- the substance candidate. he's annoyed republicans, he's annoyed democrats, he's even annoyed new yorkers. mayors love him, governors love him, wonks love him. he's perfect. plus, he's way richer than donald trump and almost as rich as vladimir putin.
true, he's older than napoleonic claret. but your generation can wait another decade or two, right? let's hope there's still a livable planet by then.
1
The progressives want to elect a message. Doesn't really matter who as long as the message gets delivered. The mainstream dems want to elect a messenger. That's what Pete IS and it's why he'll fail.
2
I honestly don’t care what progressives or moderates want this time around. I just want Trump gone.
1
Thank you. I am in full agreement with your argument. Furthermore, given the Republican Party's embrace of political evil that threatens the foundation of the American republic, we are moving toward a potentially revolutionary moment in American history. We need a presidential nominee who is willing and able to fight for justice on both a progressive and, if necessary, revolutionary basis.
13
Mayor Pete: Young, bold, and innovative in his vision. Old, tired, and conventional in his policy.
14
Not only Mr. Buttigieg was not eaten alive by the corporate machine, he exploited it. He brought $900 millions private investment to his city; revitalized South Bend, yet keeping the cost of living the 2nd lowest in the US, and achieved the distinctions such as a finalist for Smart City North America, a High Performing Race Informed City by Governing Magazine, etc. South Bend now offers equitable utility rate based on residents' ability to pay. This is among many progressive policies Mr. Buttigieg managed to implement within budget constraint and in a red state. For more, see wikipeteia.com
Mr. Buttigieg's records speak to his authenticity.
The relentless attack on Mr. Buttigieg's fundraising practice is hypocritical - Senators Sanders and Warren both have well established donor network: see report at vtdigger.org on 9/30/2019.
Mr. Buttigieg's healthcare proposal seeks to offer immediate relief to people at risk of going bankrupt for getting sick because it targets areas unable to attract insurance companies to establish ACA market. What we need is universal access to affordable healthcare, which may take the form of Medicare, or not. The insistence on nothing but single-payer is counterproductive.
Corporate has been made a villain by some campaigns. That's effective populous messaging, but obscured the main culprit -- ineffective government. Running for presidency is to seek majority mandate. Unfortunate, populous massaging to far left will lose down ballots.
12
We just won the House in 2018. The people who won it in the swing districts are folks like Abigail Spanberger, Connor Lamb, Elissa Slotkin. None of these people won by calling for whole sale structural change like Sanders & Warren. Not one. The idea that going hard left is going to carry the day is contrary to what we know works.
Buttigieg's proposals are not merely progressive sounding, they are in fact progressive. But they are also pragmatic and can actually help us win as opposed to turning people off. The reason Warren is now trying to walk back Medicare 4 All is exactly because it is not a winner.
17
I don't disagree with the premise that the incremental changes of moderate democrats like Buttigieg will not fundamentally changes the big picture issues like income inequality and increasingly ominous concentrations of power and wealth.
But it would be political suicide to assume the US electorate will go for platforms that would actually make a big dent in those problems. It is crazy to assume enough people would vote for a candidate that would remove private insurance and replace with a new system, for instance.
Buttigiegs incremental approach is the only type of change that has any chance of winning elections, which in our current system is the only way to get anything done.
15
I've already been leaning away from Pete and toward Warren or Sanders, but this thoroughly convinces me.
13
If your goal is to help the poor and middle class, then advocate policies to do that, such as increasing taxes on the rich and reducing them on the poor and middle class. The Canada Child Benefit and increased payments to seniors have reduced poverty in Canada. Could help college students with more grants and could improve public education by increasing funding. Convince voters that by giving every American child a better start, your communities will be safer and more productive.
Republicans will try to convince voters that Democrats are anti-business and will therefore destroy the economy. Rhetoric from Democrats that feeds into that viewpoint will not help Democrats get elected.
6
@Chris are you aware that 50% of workers in this country pay no Federal income tax? How are you going to lower taxes on them? That argument won’t carry much water for that half of the country. Creating a job for them will change their life though.
I'm glad that someone has finally mentioned that much of the strong economy has been thriving on the cuts in regulation by this administration. Threats to the environment by coal producers might boost sales of coal,and even jobs in that sector, but the streams that are again filling up with coal dust and other pollution will affect our health while the carbon emissions foster climate change. So much hard-fought for improvement has been tossed aside for the sake of corporate profits. I wish some Democratic candidates would bring up these issues, along with all the other negative aspects of our current policies.
8
Haven’t you been reading the Times, even with deregulation the coal companies are going bankrupt so the streams are not filling up. NYS could help by allowing fracking but apparently wants to keep farmers poor and the mine owners in Pa in business.
Good column Farhad.....Sanders Turner anybody? Come on somebody!
3
Amen
6
Amen
3
Oh, this hurts. Another circular firing squad. This drive to achieve policy purity at the expense of electoral success is so discouraging. Nothing could have said it better than: "it’s unlikely that they will be able to achieve many of those goals". In other words, let's support those who'll be ineffective, even if elected, rather than support those who can put the ship back on course.
20
My god, the Times is just lining up one after another hit piece on Buttigieg. Got the whole team on it. It's just so blatant.
27
Pete Buttigieg has consistently been one of the most well-spoken and thoughtful candidates on the debate stage. Democrats on social media are so much further left that the widespread population of Democrats in America. Pete might not appeal to radical reformers online who want revolution rather than reform, but he is an extremely viable candidate for the presidency who has good policies and the potential to repair our nation.
Perhaps I’m biased, but I can’t help but feel this is unfair.
28
It’s not only unfair. It is short sighted and self defeating. On the other hand, all these attacks mean that Pete is seen as a threat. Which means he actually might have a chance.
7
I agree, and worry that it was Pete Buttigieg, during the debates (along w/the tv reporters who seem less interested in the platform than a bit of a brawl to see who comes out on top) that knocked Warren off her winning trajectory, hopefully temporarily. He came at her from right-wing positions.
11
@SB
You give him too much credit for Warren's drop.
And "right wing". No. Sorry, that is a complete lie. And you know it is.
Both are great. Either one would be soooo much better than tyranny.
3
I think you are selling Buttigieg's policy plans short. Remember how he wowed people when he was talking about agriculture during one of the debates? His fundraisers with high tech firms are hardly disqualifying. If we are to achieve any progress with anti-trust litigation, with privacy controls, with a more progressive tax system, we might be wise to have someone in the WH that is respected by CEO's. Who else has talked with more insight and gravitas about foreign affairs? Besides Gabbard, who else has served in the military? These are notable assets that can be useful in a nominee. Remember, the working class hero is Donald Trump. It's not Warren. Mayor Pete will not get eaten alive. Quite the contrary: he has the intellect and knowledge that will serve him well in combat with Trump and the Republican Party. Yes, he might end up eating their lunch.
18
In 2016 I would have agreed with most of the sentiments here. I agree with the idea that the fundimental shift that needs to happen for true reform will require a Sanders or Warren. But post trump we need a peace maker that can bind up our wounds and instill basic trust in our institutions. Those "worst tendencies" of Obama sound like good medicine about now. A hard left turn will only be easier to demonize, it will only reenforce the conservative narrative, that the America of old is being taken from you, by someone different then you. As much as it pains me, we need someone non-threatening that can right the ship. I'm a millennial, that shouldn't matter, but to some it will. That's where we are in our discourse.
14
I'm not convinced by Manjoo's argument; it makes a couple reasonable critiques of Buttigieg's style, but the fact is that this style, this demeanor, this measured and slightly cautious view of political power is very attractive to most voters in this country. Manjoo might feel that this is not true, that Americans will only respond to aggressive, pugnacious and more ideologically intransigent politicians, but Buttigieg's success and competitiveness in this race--despite coming from a context of zero name recognition or brand--suggests that we draw a very different conclusion. Most voters want a Democratic nominee who speaks for the reasonable middle, not the one who has the most truculent retort to the deep, complex problem of corporate power. Of the major candidates, only Biden seems to have a broader appeal than Buttigieg, and whether I agree with him completely or not, I cannot in any way see Warren or Sanders appealing to a broader swath of voters in the swing states than Buttigieg.
14
If Biden or Mayor Pete is elected president, at best we'll get "Obama's third term," just as we would have if HRC had won. We don't need 4 or 8 more years of McConnell obstructionism, with government shutdowns and perhaps some modest accomplishments.
The country and the world are in dire circumstances. Simply rejoining the Paris Accord is not enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. Income inequality continues to widen. The bottom 90% are losing ground. The next 9% are treading water, while the 1% keep getting richer and richer.
Without serious, drastic action, climate change and income inequality will inevitably lead to immense social upheaval. Only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will work hard to save the planet and create a more equal, sustainable world. And yes, both of them can inspire and engage enough new voters to beat Trump.
12
Pete ain't it? I'll go a step further.
My thought experiment imagines the content of his concession speech to followers when he finally drops out of the primary. What are the lines that would keep his fans inspired, fired up for the long war? Who is the audience?
Would it be anything like... "We tried our hardest to bring REAL REFORM to bear on everything the greedy oligarchs and corporatists have wrought to ruin the middle class of this great country of ours, and we're not done yet. NO, we can still work on reform!... from our kitchen tables, from our town halls, from our... offices at McKinsey!"?
Nah, more like... "My friends, we aren't finished, not by a long shot... which is what I was when we started this journey. We still have miles to go in trying to incrementally change how this country does business. We can still defend big tech from those that just don't understand how important it is to our economy! We can still fan out and create awesome development opportunities in our cities for developers who need to keep their Opportunity Zone tax breaks to stay afloat! We CAN DO IT! Yes, we CAN!" Say it with me...
5
If the Democratic Party is divided, and ideological and identity groups stay home, Trump will be re-elected.
Strong words, pure ideologies, and righteous indignation are nice. Winning is better.
This article contributes to the formation of the Democratic Circular Firing Squad.
14
"...the corporate machine that now runs the world." Obviously, corporations are powerful, including even the Times, the corporation for whom Mr. Manjoo labors. But that there is a machine, a juggernaut of finely-meshed parts? Analytical overreach to say the least. But then Mr. Manjoo gives us "Trump's economy." Does the writer mean that Trump runs the economy?
Aside from the analytical difficulties of this piece, we have snark: "The Mayor from McKinsey." It is remarkable how much various commentators feel they have to deride Buttigieg. And of course, omit the fact that he is a gay man--an identity that might complicate simplistic notions about his relationship to power.
But then, he lacks "authenticity." Really remarkable in this day and age to believe that an American politician is "authentic." What a standard to propose. Elizabeth Warren that "gee, just folks" professor from Harvard, another corporation. Or Bernie Sanders, that just an honest independent socialist who has decided he should lead a party he didn't deign to join for decades.
Manjoo and the rest of the anti-Buttigieg crowd protest too much.
18
Progressive have a set of litmus tests that will assure trump his re-election. Instead of policy, character, and capability, they substitute image and messaging. I would take a person of good character, accomplishment and service over some vaguely millennium-correct unelectable blowhard any day
10
The Warren/Sanders agenda:
1) Free healthcare for all
2) Free college education
3) Forgiveness of all healthcare debt
4) Forgiveness of all educational debt
5) Reparations
You'll know what I mean if I call this agenda Corbynesque.
12
Farhad,
What is your opinion of Andrew Yang? Yang's entire platform (UBI and "Human Capitalism") is fundamentally an economic system overhaul that tackles inequality and addresses the true health of the US economy, beyond GDP and stock performance. He has a plan to stick it to Silicon Valley and other wealth concentrations, and he's relatively young, to boot!
Thoughts?
4
Follow the money. Buttigieg courts the super rich and (until he was called out on it) takes their money at secret fund raisers. It is naive to think a politician like that will not be beholden to the one-percenters. Only two politicians have eschewed wealthy donors -- Warren and Sanders -- and they are the only ones who can be trusted to protect the interests of the rest of us. Since "Mayor Pete" has almost no record to speak of (and what he has is decidedly mixed according to some folks in South Bend), we can't go based on his promises. We have to go based on where he gets his support. If he contends he can run for President without the support of the super rich, then let's see him do it.
5
@Andy Dwyer Let's follow Senators Sanders' and Warren's money:
- "Many of Sanders’ big money 2016 donors now backing Warren," vtdigger.org on 9/30/2019;
-"Inside Warren’s secret big-donor fan club," Politico, 11/18/2019
- from publicintegrity.org about Senator Sanders:
"Sanders indeed received some super PAC support during his 2016 bid, most of it from National Nurses United, which spent almost $4.8 million on pro-Sanders ads and communications."
"Our Revolution lists the first and last names of its contributors who give $250 or more per year — but that’s it, even for donors who give six figures. It’s difficult to accurately identify donors with only this information."
"Our Revolution states that it will not accept donations of more than $5,000 during one year “unless approved by a majority vote of the board of directors.” But the group disclosed accepting five contributions of more than $5,000 in 2017, including one for $100,000, according to its tax return. (It did not identify the donors."
"In 2016, Sanders twice asked federal regulators to grant him 45-day extensions for filing a mandatory personal financial disclosure for presidential candidates. The practical implication? Sanders avoided revealing details about his own assets and liabilities in May 2016, when he was still running for president. "
5
I fear that against Trump's bluster and macho nonsense, Pete Buttigieg will look like Mike Dukakis in that tank.
6
@Mark Thomason I dont understanding and what you are seeing.
Pete can easily outmaneuver Trump. It couldn't be farther from Dukakis.
A better title for your column would be "Why Trump Will Win"
Like the London bubble that missed BoJo's crushing defeat of Comrade Corbyn, the Liberal Elite Commentariat just doesn't get it. Move further left? Is that even physically possible?
Oh well, four more years it is.
11
You make a great case for Elizabeth Warren.
5
This "progressives hate Buttigieg" narrative is way overblown. If you measure everything in terms of social media, then you have to take into account the fact that lots of these presumed "progressives" are actually Russian trolls. And the holier-than-thou types who crash Buttigieg events and seize the microphone away from people who don't share their opinion are the Russians' dream-come-true, the very same "progressives" who, in 2016, stayed home or voted Stein or Trump, and thus held the door for the neofascist white supremacists who are now tyrannizing this country.
56
@Luke The mayor has drawn the ire of the plugged-in progressive left? That's great! I consider that an excellent reason to vote for Buttigieg. The plugged-in progressive left is clueless. If they were ever given power they would cause a horrific stock market crash. The mere fact that they can't stand that the economy is doing well should give any rational person pause. Their influence on the Democrats such as it is might facilitate Trump winning a 2nd term without the need for Russian interference. Moderates are sensing a favorable shift towards reality. November's election results are in. You have to be blind to not be able to read these tea leaves. Voters, especially swing voters are rejecting Trumpism but endorsing centrists. The Dems who won in red & purple states ran as moderates. There's no progressive majority in the U.S. & never will be. The numbers are not there. There certainly is no progressive Electoral College coalition in the U.S. that could get to the needed 270 votes. This point can't be emphasized enough: almost every progressive candidate in whom Dems invested tremendous time, money, & emotional energy in 2018—O’Rourke, Gillum, & Abrams— lost. If this election is about kitchen table issues: jobs & affordable education there's no way the Democrats lose. If it's about reparations & illegal immigration there's no way we win. We can win without progressives. We can't win without swing & centrists voters. A moderate candidate gives us the best chance in 2020.
8
Bernie would be president if the democrats listened in 2016
6
You've outlined why Pete ain't the candidate for Brooklyn.
He's running to be the president of the United States, not the trendier parts of Brooklyn.
I would go so far as to guarantee that whoever is the favorite candidate of Farhad Manjoo is fundamentally unelectable outside of Brooklyn and a few other Brooklyn-like places. So thank you, Farhad, for your indirect endorsement of Mayor Pete. Your lack of support is appreciated.
13
Who asked you and why do you have a voice? This bullhorn assumed by this and others in the media is simply undemocratic. None has the basis for an argument, especially since it is not up for debate and carries the weight of a prestigious medium such as the NYT.
5
I don't think his time at McKinsey is the Elephant in the
room in regards to his electability.
4
@cbarber For this voter, McKinsey rules out voting for Mr. Buttigieg.
I rarely agree with a Farhad Manjoo piece.
This time is an exception.
As far as I am concerned.. Pete is nothing more then Beto-2.0 and we all know how that ran it's course.
Pete will follow a similar outcome.. and off into political oblivion.
There is such a thing as peaking-2-early in the field of politics... and as with Beto.. so it is with Pete.
4
Respectfully disagree - strongly.
11
Another anti-Buttigieg piece from the Times; color me surprised. If the Times doesn't have a central role in making a candidate, they trash the ones who are succeeding on their own. Shades of Maureen Dowd and the Clintons. All we need now is for David Brooks to weigh in with some wistful nostalgia about how the world used to be run by straight white men.
As another comment notes, what America needs after Trump is not another screeching, ranting voice with an unattainable political plank, but a calm, rational, thoughtful person who can help heal divisions. Pete is one of few candidates with the mien to achieve that (I might add Klobuchar, too).
15
First off Mr. Manjoo, why not use the correct English language in your heading ? " Pete Isn't It ." Let's elevate and not lower our beautiful language to the ebonic colloquial, certainly with an important issue. Even though you will demean your subject likewise.
I read your column and I could respond to much. However I'm more concerned with a dangerous consistency that I am seeing from the people of color community, both in print and in TV commentary regarding Pete. Perhaps Pete ain't da man, as you would have it. But what I am seeing, and have for years is the black homophobia, both in the press, in society and certainly with pastors in many black congregations, especially in the south. They will state that this isn't what it is, but it keeps slyly surfacing again and again . Now you, headline your column that " He Ain't It." Perhaps he's not, but you don't know any better than any of us. Yet you single him out, out of all the candidates. I question it.
I think stating absolutes is dangerous, and may do more damage than you columnists think.
In the 2016 election 1 million black people did not vote. They are an important electorate that must vote in 2020 for whomever the Democratic candidate may be. Your column might be better spent stating " Trump Ain't It" before you decree that any of our unquestionably fine candidates, including Buttigieg, isn't it.
10
Decent points, and I can see the case for Warren/Sanders. But in the end I’m going to vote blue, no matter who. I’d far prefer the mayor from McKinsey than 4 more years of the sadistic Narcisstocracy.
7
After Mitch and his fellow Republicans sprinkle the GOP holy water on The Donald at next month's Senate impeachment vote, Trump will bust out of Washington and go after Democrats like he wrote the book! Where I differ with Farhad is in the belief that in an election against incumbent Trump, your best chance of winning is by telling the public who were the losers in the last three years and what did they lose that should have been theirs. No one will win by trying to convince Americans that Washington will deliver on promises of this for all or that for all. Not with the money that flows into Congress. FDR did not spell out the programs he planned to enact before he was elected; he was too adroit a politician.
16
We all have a right to support and/or promote our favourite policies and prescriptions for the country, be they conservative, centrist or leftist in nature. (And we should certainly respect the contrarian views of others.)
And I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with the Warren / Sanders assessment that big business has amassed too much power in the economy and that the balance between capital and labor is today overly tilted towards the former (whereas previously, in the 70s, for example, the latter held sway).
Nonetheless, the elevation of Warren / Sanders to the detriment of more centrist candidates flies in the face of what the electorate pronounced in both 2016 and 2018. In 2016, the nation elected an avowed capitalist. In 2018, the moderate suburbs made their views clear.
Has there been any messaging from the National electorate to elevate a far-left candidate to the highest position in the land? I haven’t heard it and I don’t see it. As such, I can only view an op-ed, such as this one, as completely tone deaf.
5
A lot of it is the rise of financialization. If you can't make stuff, or invent stuff, take a cut of transactions or insure stuff and take a cut of what other people do. All day long we see ads for insurance, even though no-fault would save billions. We see ads for gaming your credit score or getting an online loan, no matter how meaningless. I was at a clinic last week and the doctor was telling me how patients are loading up on specialist care because they have met their deductibles for the year. Again, gaming insurance. Every phone call is a scam. Half my mail is insurance. The AARP and AAA are just insurance companies. This is a sad economy, where everyone wants to offer credit and insurance, but no one makes much of anything. You prop up your stock with financial transactions, borrow to buy stock. People are just not ready for change.
4
One of the dreadful consequences of our political system is that candidates run for office for at least two, and often for four, years. During that time, no one will escape negative criticism from the pundits, who have something bad to say about everyone. But Manjoo gets at least one thing wrong here: Mayor Pete is not slick.
3
Farhad Manjoo is precisely on point.
Somebody needs to talk about the trajectory we're on. The 1% are richer EVERY YEAR. The poor are poorer EVERY YEAR. If we don't change the trajectory, what's the point?! With a few more Clintons and Obamas and Buttigiegs, the bottom 50% will just be slaves. Why would I vote for Pete when he promises me that the system will be even more rigged for my son that it has been for me?? The richest 3 of us own more than the poorest 50% -- and Biden and Buttigieg are okay with that, they have no plan to alter it.
Also, if the first thing Dems want to do is to "compromise with Republicans", then they are not fighting for anything, they are saying, "whatever you want, Republicans, is what we want too". You need to have a plan, a 'wish list', before you start trading away things you'd hoped to get. Also, where have these lunatics been for the last eleven years? The Republicans don't want to compromise, even at the cost of shutting down the government. Repeatedly.
7
Nice clear writing Farhad. Keep it up. You made your point well. That's what good writing is about. Doesn't matter whether people agree with you or not. You made your case. Good writing always makes me smile. An old English major.
8
Why are we supposed to believe a writer who describes himself ..quote ..”I am one of those crazy radicals”
I will not be voting any candidate who offers so much free for all policies.
I found those policies are disingenuous .. if a candidate overpromises so much freebies, voters gets cynical.
They go ahead and vote for the other guy who has achievable policies and makes total sense|
also... voter’s perspective .. working McKinsey right out of college is complete nothing..
Raising money with big dollar fundraisers means he can compete with trump’s fundraisers.
It is a plus for me,.
We need to beat trump, we need money. If a rich person wants to help, to beat Trump, they are welcome.
7
The McKinsey Mayor will "get eaten alive by the corporate machine that now runs the world."
So will Biden for similar reasons!
It's way past time to slingshot into the future. That means Bernie/Warren.
5
"it’s unlikely that they will be able to achieve many of those goals in our polarized political climate. But what matters to me is that they are making the case."
This statement indicates that you don't value realism, and you don't hesitate to proudly proclaim this failing. "Making the case" is not just enough on its own, it can seriously handicap the actual attainment of the case you champion.
Thank providence that Pete Buttigieg doesn't share this smug void.
Politics is the art of the possible. It's not the bailiwick of dewy eyed dreamers.
Napa Valley "wine caves" aren't really dens of depravity. Some who frequent them may be flawed, but the same might be true for patrons of Berkeley coffeehouses.
Spare us your virtuous chest thumping. The Mayor from McKinsey as you so glibly term him, doesn't have his head in the clouds. He is a politician, and is willing to cut corners and take advantages as opportunities arise, and even, somewhat shamelessly, engineer those opportunities. Those talents will help him defeat the odious Trump.
You probably would have had disdain for the greatest Democrat of the 20th century, FDR. He could be, and sometimes was, ruthless, and supremely devious, but his achievements were awesome. I wonder what your opinion is of another great Democrat, Speaker Pelosi. I think I have an accurate inkling.
6
"The Mayor from McKinsey." I love it! What an apt description for a candidate with no moral compass. A man who decides his campaign platform by what will suit the moment. A Mayor of the 361st largest city in America who had eight years to fix frayed relationships with his black and brown constituents and then through negligence only made it worse. And then recently threw his hands up and said, my bad.
America needs a leader, not an opportunist. He is the wrong candidate.
6
"tiny South Bend, Ind.," has a population over 100,000.
NYC still had only 60,000 in 1800, and only reached the level of South Bend some decades later.
That really isn't the issue.
3
In any opinion article there'll be some word or phrase that says it all, or at least quite a lot; here it's "misguided centrism". Where do you think you're going to win if not in the center? Where can you successfully govern except there? Where do Democrats, in their true hearts, want to win and govern? The far left; they're becoming a kind of Corbynesque Red Star Brigade. They arouse huge enthusiasm in New York, San Francisco and Hollywood, but nowhere else. Do Democrats want to win, or just get the prize for leftist ideological purity and radical intensity? Are they really just talking to one another while pretending to talk to America? At this point, going into a dead-on-arrival impeachment, it looks like what they excel at is doctrinaire emotional intensity, leftist bitterness, and hatred. Do they think the American people don't see that? Do they think that's what they want?
5
We would be so lucky to have an intelligent, well-spoken candidate like Mayor Pete, after years of a President who just put out a 6 page long screed that everyone agrees was loco. Why the need to tear him down?
9
Has everyone forgotten his stand on the ouster of Al Franken? Not sorry, Mayor Pete, your “tolerance” eliminated you from my consideration.
2
How dare he espouse myriad policy opinions held by a majority of Americans?!
10
The writer's (smug) assessment that 'Mayor Pete" will have his lunch eaten by corporate elites avoids the analogy of the double edged sword. This 'stupid' economy buoying Trump's meagre approval ratings has the capability to turn on him (and us). Trump is synonymous with the booming economy, however unequal, but there will be a recession. It could be a severe one, because of all our debt and the rampant speculation in the markets. And it could happen between now and next November. If so, Trump will be blamed. Pete could be the last man standing.
2
"A funny debate has been roiling the online left: Do young liberals hate Pete Buttigieg too little, or too much?"
Why does he have to be hated at all? He's making his case, not putting children in cages. If you don't agree with his positions, don't go to his rallies or contribute money to his campaign or vote for him in a primary. By all means, pick apart his positions. But hate him?
7
Our politicians let this happen.
The only way to correct the abnormal situation is to have term limits for all politicians, judges and the supreme court.
Make corporations accountable to the people also.
2
I could not have said better what I want to say, except Pete is more like Bill Clinton rather than Obama. They both are slick with verbal dexterity and both are Rhodes Scholars.
3
Why is such an inexperienced candidate so heavily financed by Wall Street and Big Tech? I suspect they see Mayor Pete as a pleasant, smart candidate who will neither challenge nor threaten their interests. Unfortunately, their interests are not beneficial to the vast majority of Americans or the environment.
10
The far left, and this far left opinion writer, is really coming out swinging at Pete now that he’s a real potential winner of the nomination. I’m sorry, but your bias is showing. I believe Pete is the only hope of winning over the moderates, independents, and former Trump voters. He’s smart and pragmatic. Purity tests are naive.
10
Assessments of the potential Democratic Party candidates need to factor in Trump's mental and emotional state post-impeachment.
Since the start of his presidency Trump has been sinking ever deeper into full-blown insanity.
This week's unhinged and rage-driven rant tells me he just drifted further from the real world into the realm of the delusional.
Will Trump have the basic mental and emotional stability to engage in an electoral race?
It's a real question that we seem to be avoiding.
There are some among us who are too insane to function. That may be where Trump is headed.
1
Maybe we should take down every candidate who gets some momentum in our quest to find a candidate who offends no one. We can surely find a way to give the advantage to the Republicans to re-elect the most corrupt president of our lifetime and change the judicial system for generations to come.
6
Dems likely to lose with Warren or Sanders with their radical left policies.
2
To me the issue with Pete is the fact that he was disingenuous about black support for his racial justice plan ( https://theintercept.com/2019/11/15/pete-buttigieg-campaign-black-voters/ ) and his extreme hesitance to disclose his donors and open up all fundraisers. He certainly does not have a monopoly on good ideas in this election, so we need to we need to judge candidates on whether they would actually stand up for their ideas against special interests.
5
The problem, most any candidate that will please the writer of this essay will fail in the electoral college.
4
@Andrew
The real problem: the electoral college.
“The economy is stupid”. In other words, if the economy works in a way that makes some people richer than others, it does not work at all. Unless we have perfect equality, relative prosperity is not worth having. Rather than having some go hungry while others eat too much, let us all starve together. There are endless examples of catastrophes created by this kind of thinking: ruined countries, ruined economies, ruined lives. People want opportunity, not shared misery. Just ask a refugee from Cuba or Venezuela whether equal poverty is preferable to unequal distribution of riches. Eliminating poverty is only possible if the society accepts differentiated outcomes which are the necessary corollary of free markets. I like Mayor Pete not because he is intelligent, young and gay (though all of these qualities are pluses in his favor). I like him because he is NOT Warren or Sanders. Class war was tried in the last century. The result was genocide. Now it’s the time to try something new.
6
People don't want to hear Mayor Pete's educational pedigree.
Bill Clinton went to Yale and signed Nafta. Ross Perot went to Texarcana Junio College and said Nafta was the sound of jobs being flushed.
Perot was right.
7
"Electability" is now a euphemism for "corporate-approved as safe."
5
I agree with you, Mr. Manjoo. Initially I was impressed by the way Pete Buttigieg could get right to the point and express what seemed to me to be the heart of the matter. But that's when he's talking about ideas and principles. When it comes to policy proposals, he's just the opposite. He loosely says that X would be nice, but we can't really do it, so we'll just circle round and round.
9
Ok, I guess that means Trump is going to get re-elected.
7
Ask Jeremy Corbyn how having the support of the "plugged in progressive left" worked out for him.
6
Time will tell and this is not the time.
Calling Buttigieg “the Mayor from McKinsey” is straight-out hyperbole. From what I recall, he worked at the firm for less than three years, right out of university (maybe to pay off debt?) I know a bit about the consulting world; I doubt whether he would, in that short a time, even have been a project manager. More likely he would have been an analyst crunching numbers and drafting reports, with no substantive decision-making responsibilities whatsoever. If you disagree with Buttigieg or simply don’t like his policies, Mr. Manjoo, fine - go after him on that level. Don’t, however, misrepresent and try and make it sound as if he was an evil, big-shot McKinsey executive. Let the GOP do its own dirty work.
13
I lived in South Bend, IN during Mayor Pete's time and before. In a conservative northern part of the state South Bend was a Democratic island. I saw him on the local TV station during his initial mayoral campaign. I didn't know who he was, and I wasn't even going to attempt the name, but I thought he was well spoken. Admittedly, the South Bend Police Dept. controversy started before he took office, but one of us first acts upon becoming mayor was to fire the African American police chief. He refused to explain adequately why, and led us to believe that federal law prevented him from doing that. It was the first of several cringe moments I had watching him. Then the tear down the vacant houses campaign, which unfairly impacted ethnic neighborhoods disproportionately. He was never able to diversify the police force. He dragged tech in the area forward by fiber opticing (yes, I made that word and I'm sticking with it) most of the town on the idea that it would attract business, he decided the one-way streets in the area hindered business, so he tore the place up and made them all two way. I worked in media at the time, and all the feedback we got was that people didn't want the streets changed. My point is, however good he thinks his intentions are, he tends to railroad things through. Mayor Pete is well educated and well spoken, but with this campaign, he is learning lessons that Oxford can't teach.
6
I spent over 4 decades in the oil patch.
We hired the likes of McKinsey to help us with projects. And I met and worked with many - senior level and entry level ones like Mayor Pete
And to use Sen Bentsen put down of Quayle "The Mayor is no McKinsey consultant."
All he did was spreadsheets and powerpoints when he worked for 2 years right out of college. And the list of clients he released is hardly made of Fortune 500 companies.
To me, it's even amazing and incredible that folks take him seriously. He is a mayor of a town in Indiana where it's own citizens may have problems putting it on the map.
And to compare him to Obama?
At least Obama had been elected to Illinois House and then, won a statewide federal election.
This man has won one election - when probably no one else was running.
And he may not win again if he ran. He has already declared he will not return. Not one on his council has endorsed him.
I would take any Democrat currently running over this Mayor.
I think if he were not white and gay - and "married" to a man - no one would even hear about him.
He fits an identity that Democrats crave for, pure and simple.
13
@Neil
Sounds like no matter which Democrat is picked, you'll be voting for Donal Trump. And you misrepresent his record. He was elected in 2011, and won re-election in 2015 with 80% of the vote. He's a Harvard grad, a Rhodes Scholar and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. No other candidate comes close to that.
I doubt that he'll get the nomination, but he is really what we need in the White House.
5
Sorry I disagree, a lot of moderates in both parties like the prospect of Pete’s candidacy, I think he may very well be the last man standing out of this scrum.
8
This is the best and most crucial summary yet of how US discourse on economics is completely divorced from the lived reality of the vast majority of people
Nothing is going to improve in this country unless and until more media outlets understand this,
and change accordingly the way they cover political economic events and trends
This is why your conclusion about Buttigieg is exactly correct
He is NOT the person to challenge corporate domination of both the economy AND media discourse ABOUT the economy
The similarities to Obama are disturbingly on-point,
which is why no small part of fixing things is, at long last, becoming clear about why
Obama was such a DISASTER for the economy in general, and inequality in particular
Keep on keepin' on -- this kind of analysis is CRUCIAL
"Headline economic stats are increasingly divorced from more substantive metrics on American well-being.
This is a country in which prosperity rains on the rich -- while hundreds of thousands of people go bankrupt every year for getting sick.
This is a country in which it is not unusual to encounter developing-world misery -- alongside the most obscene collections of wealth ever recorded.
There’s a lot of job growth, but a lot of the jobs are low-wage, high-toil jobs.
It’s a country in which every nearly every economic sector trends toward monopoly and oligarchy,
and in which regulators let companies call the shots — see the FAA and Boeing"
Well-said and SO true
10
This column is another rendition of the same argument: Should Democrats give the country a Moderate Progressive or a "Far-Left" Progressive? With regard to Buttigieg, it's unfair to obsess over his three years at McKinsey. This was his first job out of college. He stayed a short time and left. It was a learning experience. This country hasn't elected a far-left president since FDR---and that followed a devastating Depression. To conclude that Mayor Pete is unconcerned about income inequality because he raises money from people who have money is also unfair. You are concluding that the Mayor will therefore do the bidding of these folks. But he has also raised millions in small donations from people of lesser means. Why not conclude that he will do their bidding? Personally, I am ready for a President with a progressive vision and a moderate tone. I am ready to be on he side of victory.
7
@Richard Winkler It should also be noted that FDR’s policies prolong the depression. WWII is what ended the depression.
@T Smith
Uhhhh, FDR's policies did NOT "prolong the Depression" ...
After trying a number of policies and programs that --
despite the fierce opposition of corporate titans and Republicans --
created both economic growth AND hope in a time of want and hopelessness,
FDR was re-elected massively in 1936 ...
At that time, FDR did make a huge mistake, undoubtedly the worst of his presidency:
He accepted the incorrect diagnosis of his right-wing critics that the economy was "back to normal"
and returned to the conventional economic thinking about deficits that had created such a disaster in the late 20s / early 30s ...
These, btw, are the same set of toxic moves mainstream RPBs today --
the people Paul Krugman correctly calls "deficit hypocrites" --
want to re-impose on any DEMOCRATIC president,
since they don't mind creating huge deficits when it comes to, say, a fraudulent and corrupt invasion of Iraq ... or a massive tax break for the wealthy and corporations
That mistake by FDR did indeed set the economy back,
making it much more difficult for the Keynesian policies that had worked after 1932 to work again
It wasn't until the strategic needs of fighting a two-front global war MANDATED the kind of state intervention policies FDR had tried to install from the start --
along with the possibility of significant profits from war production --
that a new -- much more global in scope and technologically advanced -- economy came into being after WWII
2
I agree. Buttigieg is a not the person to run this country. He has no core principles and is way too cozy with people like Zuckerberg.
As for the economy, sure it is nice for the top 5-10% but it is miserable for the rank and file. Walmart workers and shoppers aren't feeling it.
Progressives are not trying to achieve "equal outcomes"; they are advocating for "equal opportunity". It is called fairness. Is that now un-American?
12
Right on all counts. At first I contributed to "mayor Pete", as I thought he would eventually take a clear and defined stand on many issues. How wrong I was.
5
A guy who spent 7 months in Afghanistan should look less blithely self-assured. I'd like to hear more about what he actually did there other than shuffling paper and drinking tea. For example, why is Dari on his language list, but not Pashto?
7
I would much rather win with someone whose policy ideas might actually accomplish something than lose with idealistic proposals with no way to pay for them, and which won't get through Congress anyway.
Hence my support for Mayor Pete. Saying he's too much like Obama is hardly a condemnation in my book.
23
Amen! Agreed
1
No. The economic argument against Trump is NOT simple. The constitutional argument against Trump is simple. The Democratic Argument against Trump is simple. The social justice argument against Trump is simple. Throwing Pete under the Bus because of his background is Politics of Grievance. That worked great for Corbyn. The Politics of Grievance is Trump's battlefield and Democrats will lose. The politics of Hope is Not Trumps Battlefield. If we have a positive message, Trump will only fire back with grievances and resentment. He will look awful and he will lose. Looks like the author is too filled with grieveance and resentment to even care.
9
The mayor from McKinsey? Heaven forbid that a public servant works for a few years right out of college at a for-profit firm and learn a thing or two about businesses run. Your purity tests will ensure four more years of Trump.
35
Democrats play to the energized base during the run up to Election Day willfully ignoring the fact that there is a big electorate outside their echo chamber. Come that certain Tuesday, they’re shocked that the real world is different than they had believed.
10
I should probably want to vote for Pete Buttigieg as he is a gay man and i never thought i would live long enough to see a gay man run for president and actually poll well enough to be considered a front runner. The world has definitely changed. I even contributed to his campaign at the beginning. He was smart and articulate and seemed a breath of fresh air, but after watching him waltz with the tech barons and take advice on campaign staffers from Mark Zuckerberg I realize he is one of those guys whose only goal is to be president, not to actually change anything.
Bernie, Elizabeth and Andrew Yang are the ones i am watching. I will vote for any one of them to be president of the United States. They have big ideas and we need their vision.
Today the supreme court invalidated one of the major supports of Obama Care. The only issue the Dems should be running on is health care. Talk to people who were once considered middle class and see how they are barely making ends meet if indeed they are.
Vote for someone who says "we can" rather than someone who says "we can't" (and yes i am talking about Pete and Joe)!
And please don't talk about President Trump. Bashing him will just upset people who voted for him. Lets talk about what the policy alternatives are, not the character of the president. He is completely capable of sinking himself on his own.
10
Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are running on platforms that enjoy the support of around 30% of Americans. You should write your next column on how that translates into a victory.
15
Mayor Buttigieg is clearly the same kind of excellent actor as President Obama: projecting hope and change, then turning on the little people who believed him. (I include myself.)
For the few specifics President Obama campaigned on - a public health insurance option, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, transparency in government, help for the homeowners facing foreclosure, letup of deportations - whoever believed him was the one that got kicked in the knees. Once in office, he turned around and did the opposite.
Does anyone doubt that Mayor Buttigieg would do the same if given the chance, i.e. if elected? At McKinsey of course that is what he learned, satisfy the customer, fake it, dissemble until you get paid.
We would be Mayor Buttigieg's customers, he is trying to get our business, er, our vote, and once he has it, who do you think he will govern for?
Back to the Obama/Clinton administration: it was they who made Trump possible. It was they who took a huge mandate of organized volunteers and turned it over to optimize managing Wall Street's interests.
During their administration, 2009-2016, youth suicide and mortality among poorer Americans skyrocketed. Americans know this in their bones, and Sec. Clinton's "America is already great" sounded like ridicule and insult added to injury.
Thank you, Mr. Manjoo. You are completely on target.
God help us if Mayor Buttigieg makes it anywhere near the nomination.
10
And Bernie/Lizzie nomination will lead to Impeached Donnie being re-elected.
5
I am a liberal. I am for policies that reverse the corrosive effects of wealth inequality. But I do not resent the rich. Working for McKinsey is a strength of Buttigieg. I respectfully disagree with this columnist.
13
It feels simpler to me.
How can a mayorship of a town with a population the size of a football stadium prepare one to run the biggest economy/military on the planet?
11
Valid point, but the current President is a morally, financially and intellectually bankrupt ex-reality television personality.
4
And yet somehow Donald Trump is doing it now.
2
I don't think your finger's on the pulse. I've noticed how many op-eds that dismiss Buttigieg reek of condescension. And how often they imply he is bland, weak or wily. Even uppity.
What I see in him is a calm center, a brilliant mind, and a very strong spine. And faith defined as selfless service and compassion.
You underestimate or undervalue his character. Many voters won't.
15
Neither people on the left nor people who voted for Trump trust the status quo which Buttigieg wants to reinforce.
People with similar beliefs and priorities, and want to see massive reform, are at each others throats.
Poor black and poor whites, for example, would be a juggernaut if they pooled resources, organized, and fought for change that would impact them. Not likely to happen because of racism and prejudice.
If we could rid the electorate of the social issues which the right has propagated in order to create division, such as abortion and gun rights, and people voted on the social economic policies they favor, there would be unity.
Ending corruption in Washington DC and a liberal fiscal agenda isn't some leftist trope, it is what most Americans want.
What Sanders and Warren need to do is translate their ideas to people on the right who voted for Trump because he said he'd "drain the swamp" but which he had no intention or competence to enact. I hope they can do it, not just to get elected, but to serve the needs of the whole country.
6
sorry but Anybody But Trump.
they all look like Lincoln to me in comparison. This is exactly the type of thinking of moral purity that got us in this mess in the first place.
14
I don’t even agree that “Mayor Pete is a lovely man.”
Lovely men are not buddies with Bond Villains like Mark Zuckerberg.
Lovely men do not volunteer to serve in the military when the only wars being fought are unjust imperialistic wars like the one in Afghanistan.
9
"This is a country in which prosperity rains on the rich while hundreds of thousands of people go bankrupt every year for getting sick."
We know this due to the groundbreaking research Warren conducted as a professor. This is why she became a Democrat (prior to that, she was mostly apolitical and a registered Republican). This is why she is running for president. This is why she should be elected president.
7
Our system is not designed to allow as is stated “ radical reform”. The system is designed for gridlock and incrementalism. Wanting anything else is a pipe dream.
4
Liberals need to recognise a critical fact about being the president of the United States. You can't be effective unless you can sit in a room full of billionaires and have them listen to you. Those people wield a lot of power and they are going to wield it with or without the president. A president who can talk to those people is far more likely to further a progressive agenda than one who can't - or, more the current situation - won't. One of Hillary's strengths was that she *could* talk to those people on their terms, and they would respect that when she started talking about other matters.
Politics make strange bedfellows. What that means is everybody has to be in bed with everybody else. Leave the billionaires out in the cold and they will come in the back door, in a very bad frame of mind.
9
@Steven
Most billionaires are not interested in backing people they want to listen to. They're interested in backing people who will listen to them. That's why their support is not a good sign if you're interested in changing the status quo.
3
As usual with presidential elections, it's not what you say but rather how you say it. Turn off the sound during the debates. Who looks agitated, disheveled and a little off: Waren and Sanders. Who looks old, basic and standard: Biden. Who looks smooth, calm, collected: Buttigieg.
Who will independents vote for? It won't be Waren and Sanders.
8
Television executives are smiling at this comment. Yeesh
In my opinion, it is useless to try to convince Mayor Pete's supporters that he is not the one.
However, I would ask Pete's supporters that they please consider pressing Pete to improve his climate action and justice plans. Greenpeace gave his plan a B. In comparison, Greenpeace rated Bernie's plan an A-plus and Warren's plan an A-minus.
Until Pete has a better climate action plan, I will not vote for him in the primary. A grade of a B is a mediocre score for the most important issue of the day.
Of course, if Pete is the nominee, I will vote for him against Trump.
7
Txs for expressing my thoughts so clearly. Good commentary.
6
Funny how the Republicans never want "incremental change," the favorite phrase of Buttigieg's and Biden's supporters.
I hate their ideas, but one could never accuse them of not thinking big.
2
I like Mayor Pete, but I’m just a selfish boomer. Right ? I really don’t care WHO our nominee is, at this point. I just know that if the Creature manages to get “ re-elected “, America is DONE. Why is Pete being Hilloried ? Is there a Memo I’ve missed ? Or, are some people worried about the competition for their own choice ? That’s what it looks like.
Sad.
9
This is so absolutely spot on.
5
I am confident that today's young "progressives" will succeed in finding the best Mondale their party can put forward.
An entire generation (and maybe two) has been brainwashed to hate anything "corporate". Even those who get a good college education can't bring themselves to work for one, preferring, instead, to eke out a living in some job at poverty wages that seems somehow virtuous. It's not bad enough that we have so many whose talents are grossly underutilized, they blame "the man" or "the system" for the poverty their own choices created. With this profile, they are, of course, Democrats.
Manjoo's article reminds me of the old Groucho Marx line: "who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?"
4
Well, at least this piece is in the Opinion section, because it is, at the end of the day, just Mr. Manjoo's opinion. An opinion with which I happen to vehemently disagree.
Mayor Pete is young and doesn't have much experience but he ticks all the boxes for me: intelligent, principled, moral backbone, pragmatic, calm, natural unifying leader. And he has recently added another notch to his belt: he has ran an outstanding presidential campaign so far, especially compared to other candidates who, initially, had far more name recognition (e.g., Harris, Boooker, etc.).
He fulfills the basic requirements for running for President - a U.S.-born citizen over the age of 35. We the people, the voters, will decide. I wish the NYT would quit picking on him. It feels like a repeat of 2016 when the media was trying to sound balanced by offering false equivalence after false equivalence between Clinton and Trump. Please stop.
8
I keep reading these woke, uber left “take downs” of Mayor Pete, and they never amount to anything substantive. Here’s the thing: Pete is the poorest candidate in the race, is the son of an immigrant, grew up a closeted gay person, and eschewed a career in Washington or a coastal city to serve his Midwestern city. Sorry, those facts don’t mesh with some poster child for privilege that the far left is trying to sell us. On policy: many of us Democrats think reforming the health insurance industry that we have and more tightly regulating the markets and employment policy is preferable to “revolution.” As for pragmatism: heed the lesson of the British general election—if we go with Sanders or Warren we’ll lose the Midwest to Trump.
13
I don't know why voters are supposed to listen the openly socialist writer who calls himself ..quote "I am one of those crazy radicals'
I find Warren's & Sander's free for all policies are so disingenuous.
They are knowingly conning voters. They both know none of the freebies will not pass.
They are coming up insane budget solutions....trillions , billions.. Their math is totally wrong and debunked..
Wealth tax is a joke . It would not even pass congress. (forget about supreme court).
If a candidate offers so many free stuff, voters get so cynical and they vote the other guy makes sense. So far Mayor Pete makes sense to me. I will not vote for neither Warren nor Sanders, because I do not like to be conned.
6
The idea that we can’t discuss, analyze, even attack Dem candidates is ridiculous. This is what primaries are for.
The GOP had a million candidates in 2016, there were vicious attacks that make the 2020 Dems look like softies, and guess what, Trump won.
This is a crucible, let’s see who makes it through.
3
As we saw in the UK, People voted for the most chaotic government in history because that was more palatable than the alternative which was revolution. People don't want to go from one kind of chaos to another kind of chaos. As a group of black women supporting Biden said, "I want boring, I want to be able to sleep at night'. Buttigieg is the smart, potentially boring candidate who will make the incremental progress that will in the longer term (which is not 2 weeks) get us where we need to go on healthcare and a host of other issues. HE is the younger, smarter version of Biden that will let us sleep at night knowing the country is in good hands.
4
I think it would be wise to bring Andrew Yang into your understanding as his perspective on the uselessness of the current metrics that measure our economy are entirely detached from what is the reality for normal people.
2
Great, great column. Thank you Mr. Manjoo for so clearly elucidating all my own concerns. I'm sure you'll be pilloried for it by so called "moderates" who are really just frightened people who think if they put their heads in the sand all the bad stuff will go away. We are going to need to wage a battle in the next 10 years against the dark money forces and we need a leader willing to lead the charge.
My guess is, all the people who will write comments supporting Mayor Pete have great health insurance and good paying, secure jobs. Good for them; but what about everybody else?
10
There is no perfect candidate, but to write off Mayor Pete because he raises big money, had a big money job, and is not left enough is a short sighted way to evaluate a candidate. There are many qualities that make a good candidate: honesty, inclusion, hard work, the ability to make good decision, etc., however genuineness is not the biggest one. Many think DJT is genuine, yet he is the most divisive President since Lincoln. It's naive to think that the new socialists, like AOC, who won by a mere 4K votes, are the only future of the Democratic party, but that's not the statistical reality across America. All of our economic disparities flow from allowing legislators to be bought by lobbyists. Not AOC, Mayor Pete, Bernie, Joe and Elizabeth combined can change our system without undoing Citizens United. Once that 'For Sale' went up, it was American government to the highest bidder, either foreign or domestic. Anyone who vows to change that, even if we don't agree with the rest of their policies, is good for the country. Candidates have to tackle the biggest obstacles first, everything else can follow. Big buck social programs are also not what most Americans want. Like those who immigrate to the Valley, most simply want a better paying job, with benefits. That's not possible without working with corporate America. Of the 155M working Americans, 107M are in management, and finance: read corporate. Push them away at your peril.
2
Sanders would definitely lose, and Warren may or may not. We Democrats were rudely reminded in 2016 that piling up votes in California, New York, and Massachusetts (as Hillary Clinton did) does not elect a president. I wish it did, but we are stuck with the Electoral College for the foreseeable future.
So I favor the only candidate who has won a competitive state's general election: Amy Klobuchar. She has won three times in a state which Trump came close to winning in 2016. She resonates well with voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. She's 59, so not so old as (ahem) certain candidates, and not so young as Mayor Pete.
And she's center-left, which is the Democratic Party's sweet spot. Before you write her off as "not progressive enough", read her website, starting with goals for the first 100 days: https://medium.com/@AmyforAmerica/amys-first-100-days-b7adf9f91262
Amy: She Can Win Where it Counts.
4
It takes a certain gall to criticize a stellar candidate so dismissively while using arguments so shallow.
A few examples:
- the economic argument against Donald Trump is not that the rich own too much, but that the poor and middle class own too little;
- the tax system he sponsored made inequality worse;
- his trade war has hurt national and global trade and widened the trade deficit, upending existing supply chains and creating uncertainty. Farmers are taking government handouts to offset the losses of former customers.
- Growth has stalled, manufacturing and confidence is declining, such that Trump bullied the Fed to lower rates given signs of recession, despite unsustainable trillion dollar annual deficits for short-term fiscal stimulus.
- Trump has regressive losing economic policies, ginned up with debt just like the numerous serial bankruptcies in the private sector.
Pete can make the substantive argument against Trump's failed economic policies far better than your straw argument.
Every government proclamation by fiat and overly prescribed solution to a fast moving market-based economy suffers from an ignorance of insight and impact.
I have no doubt a brilliant, ethical, accomplished, patriotic American President Buttigieg can defend our nation from Russia's hot war in Europe and North America, uphold our institutional guardrails of power, and safeguard our sovereign elections and restore our democratic alliances around the world.
3
I could not disagree more. It's a shame that the right has abandoned any semblance of reasonability, but I can deal with that. When I see it on the left all I feel is despair. What we need is a reasonable president who can prove that progressive policies are more conducive to a stable society than conservative ones.
Anyone familiar with South American politics knows you can make a career out of finding the right scapegoat and promising the world to people, but if you don't have a sound budget, you're only leading your people to financial ruin.
Latest Buttigieg plan shows he wants to raise $7 Trillion in additional taxes from the wealthy over the next 10 years. That's significant, but also believable.
The Scandinavians didn't build their egalitarian society with radical, unachievable promises. They did it with measure and prudence, and with the goal of earning the people's faith in public investments.
7
The columnist should support the Democratic candidate of his choice and refrain from criticizing his less favored candidates. The Democratic Party is a center-left coalition, and the center is an important and indispensable constituency in that coalition. We do not dis the center! Especially if we are on the left and have any respect for building cooperation within the coalition, one of our vaunted values.
Focusing on healthcare and any number of progressive issues in this election is not a winning argument when it comes to gaining the 55% vote that will be required to overcome bias in the electoral college. Focusing on how the US is undemocratic and allows the minority and a handful of billionaires to have their way against the well being of the majority under Trumpism is not only the most fundamental issue, it is the best foundation for a Presidential campaign.
2
Powerhouse column, thanks. Agree Obama could have done more to curb corporate power considering the opportunity to do so given his majority, but he was astute enough to often state Wall Street was not the real economy. This is lost on Trump and he has done nothing to improve the lot of the working and middle classes. All he has done is further gild the lily the GOP so blindly supports (unchecked corporate interests). Trump calling out Wall Street records as the only indicator of economic strength is ridiculous- we need infrastructure, we need to lead in green energy and we need to fairly overhaul our tax code. None of this happens with another warmed over centrist.
10
A far left candidate like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren can’t beat Trump. (Warren had an excellent chance to be the first female president, if she had kept Medicare for All & huge wealth tax to herself and put out plans like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg or John Delaney & similar others. Bring out the radical agenda when it can fly)
Mayor Pete is an amazingly gifted & eloquent man with excellent presence of mind, unlike almost equally gifted Bill or Hillary Clinton who tends to put their foot in their mouth.
Pete is progressive enough. If he had decided to stay at McKinsey, or another similar firm, he could have been immensely rich; he probably knew that too. He chose public service, ran for mayor of the modest city he was raised in and volunteered for combat duty, all in the service of his fellowman. He doesn’t need anyone’s permission/recognition to be seen as a sufficiently progressive Democrat.
If he’s elected president, which is very likely if he gets the nomination, he will at least be as good a president as Bill Clinton was whom I still admire immensely.
6
@A.G.
I maybe wrong, but I believe after Obama, a minority candidate at the top of the ticket is unwindable. Many white Democrats may not vote for such a candidate, which they may not disclose because it's improper, uncivilized, "uncool." But as VP pick may still be ok, but not any one. Kamala Harris is not that good, comes across as a little odd.
Because Hillary Clinton lost, a huge number of women were quite upset, a reason why after Trump's inauguration, Large numbers of women marched all across the country. Any woman may be enough. Amy Klobuchar is a little inadequate. But as a VP pick, she is a winner. Buttigieg-Klobuchar will be good. But their chemistry may be difficult.
VP pick is very important. Joe Liberman in 2000 was a horrible choice. In 2016, if Hillary had picked Bernie Sanders, who definitely deserved it as well, she would be president now.
1
Pete Buttigieg embodies a quality that is in short supply among Democratic candidates: He is inspiring. Going along with that, he is self-effacing and has a wonderful sense of humor. And a tremendous amount of persona integrity. He is brilliant, calm, and speaks in complete well-formed paragraphs.
Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and Obama were all inspiring, and yes, even Trump is inspiring to his base. The more inspiring of the two eventual candidates has historically had a clear advantage - and a Trump-Buttigieg contest will reach clearly demonstrate this.
We need to be inspired, not talked down to, not shouted at, not preached to. Pete's the person to do that.
22
There is a fundamental disconnect at the heart of Buttigieg's candidacy: he made his name by challenging the electorate to overcome prejudices - against his orientation, his age, his claim to what constitutes a suitable resume for the most powerful job in the world - and yet now he's exploiting other prejudices against all the things he's not: non-white, female, old, or a holder of any position that could be considered controversial. Far from breaking barriers, he's trying to convince us that he's the safest candidate. He's exploiting our fears and wants us to vote for him out of fear.
The problem is that a cursory look at history will tell us that "safe" candidates are anything but safe. Just ask Romney, Kerry, Dole or Mondale. The American electorate is inconveniently impractical; we will show up to the polls when there's someone we like and when there's no one we like we stay home. (By "we" I mean the crucial portion of voters in the states where the Electoral College is in play.) Hatred of the opposition has never been sufficient motivation to get the swing voters to the polls, and that won't be any different when the opposition is Trump.
At the same time in 2020 the Democratic Party has to open the biggest tent in the history of democracy, one that spans the ideological spectrum from AOC to Mitt Romney. Also, the vote WILL be hacked; nothing short of a landslide victory will be sufficient to overcome these obstacles and beat Trump.
Pete may not be the one, but who is?
6
While I don’t disagree completely I find it odd that you dismiss Mr. B out of hand. He’s whip smart, had the courage to volunteer for active duty in a war zone, and to come out publicly, which might have ended his political career. He listens and appears to actually take seriously a need to improve.
My first choice is Ms. Warren, who has a record of being able to compromise to achieve goals.
I’m curious what the writer’s solutions to the issues raised in paragraph #5 would be.
3
"Even Biden, who has built his brand on common-man folksisms, seems more believable..."
Not to me. Neither seem like they would be much of a step forward on economic equality issues. And Biden is worse in one respect - that he still thinks he's going to change things by working with Republicans.
8
Ok, I get it. It would be nice if we could “reform the way America does business,” have universal health care, free college for everyone, “break-up big tech” and “take on the corporate machine that now runs the world.” And you recognize that even though Warren and Sanders will be unable to achieve “many” (I’d use the word “any”) of these goals, what matters to you is “at least they are making the case.”
I have some news for you- this isn’t a debate competition or some scholarly discussion in peer-reviewed journals. This is an election for the survival of our DEMOCRACY. If a candidate is too far to the left, then he or she will lose because this is not where our country is right now, nor where it has been in the past (see, for example, George McGovern).
The reality, whether you like it or not, is that the election will likely come down to several thousand voters in a few moderate states - either the Democratic nominee can meet those voters where they are, or we’ll have four more years of Trump.
And, for the record, I’m a liberal.
22
This is a classic case of the perfect being an enemy of the good. The US is a big ship and big ships are hard to turn. The platforms espoused by Warren and Bernie will not be accepted by the majority of voters regardless of of Mr. Manjoo's feelings on the matter. Better an incremental approach by an articulate moderate like Mayor Pete than a dated and sclerotic Biden. And I'm tired of Manjoo's single-minded class envy being put forward as an acceptable substitute for competent leadership.
18
I agree with everything you said about the obscenity of modern capitalism.
But here’s the big problem: your argument only appeals to intellectual urban liberals... the swing state voters who used to vote Democratic but voted for Trump in 2016 don’t agree with you...and they won’t vote for Warren, who most aligns with the views in your column.
Did you see the British parliamentary elections? That’s exactly what will happen here if Warren / Sanders gets the nomination.
And that’s why I donate to Mayor Pete every month.
Vote Pete 2020!
Incremental Obama-style reform beats 4 more years of Trump!
26
As someone who exists outside of every party, I can't see the downside of a centrist view in the current realm of extremes. As a millennial, I can accept that my views have been influenced by Keanu Reeves' role in "Little Buddha" telling me to choose the middle path.
7
A reservist intelligence officer isn’t much for the veteran bonafides. It’s more than other current candidates though it is far far away from a Washington, Jackson, Grant, McKinley, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Ford, Carter, Bush, or Eisenhower. What Mayor Pete is is a chameleon. He’s ticked the boxes in a manner to please while adapting positions so as to curry more favor and avoid offense. A character trait one normally associates with veterans is moral conviction, a trait to which Pete seems lacking.
14
@James Allen
Oh for god's sake. There's SO much unease with PB's restrained personality. I haven't seen so much projection since they closed the last drive-in.
PB is smart and strategic, not strident. He's also steady, backs his positions with visionary thinking, and it's about time we elected someone who is brilliant, not just furious.
5
Doing your job as part of the circular firing squad, cannot be easy. How about a little enthusiasm for those who stand ready to take on public service? Maybe imagine a future with no regulations at all, or a darwinian approach to wealth and income disparity, or favors for the supporters and punishment for the dissenters, or a Supreme Court with a mission, or privatization of everything, a religious litmus test to laws of the land and a hatred of otherness. These are the ghosts of Christmas present and future, should our best and brightest continue to look for flaws over assets.
10
You seem to argue that he is both of and catering to the corporate world, while also saying they will eat him alive. Well, which is it- is he one of them, or ready to fight them and maybe he has the smarts to figure out how to do so? And if not him, who? Sanders and Warren are too out there, at least at this time in our history, despite their having some good ideas and passion.
10
Maybe he's just smart, Farhad. Americans are very excitable. 9/11 made us invade a country without cause. A couple of social media posts from Russia has all but sunk our democracy. We overreact when afraid and we become afraid easily. Even your piece is riddled with "worry."
So, talk like Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders and you easily freak out many very relevant American voters who are confused about what "socialism" means, even though a quick poll among them would find that they probably are supportive of the policies each of those candidates is championing.
Maybe Pete's playing it a little more conservatively on the rhetoric to get nominated and get elected first. Then he can start doing all of the stuff that Americans support up until the exact moment a candidate actually starts campaigning on it.
I don't know why, but I've always sensed this in him. I think I plan to vote for him.
14
What's with the wrath against Pete from the progressive wing? You'd almost think he was winning hearts and minds - such is the perceived threat. I started out this season as an Elizabeth Warren supporter - she may still get my vote. But her glow has dimmed for me some as she has, yes, tried to be everything for everyone - sounds like one of your complaints about Buttigieg. His ability to listen to and actually answer the questions he's asked seems like a plus to me, but somehow it's now being dismissed as slickness and insincerity. Stop it. Just stop it. Whoever can win should be the nominee. And I'd rather place my faith in polls of real voters than in some magic revolution that may or may not materialize. Try winning votes instead of trashing your opponents and calling them names based on a job they took for some experience out of college.
22
@Rob Yampolsky
The polls ("of real voters") have consistently pointed to Bernie since the end of 2015 and Biden and Bernie since the beginning of 2019.
6
@Rob Yampolsky
Today's "progressives" regard any contact with corporations as --- shudderrrrr -- contact with the unclean. Only those working in the public sector or academia are of the body.
1
Many supporters of Buttigieg seem to value his political pragmatism. They should recall that exactly THIS is what cost Obama his widespread support that the country granted him in 2008. The desire for REAL change can unite those who lean to the left with those who lean to the right.
10
Obama in 2012 results:
332 electoral college votes = 126 vote margin
66 million votes
51.1 percent
Took the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, OHIO, Florida and Virginia.
We could only HOPE and PRAY anyone can have a “down” election like this.
2
As I recall, Obama served two terms. The lost support you refer to happened when?
2
@Steve Bresnen
Obama started losing his support among progressives, independents, non-affilated and reformed Reagan-democrats immediately with his cabinet and fed picks. The dems lost 60-some seats in the 2010 midterms - and again many in 2014, even down to the most local levels. If he wasn't a wartime incumbent (and Bin Laden hadn't just been caught) he probably wouldn't have been reelected. He only followed the progressive platform that he campaigned on in his final two years, using executive orders (that just get later reversed).
1
The problem with this general line of thinking is that you have to combat the far right with the far left. I'll be first to agree that Obama didn't go as far as he should have, but a centrist approach ultimately works better because it has to exist in a nation of diverse interests. Radical swings don't move the ball down field, they just enrage half the nation at a time.
7
@Jeff P. The GOP seems to have moved the ball pretty well down the field. You don’t stop that with a wishy-washy defense.
7
There are winning combinations - and there are losing combinations. Being gay and being a "know-it-all" is a hard one to overcome in most of America (and elsewhere). Politically, Buttigieg is the opposite of what the country is looking for, imo, which is a social 'centrist' and an economic liberal. Buttigieg is socially very liberal, but less concerned with economic justice and a level economic playing field.
10
Manjoo’s writing is always thought provoking. While I don’t agree I have other doubts about Pete. Winning the nomination and the election requires solid support from African Americans. Don’t know how Pete will win them over. Joe has that support locked up. And he still has the best shot of beating Trump.
1
I haven't yet decided who to support among the Democrats running. But I don't agree with this critique of Mayor Pete.
First, I dont agree the the strongest argument democrats could use is about the economy. If the election hinges on the economy, I think Trump will win. So, we expressly dont want it to hinge on that. What we should be running on is decent improvements to healthcare, infrastructure, education -- these are winning issues that most americans agree with the dems on. And we should also run on civility. Pete would be good at all of these issues. I think he'd have a decent shot of winning the election if he were the chosen candidate. I care passionately about defeating Trump. From my observations of coworkers and neighbors, Warren and Sanders would lose badly to Trump, so I won't be choosing them.
14
@UU
But don't you consider less anecdotal evidence, like nationwide polls? You probably shouldn't bet anyone based on your hunches. After all, oddsmakers rely on the empirical evidence. Bernie and Biden are clearly and consistently the top challengers to Trump (based on the country's electoral college), as seen at oddsmakers sites, e.g. Odds Shark, etc..
3
@carl bumba
I see your point.
But my hunch was right about Trump, against the prevailing oddsmakers, and about Kerry as well. So, I'm not so fast to ignore it.
Moreover, many of the polls of crucial swing states show Bernie and Warren down against Trump, while Biden up. It's a little too early to trust polls about Buttigieg, as he's not yet well enough known nationally.
1
@UU
The polls, imo, underrepresent the disenfranchised, economic struggling, opioid addicted and/or ridiculed flyover folks who are less eager to talk about themselves to more educated and probably happier pollsters from distant cosmopolitan cities. Because of this, I didn't (and still don't) trust the polls in measuring Trump's support. But I do trust the polls that compare BETWEEN democrat candidates (with respect to, say, Trump). Bernie is far above Warren in the industrialized midwest and other swing states, from my reading.
Insisting on ideological purity will lose Democrats the Presidency and give us another 4 years of Donald Trump. Governing entails negotiation and compromise. "My way or the highway" has never worked in politics and never will.
9
I think the problem is that the election comes down to a very small slice of the electorate. The rest of us cancel each other out and, due to the Electoral College, we simply don't matter very much. It is very hard for Americans to admit this upsetting fact, but it's crucial to defeating Trump. I don't think those swing Obama-Trump voters in Wisconsin, western Pennsylvania, and Michigan are attracted to a progressive agenda. They seem not to be all that ideological and instead seem motivated by likability and stability. Oddly enough, I have the sense that the three best candidates to win their votes are Biden, Bernie and Mayor Pete, possibly in that order and despite their huge policy differences. I have no problem with Mayor Pete because the US is a profoundly unequal and conservative country with a strong resistance -- structural, cultural, political-- to the kind of progressive change I personally would like to see. I just don't think it's gonna happen. Hope I'm wrong, but 25 years of teaching US history and watching US politics lands me here. I will happily vote for anything that breathes and is not Trump.
7
No one gets to the core of the issue like Pete does. Vote for a charismatic energetic moderate into the White House then vote for progressive senators and representatives.
17
Thank you so much for saying this. There is not enough space allowed here for me to truly articulate what I think on this subject, so I will happily throw in with you.
10
Pete’s willingness to take big money from tech and the financial sector worries me. Tech and finance are the the two industries that, to me, seem most in need of reigning in through common sense regulation. I agree that Warren and Bernie are willing to at least get caught trying to make the playing field just a tad more even.
10
Hate to say it, but presidential campaigns need money. Trump has no ideological impediments to taking money
2
So we're told that we can't trust Buttigieg's willingness to fight for the common good because of his McKinsey stint, but there's no similar critique of Warren despite her past stance as a Republican and her work in corporate law.
The thoughtful and consistent response to both Warren and Buttigieg's record is to appreciate that people are capable of growth and change, and that we should be lucky to have a choice between multiple candidates who saw the other side and came to the conclusion that their talents are better used fighting for progressive change. Buttigieg obviously has a shorter track record, but that doesn't deny a career path that has clearly trended against the Wall St-coddling he's accused of.
18
@Ted
Wise insight, Ted. Thanks.
All Democrats have to do to lose the presidency is nominate Sanders or Warren. Anyone who thinks either of those two can win likely lives in either a solid blue district or on the coast somewhere---because in the heartland, that ain't gonna fly. But leave it to Democrats to figure out how to lose this one when they will win the popular vote by as much as five million.
8
@Rover ""--because in the heartland, that ain't gonna fly."
Does that include Borough Park, Brooklyn or Suffolk County?
3
I live in NYC even we are not thinking they cannot win... Warren & Sanders are welcoming 4 more miserable years with Trump
1
We may survive four years of Trump, but I'm concerned that neither the United States nor the world will survive a second Trump term. The priority for the Democrats is to nominate a candidate who can beat Trump and begin to repair the damage he wrought. It is less necessary for the Democratic nominee to be a transformative leader than one who is responsive to the needs and aspirations of the American people. Pete Buttigieg lacks the experience necessary to translate these needs and aspirations into viable policies and programs. The more transformative candidates, Warren and Sanders, are likely to lose to Trump. (Warren has also demonstrated poor political instincts.) It's too bad that Klobuchar and the other centrist candidates, apart from those named Buttigieg or Biden, are polling so poorly because a centrist might be better suited for defeating Trump than the more ideologically-driven candidates.
1
I think Warren has the most sophisticated understanding and plans for structural change I've ever seen in a democratic candidate. But haven't we learned that elections are more about making people feel seen and valued than actually doing what is best? It is on those grounds that I think Mayor Pete does better. To my great disappointment because I really wish it were Warren who could make America feel understood.
9
"Mayor Pete reminds me of so many techies who promise big, disruptive change while refusing to accept the full costs of achieving their idealism. For them, there’s always an easy, slapdash, cost-free revolution: Just use the right hashtag on Instagram and you, too, can..."
Interesting.
Do you know who else promotes a cost-free, easy, idealistic "revolution" based on Instagram hashtags?
the exact candidates you support in this piece.
13
I don't think Buttigieg would have much of a problem making most of those economic arguments. And for heavens sake, there is a lot more wrong with Trump, even just in the economic category, than just "the rich own too much."
8
If I were a billionaire, I couldn't help myself: I would imitate Bill Gates but give even more (Bill's net worth keeps climbing). For billionaires who can't seem to appreciate the notion of sharing with the less fortunate and helping this world out of its worst problem, government needs to intervene. The homeless encampments of Oakland cannot be allowed to continue unabated. Half the nation is one paycheck away from disaster. Indeed, this economy works for those with financial assets but not the whole. Meanwhile, we are running the nation into even greater debt at an accelerated pace. Why, this is an expansion? The Democrats will win right about the time this fragile success finally cracks, then it will be their job to dig out - just like Obama.
9
Although I agree with the writer that more has to be done to restructure the economy to benefit the middle class, I don't agree that Mayor Pete isn't radical enough. The fact is that radical positions have gotten Warren and Sanders into trouble and called into question their viability against Trump. Mayor Pete recognizes this which helps explain his cautious approach. He wants to be elected President and he's walking a tightrope to the White House. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
One more quibble. The writer like many of his colleagues at the NY Times is complaining about a robust economy which is ridiculous. The political bias is obvious since most press simply don't want DJT in the White House and are determined to undermine him no matter what he does.
Though I admire Warren and Sander's ideas for health care and taxes on billionaires, I'm worried about how their approach to the economy will affect the current bull run and our trade war with China.
For now, Mayor Pete''s cautious approach makes me feel a little better about my retirement fund, though he does need to step up his game with health care and tax reform.
7
I like Pete.
Why would any of us care about all the nitpicking and searching for ways to tear this great American patriot and statesman apart when there is so much that is decent, positive and just plain upbeat with him?
I am sending him money and supporting him in any way I can as are over 700,000 other voters.
23
@Simon Sez
Wasted money.
Actually don't care! Will vote for whichever candidate is on the ballot! I wish all of the candidates would routinely pause to remind audiences that they are more alike than different. Everything else only serves to undermine them individually, when the important point is that each and every one of them would do a much better job than the alternative in November.
10
I disagree with this assessment wholeheartedly. It strikes as just ranting about nothing. Becasue basically, all the candidates are more or less for the same things. It is just a question of tone and demeanor.
We could do with less billigerence in the coming years. A calm, and rational voice woudl be most welcome.
15
“As their detractors note, it’s unlikely that they will be able to achieve many of those goals in our polarized political climate. But what matters to me is that they are making the case”
And therein lies the problem with progressivism. They want rhetorical purity rather than any tangible results.
8
Your contrasts between economic ups versus individual downs might well have culminated in observing that the GDP is rising while life-expectancy is falling, but that's a point Pete makes all the time, so you're actually in agreement. And about those fund-raisers: some of those who donate the max of $2800 get a fancy dinner, but others stand for two hours and get just a photo and a quick handshake, while still others don't get anything at all: they just send in $2800 because they believe in him.
6
Please take note of how Jeremy Corbyn destroyed the Labor Party. If a young progressive had been allowed to lead instead of a traditional socialist, the voting public would have found a different fulcrum, and the election last week might have worked out. Similarly, the situation in the 2020 presidential election requires that the Democrats are led by someone in the middle. Buttigieg is preferable to Biden, so he gets my vote.
10
Farhad's reasoning represents well my and, I imagine, many other progressives' feelings about Buttigieg as well as Warren/Sanders. Nice column.
5
Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern also had some pretty progressive ideas, but they were also an object lesson in the perfect being the enemy of the good. I don't question Pete's backbone and I don't see him being meat for the CEO's.
11
I am at the young end of the silent generation and I'm sick and tired of voting for Democrats who are actually right-wing like Bill Clinton or are center-right like Barack Obama. I want this country to become progressive and work for the people and not the corporations. I son't understand people who want the corporations to run our healthcare and think it's okay to take on a lot of debt to get an education. I don't understand people who think it's okay that too many big corporations not only pay no taxes but get subsidies paid from our hard-earned dollars.
I know we have to get rid of Trump, but do we have to have a "moderate" who will bring us back to the status quo that doesn't work well for most us? That's what brought us Trump. Don't people get it?
12
Right on the mark, Mr. Fanjoo. PB keeps shifting his positions as the wind changes. First it was all about his how generation should take over because the oldsters messed it all up--as if no one under the age of 40 or 50 voted for Trump or voted at all, or that being 37 was somehow a credential for the Presidency. (Agism, by the way, is no better than all sorts of other discrimination. He ought to know that, but chooses to ignore it.) This was a ridiculous assertion since the real answer is that the GOP messed it up for all but the wealthiest. And they sure are messing with the environment.
He was a Progressive, but now he's figured out his angle is to be a Moderate. He was for Medicare for All but now he isn't, sort of. He touts his military service, but he's not anti-war in the way that Gabbard is, and she was deployed twice, and she is still in the Army. And he's way too tight with very big money interests. And the McKinsey business is suspicious at best. He's just another Wall Street, Big Money Democrat. No thanks.
Genuine? Nope. Better than Trump? Of course, but so is everyone else running on the Democrats' side. Will I vote for him if he gets the nomination? Of course. But it will be another bummer to vote, just like the 2016.
13
This is absolutely 100% correct. Finally, someone has articulated the case against Pete. Unfortunately, it wasn't Bernie or Elizabeth but ok.
12
@robert
Amy Klobuchar already stated that Buttigieg was a thumb on scale. She nicely refused to state he wasn't qualified, but that was the subtext and spot on accurate.
2
It is truly bazaar that Mr. Buttigieg is relentlessly criticized for the fundraising practice that is no more than what any senior candidates have done before. He was pressured to release bundler list as if there is anything to hide when every single individual donation is listed in the FEC website. If candidates are not pressured by such purity test, perhaps POC candidates would have a better chance to compete with the 70-year-old forever Washington insiders who already have the donor network.
The criticism of inauthenticity is supported by not one shred of objective evidence. I have watched numerous interviews of Mr. Buttigieg, and listed to many of his speech, and yet to see one instance when he changed his message to "try hard to please everyone."
His policy proposal may not be progressive enough meet the taste of some, but let's not forget progressiveness is not the only consideration -- does it actually work to solve the problem?
Take free college for example, I taught at an underfunded state University. My students worked in labs built in 1965, and actually did not meet safety standard. The University was allowed to hike tuition, but only enough to keep it in operation, not to build new labs. Data from countries offering free college also shows that it does not increase social mobility.
What Mr. Buttigieg demonstrated is not concession but priority, as a (rare) responsible politician would do,
14
Pretty funny when you think about it. Warren (net worth $12 million) and Sanders (net worth $2.5 million) doing a smackdown of Pete Buttigieg (net worth $100,000) for hanging out with millionaires in wine caves. Sanders and Warren could be in those caves themselves. Not Pete, though. He'd never get invited.
27
@Andrea Sand oh ha ha ha. Pete's just younger - compare what he has with what they had at his age and also compare his privileged background to theirs. Look at his many status markers. It's ludicrous, yes he is the one who fits in with the bankers not them.
5
Pete Buttigieg is clearly brilliant, but if he can't heal the racial wounds in South Bend, some of which he inflicted, it's hard to see him getting the enthusiastic backing of African-Americans so essential for winning the presidency. To this psychologist, he seems, in the Myers-Briggs sense, too high thinking and too low feeling to allow him to connect with minorities, working class Americans and those in dire need of medical care. If you value experience, electability and moderate views, then you probably should prefer either Joe Biden, a very high-feeling candidate, or Amy Klobuchar, who another high thinking and evidently low feeling given her harsh treatment of her staff, candidate. Although I'm a 79-year old New Deal progressive, I feel the best ticket at this point may be Joe Biden-Kamala Harris. My dream team, however, still is none of the current crop but Sherrod Brown and Stacey Abrams.
9
@Paul Wortman
Watch the videos of his meetings with SC voters. That tide of doubt is turning. They can see in person how genuine he is.
1
@Paul Wortman YES YES YES i think a ticket of sherrod brown and stacy abrams would be absolutely terrific....now if we can just convince sherrod and stacy to enter the race
1
Clinton and Obama were nice and polite versions of what republicans used to be, before the party became owned by Moscow. Pete is the same. Electing an actual democrat would be a welcome change.
10
I am the same age as Pete. I have watched over the past 4 decades as this country was gutted by neoliberalism, mascarading as "pragmatism" and "common sense," as if those are values that progressives do not use every single moment of every single day in the same measure as our friends and family who happen to vote differently. As a woman, I would not be where I am today if I took the advice of others who told me not to stretch, nor would my mother, grandmother, or any of the other accomplished women I know who challenged the status quo and continue to do so. Yet as a woman, I am asked constantly to settle for incrementalism, for limitations, for "down the road, we'll see." Wake up! Stop focusing on the short-term. You may get 4 or even 8 years of centrism under someone like Mayor Pete, but another Bush II or Trump will surely be there to follow him because he is very clear about not wanting to make the structural changes needed to fundamentally challenge the oppression/inequality that strangles the U.S.
From looking at other comments below, let me say to those who think this is short-sighted, I campaigned for Obama and had this same criticism of him during both of his terms. To quote my father who was also an early Clinton supporter, "Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had." We have seen what 40 years of struggle between the center right/the right has given us: a pendulum of petty power swings. Enough is enough, it is time for real change - Pete ain't it.
29
Raising the debt to unprecedented levels is NOT economic progress--especially for younger generations!
7
There is a false equivalence emerging between Warren and Sanders because they happen to be close in the polls and promote some policies to the left of the middle. However their experience and competence and policy details are entirely different. These differences need to be more clearly articulated for us to understand the pros and cons of Butigieg.
2
The backlash and vitriol the Buttigieg has been getting lately just tells me Trump is going to win in a landslide. The middle moderates and persuadable reluctant Trump voters are going to rum scarred of Warren and especially Sanders. And the Bernie Bros and Warren voters will stay home rather than vote for a moderate Biden or Buttigieg. "Just more of the same, No Way"
Say I prefer Warren or Sanders, Buttigieg is a little too middle of the road for me But they're all good. Just don't do Trump's work for him by bashing the field.
15
I would much rather vote for practical, sensible solutions that appeal to the majority of Americans, not a small minority.
Radicalism and extremism on the right AND the left hold us all hostage. They are the minority and need to be treated as such. The vast majority of the USA is in the CENTER!
18
Sorry, this argument sinks. I do realize, as you confirm it, that you're a radical leftist, which is great and we need people like you to hold up a mirror to our politics and our country's mentality. But we also need realism for the present day. Mayor Pete IS a nice man which doesn't mean he'll get eaten alive by big business -- and didn't you just throw an invective of McKinsey Mayor? Which would mean that he actually has been on the inside of the capitalism sausage making, which would make him more prepared than others in how to deal with it. Not everyone who has the heart and mind to make things better in this country needs to thump Das Kapital. I grew up in a country that started the miserably failed socialism as an earnest endeavor, only to stumble into abyss caused by people's corruption on a wholesale scale. Too much too soon is not a recipe for success. I believe Mayor Pete has the means to slowly start turning misguided perceptions and alleviate baseless common fears precisely because he's a smart, eloquent and a NICE guy, who can be persuasive without being alienating.
16
Pete has a good chance to win over independents in the key battleground states and thus beat Trump. Calling for progressive purity tests and demanding radical change is not going to beat Trump.
27
Your article - and those like it - miss the point entirely.
Trump ain't it.
Whether the Democratic candidate is progressive, centrist or even conservative, they are preferable to a racist, corrupt, misogynistic, Russian asset intent on destroying democracy and the nation from within.
Columns like this are part of a strategy to divide Trump's opposition into warring camps that can't find common ground under that central tenet.
Pete Buttigieg is a gifted scholar, naval intelligence office, political analyst, consultant and mayor who is thoughtful, deliberate, honorable and polite.
He, or any of the Democratic candidates running for the nomination to his right or left, would once again elevate the office of the United States Presidency and the standing of the nation.
All would address climate change as an existential threat to humanity, unlike Trump who is relaxing pollution and energy efficiency standards to please his master Putin.
All would rebuild the nation's infrastructure to improve productivity; support basic research and rely on science; reestablish the strength of the State Department; ensure the independence the Justice Department; and safeguard voting and our sovereign elections.
Every Democrat believes in universal health care. Pete believes in choice and a public option, and I do as well.
We need to take ego out of the 2020 election, and stop being diverted by sideshows like this column.
37
The Mayor from McKinsey. Now that is a cheap shot, and from that moment on I felt I could not trust any more of your opinion. The smart guy, Rhodes Scholar, took a job at McKinsey for a couple of years. He sat in a backroom and crunched numbers--believe me he was not directing corporate strategy. Then he got on with his life, in a good way. Give him a break. There are lots of smart young people who have done the same and are wiser for the experience.
37
@allanrp Pete Buttegieg seems to be very comfortable with ideas and data.
I'm not interested in a data-driven policy maker. I'm interested in a presidential candidate who can relate to all sorts of people and who can make decisions based on what people need, not on what the efficient, data driven "facts" tell them to do.
McKinsy recommended to ICE that it cut spending on food and medical care to detained immigrants because it would save money. This is an example of a mindset - data driven.
I'm interested in a president who can relate to people.
He is having big problems with the black community because even though he is 37 years old, he hasn't found a way to engage with them, even in his home town.
5
@allanrp
Okay, then let it be Wall St. Pete.
That shoe also fits.
There also could be an argument made that since Mayor Pete has worked in the belly of the beast, that he knows how the stockholder management, greed is good, world works, and maybe he has some idea of how to tame the corporate beast and reform things. FDR was a member of the patrician class, one that had nothing but disdain for the idea of workers having rights, of immigrants achieving the American Dream, very similar to people like the Koch Brothers and Trump himself, who really believed that their class was special, blessed by the (Episcopal) church as "blessed by God", yet FDR, faced with the depression, created the kind of world for the working class that ironically Trump's supporters want to go back to, where working class people and others had a taste, a small taste, of the good life, one where they could get sick and not worry about going bankrupt because they had health insurance, one where they could get wage increases, real ones, one where their kids could go to college and do better. Conservatives have spent the last 50 years gutting that and returning the US to the land of corporations and the rich while returning the working class and much of the middle class to where they were in the 19th century.
I don't know if Mayor Pete has real ideas, but sometimes revolutions happen from within, not from without.
4
"That argument goes like this: Though the economic stats look pretty good, the Trump boom is a mirage and a moral disgrace. Today’s seemingly rosy climate is the culmination of a political economy that consistently rewards the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else. "
The NYT had been a cheerleader for that same economy prior to the Trump presidency.
Off-shoring, outsourcing and imports have been the mantra of the forward thinking economists at the NYT.
The "already wealthy"? Actually the top 10% to 20% have also done well. Are you counting them in the "already wealthy"? Of course we know that doesn't include the residents of NYC and SF. It seems it takes an annual salary of at least $1,242,356.39 just to get by. Some of that could be saved if their children attended public schools but that's another topic for discussion... I think some of the forward thinkers at the NYT refer to the underlying drive as "white flight". No?
2
You can keep telling yourself this over and over until you actually believe it and then I'll answer: Jeremy Corbyn. The issue of the day with 3.5 % unemployment (yes, I know it's a mirage and a moral disgrace- try selling such platitudes to trump's base) isn't income inequality, as concerning as that may be, but cultural populist anger. You would do well to remember that if you want to defeat trump in 2020. So far I'm not optimistic and opinions like this are a major reason.
9
I’m certain that Buttigieg’s centrism would lead to better actual results than Warren’s or Sanders’s wonderful but politically unworkable ideas. A presidential candidate should not offer only their ideal version of America; they should give us a plausible path to get there.
13
This article is right on target. Buttigieg can't fix the major problem of US politics -- the influence of big money -- because he's financed by big money. We can't trust Buttigieg to fix the corruption that big money brings.
It's the big money donors who have blocked meaningful healthcare reform and blocked dealing with climate change.
That lack of trust in big money candidates applies to all the other Democratic candidates, like Biden, who happily accept big contributions from big corporations and rich donors. Buttigieg, like Biden, shrugs that the only ways to deal with our current crises -- climate change, healthcare coverage and costs, college costs, wealth disparity, endless wars -- is by big money approved incremental corrections to the status quo. Never mind that time for incrementalism has run out.
17
To me it seems Mayor Pete is more concerned with his career than he is with any issue facing this country, and that's the problem. We have a slew of contractors, lobbyists and consultants working throughout our government and it's destroying our ability to do anything well.
14
Mayor Pete should send you a thank you note. This column inspired me to send yet another $100 contribution to his campaign.
20
I disagree with many of this author’s points. Like it or not, and I for on do not like it, the system requires the successful candidate to raise a vast sum of money. I do not fault Mr. Buttigieg for playing the game whose rules have been long-established by those who came before him. Likewise, far too much is being being made of his association with McKinsey. His experience there, like his academic credentials, his military record, and his political experience, is part of who he is and the perspective he has developed. In my opinion, Mr. Buttigieg is the best hope of the Democrats. Mr. Biden is past his prime and Senators Warren and Sanders are asking for too large a swing in the pendulum. To get the ship of state righted will require patience, intelligence, a steady hand, professionalism, dignity, and a great deal of energy. The changes that are required must be incremental and effected over time. We do not need a wild swing to the left in response to a wild sent to the right. Of the current roster of candidates, I believe Mr. Buttigieg offers the best hope.
12
It should only be a matter of time before Dems come around to the following:
A. Mayor Pete’s time has not yet come—plus he heeds some serious seasoning, in a bigger arena.
B. Biden has no executive experience, and is one big gaff away from a tailspin from which he can’t recover. He has shown himself stubbornly obtuse when it comes to availing himself of simple apologies, and key opportunities to set various nettlesome records straight.
C. Warren has the best ideas, or at least practical solutions, and would make an awesome cabinet secretary, but will not be a strong vote-getter with disaffected former-trumpers, moderates and independents.
D. While many ‘felt the Bern’ 4 years ago, the fire isn’t there anymore. That torch got split into a lot of matches, picked up and carried by others, but hasn’t the feel of a movement anymore. ....Having realized all of the above, I’m mystified that so few seem to have grasped the obvious solution (which he himself deduced, after waiting and watching) the kernel of which embodies the sine qua non of this cycle: the defeat of Trump. Only one candidate embodies the executive accomplishment, the bootstraps backstory, the financial wherewithal, the progressive bona fides and what appears to be a kryptonite shell to wield against Trump: and that is Mr Bloomberg. No candidate is perfect, but if you’re looking to get the job done, he’ll get it done.
5
I'm suddenly motivated to give (another) $100 donation as well as order a Mayor Pete bumper sticker. Too many subjective "feel-y" criticisms here, and an exaggerated focus on the economy which can rise and fall -- and likely will -- several times before November 2020. Let's see how Iowans and New Hampshire-ites judge him, with solid post-primary polling to discern their balloting decisions based on all issues: economic, social, and political.
14
Well said, except Biden is not the front runner. No citizen has voted and no delegates have been awarded.
6
Meanwhile, outside the bubble:
I live in a congressional district that is made up of the city of Lincoln, Nebraska and several smaller cities and rural areas. The district has been solidly Republican, but Trump's antics have made the district competitive, with the university and government city of Lincoln ripe territory for switching R's to D's. The Democrats have a strong candidate in Kate Bolz who has positioned herself well to fit the district during her time in the state legislature. But she will have no chance if the Democratic Party is branded a far left party by the nomination of Warren or Sanders. And this same dynamic will be at work in many, many districts and purple state senate races. Let's work to make the Democratic Party a majority party.
202
@LewisPG The democratic party is a majority party. It's just that we don't apportion power according to votes in this country, so you get weird situations where commenters suggest a tiny place like Lincoln, Nebraska is somehow not a bubble but the actual America.
I live in a metro area of 7 million people in a state of 40 million people. Sure, it's a bubble, but it's a pretty huge one.
162
But the electoral college are the rules that elect a President. Those rules will be in place in 2020.
That’s why middle class whites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina are so important despite the huge margins in LA, Chicago and New York City.
60
I don’t want to be ruled by the preferences of middle class whites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina. I’ve never been to these places, have no friends nor family there or from there, and consider them more alien to me than Mexico City or New Zealand.
I don’t care to beat a Trump appealing to lower class whites and their preferences in order to elect a Buttigieg appealing to middle class whites and their preferences.
I’m voting on the issues, and the issues are urgent and require radical, rapid intervention; money in politics, economic inequality, the cost of healthcare, gun violence, getting out of overseas wars and the global warming crisis. Whoever attacks these head on and from the root gets my vote and I hope they win.
If not, you can all have your Trump and eat it too, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
56
The current choice is Bernie, Warren, Pete, Biden, and possibly Amy. Some Democrats are having a hard time deciding, some are panicking, some are deeply committed to one candidate or another. This is the latest panic about Pete in favor of Warren and Bernie. Democrats will eventually get behind the nominee, but if it is Bernie or Warren, Trump will win four more years. Wisconsin and Arizona will not support a socialist, especially in a good economy. And to win those states, Democrats need to flip Pennsylvania and Michigan first. The choice is really Pete, Amy or Biden, and even that will be extremely close. Warren and Bernie, not even close, not even a prayer.
6
@william
You are right. The one question. Who can BEST win Penn, Wisconsin, Mich, and maybe push a challenge in North Carolina and Arizona. Where is Warren and Sanders support in those states?
That’s it.
Running up the score in New York it getting a few more supporters in upside down states like Florida, Georgia or Ohio doesn’t matter.
1
@William I : Bernie won the Wisconsin and Michigan primaries in 2016. Wisconsin was a hotbed of socialism in the past, and Michigan went for Jesse Jackson in 1988.
Don't make the mistake of stereotyping Midwesterners as a bunch of hayseed fundamentalists.
4
@William I
Were the U.S. not a viper pit of misogyny, the 2020 Dem ticket would, clearly, be Warren/Klobuchar. And the nation would be lucky to have them both in the Executive Branch leadership.
Trump has set the bar pretty darn low.
To be better than him, all it takes is: civility, humility, respect for all people, support of our allies, willingness to learn, 4th grade grammar skills or better, a desire to make the nation a better place for everyone--not just themselves, trustworthiness and transparency.
There you go.
It seems that most of the Democratic candidates can foot that bill.
11
You can’t scare off people with never tried or very complex ideas either.
Too many Americans think only if themselves and their immediate needs. Don’t underestimate the ability of the middle and upper middle class suburban white American to toss away political norms of the other candidate is a perceived threat to their pocketbook.
1
Nice man, but another clone of the centrist Clinton/Obama mold. Should he be elected, not much will change--in four years or eight. In 2028 (or 2024) we will be right back where we are today, only in a worse shape with the lower middle classes more upset and the Rep. more revanchist. Not pretty.
11
@Bob
Clinton and Obama won two terms by large margins.
2020 is not the year of bold new ideas.
2020 is about rehabilitation. Think of a star athlete recovering from surgery. They aren’t hitting the field for a long while.
The big ideas can come in 2024
9
@Bob
First of all, Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama won their elections twice.
Hillary Clinton won by popular votes decisively.
Not much will change?
We exited the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and are rolling back energy efficiency and pollution standards under Trump.
We have a trillion annual deficit in a massive corporate tax giveaway, while he pressured the Fed to gin up the economy he claims is booming with reckless monetary stimulus.
Trump's trade war is a disaster, so the federal government cut 700,000 people from food aide to pay billions in subsidies to farmers who can't sell their products now.
Trump is being impeached for repeating his work with foreign governments to attack his rivals and our sovereign elections.
Trump is cutting Social Security and health care while he fleeces the US Treasury by pressuring the government to use his businesses.
Absorb some facts.
6
Yeah, and almost every person who voted for Trump is still stuck to him like glue. Ever heard of the electoral college? New York won't matter any more than it already does even if ten million more people in that state vote Democratic. Getting non or seldom voters to come out for the Democratic candidate in these target swing states is our only hope. That means appealing to as many constituencies as possible.
3
I don't think that income inequality within the US is the right measure. We should be focused on the average standard of living. I would love to know how the poor in the US today compare to the poor in the US from 25 or 50 years ago. My suspicion is that they are much better off today - with access to technology and resources that the poor of yesteryear would find unimaginable.
Globalization has decreased income inequality across the globe, but exacerbated it within the US. But the overall standard of living - I suspect - is higher now than at any time in history.
3
Why would anyone vote for a Democrat pushing a plan (Medicare For All) that not even a majority of Democrats want? Pete's "Medicare For All Who Want It" sounds exactly right. How is increasing competition into the health care market from a government-run program kowtowing to wealthy and corporate interests? Answer: It isn't. I'll pray for Farhad.
11
@Steve
Former left winger Medicare4All Buttigieg shifted to the center and stole the M4All who want it from moderate Klobuchar, who always held that policy.
Buttigieg is running on his personality, not on his record. It's a scant record with several red flags.
If a woman or a black person had tried to run the same kind of glamour-focused campaign, they would have been dismissed as light-weights.
He is hardly a person to speak truth to the power of the financial elite.
Thank you for your column.
21
Perhaps Mr. Manjoo, you should evaluate Mayor Pete from a different perspective. Has it ever occurred to you that Mayor Pete entered the corporate world, looked around, didn't see what he liked and decided that public service was a far better option? With his academic credentials there is no doubt that his experience at McKinsey would have been an excellent platform to excel in private business. He clearly would be making far more today than South Bend pays.
He may not be perfect but you can rest assured that he understands how the corporate world functions far better than Donald Trump (funded by Dad and never reported to a Board Of Directors).
238
@Tom Q He might be making more if he were still working at McKinsey, but he wouldn't be running for President.
I suggest all Pete fans watch Netflix's "The Politician," the comedy based on -- at least to me -- Buttigieg's life in high school. Ben Platt gives an amazingly "sincere" performance playing him.
6
Or he’s a sharp, even cynical go-getter who included Harvard, the Navy, and political office in his long term plan to become President. Now that the plan is coming to fruition early, he’s making his move.
9
@Tom Q
And Mayor Pete knows infinitely more about the economy and the world of business than either Sanders or Warren. I'll bet you could give both of them a simple multiple choice test about basic economics, taxation, finance and business and both would flunk cold.
10
Excellent analysis Mr. Manjoo! We need more articles and opinion pieces making this point: the System is broken for most people. The people get this, that's why many - including many lifelong Democrats - voted for Trump. Many weren't very optimistic that he would change things, but they were certain of one thing: Hilary would not.
And here we are, almost 4 years later, and still the DNC and "mainstream" Democrats don't understand this lesson. They're working to nominate another "centrist" who will sound good, but in the end won't do anything to change the Status Quo. If they think that message is going to beat Trump, they're even more clueless than I thought.
Had they - and the MSM - not worked so hard to derail Sanders in 2016, we'd be looking forward to electing him for his second term, and all the stain of Trump would have been averted. Even now, they continue to undermine and downplay his ideas and support. Odd though how his support keeps growing despite all that. Even Warren is feeling the target on her back by the billionaires who own most everything, and fear her as much as they do Sanders. Either one will break the chokehold this oligarchy has had for decades.
Yes, Pete's a really smart, well-spoken, nice guy, who promises compromise. The problem is that the other side refuses to compromise, so guess where that leads? No changes to the System that is clearly in need of them.
10
Buttigieg abandoned his support for single-payer healthcare in favor of an incremental half-measure after realizing he could raise tons of cash from corporate executives in the pharmaceutical and insurance industry. His list of donors includes executives from Aetna, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer and Indiana's Eli Lilly & Co.
Buttigieg has run $6 million in TV ads in Iowa with the message of preserving health care "choice." At the same time, the Partnership for America's Health Care Future, a coalition of insurers, bought half of all political advertising in Iowa with the same message.
Student activist Greg Chung asked Buttigieg: "I wanted to ask if you think that taking big money out of politics includes not taking money off of billionaires and closed-door fundraisers.” Buttigieg responded, "No" and walked away. Buttigieg calls small donor money “pocket change.”
Last week, he held 3 fundraisers in NYC with wall street bankers then flew to silicon valley for a fundraiser with the CEOs of Netflix, Google and Facebook.
We need to stop climate change. Yet Buttigieg's climate change advisor is David Victor whose research was funded by BP and the fossil-fuel industry. We need to breakup BigTech because 90% of the jobs now are concentrated in 5 cities. We need to reduce drug prices and fight the opioid epidemic. The list goes on-and-on. Buttigieg equals the status quo.
He's a puppet of billionaires just as Trump is a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
20
The idea that we can reform capitalism with one election — or with one person — is insane. That’s a much bigger process, and it’s not going to happen from the top.
This election has got to be about getting rid of Trump. He is destroying too much. We cannot have four more years of this depravity.
The very idea that Democrats will win by indicting an economy that is purring is absurd on its face.
Buttigieg’s gambit is to articulate progressive values (vs. positions). That may be too subtle for the pundits, but I think it might be just right with an electorate that does not approve of the President.
22
He’s too packaged and lacks charisma. Obama was cool. Mayor pete is definitely not cool. I don’t know how we got to this place but none of these 20 plus candidates can beat trump—at this point Biden or Bernie seem like the best bet. For whatever reason people like Biden and Bernie can get the turn out....
1
This country doesn’t need a “cool” president. It needs a president with reasonable ideas and a plan to make the economy better for average working people, someone who will at least make a valiant attempt to reunite our badly divided population, and someone who will begin the process of unraveling the mess Trump has made. If Pete is that guy, so be it, and I couldn’t care less whether or not he’s “cool”.
4
"A funny debate has been roiling the online left: Do young liberals hate Pete Buttigieg too little, or too much?" And "Mayor from McKinsey"?
That's about as funny as four more years of Trump and a 7-2 Conservative Supreme Court majority that will keep progressive policies from reality for at least a generation.
The problem I have with progressives isn't with their policies, it's with their approach to politics. Progressives often seem more concerned with making a point than making actual policy. It's time to stop just talking about change and start winning elections and passing actual laws.
Disdain for centrist candidates and jokes about how much hatred someone like Buttigieg (?!) deserves is not going to help progressives make the case to the wider country that they are ready to be the majority.
20
Ask Jeremy Corbyn how well this perspective worked at the ballot box. Or, better, ask Boris Johnson.
6
Yeah you want universal health insurance but you criticize Buttigieg's approach to it.
Well we tried the my way or the highway progressive approach to it back in the mid-70's.
Thanks progressives !!!!!
"“Asked about his greatest regret as a legislator, Ted Kennedy would usually cite his refusal to cut a deal with Richard Nixon on health care.
…At first, Kennedy rejected Nixon’s proposal as nothing more than a bonanza for the insurance industry that would create a two-class system of health care in America. But after Nixon won reelection, Kennedy began a series of secret negotiations with the White House that almost led to a public agreement. In the end, Nixon backed out after receiving pressure from small-business owners and the American Medical Association. And Kennedy himself decided to back off after receiving heavy pressure from labor leaders, who urged him to hold out for a single-payer system once Democrats recaptured the White House in the wake of the Watergate scandal."
- Steve Pearlstein, Washington Post, August 28, 2009
6
What Mr. Manjoo misses is that Democrats lose when they try to persuade voters that the voters' experience of life is a delusion and that they, the wise politicians, know better. It doesn't matter how many different ways a candidate might say "the Trump economy is a fraud" if in a voter's own world things seem to be going better. You have to find a better argument, or you just won't be believed, and, in fact, you'll come off as condescending and arrogant. Mayor Pete gets this, I think.
11
The author makes the common—no, universal—editorial errors of presuming that new policy ideas could A) be enacted, readily, in a new administration, and B) that if enacted, big economic change in America would follow, as one follows two. Wrong, and wrong. First, there is, absent an acute national or international catastrophe, such as a world war, an inverse relationship between the degree of change a new policy idea represents and its likelihood of prompt and wholesale adoption in a new administration. Second, again absent catastrophe (and the President’s personality flaws don’t count as such), any and all change will be incremental.
Given these facts, demonstrated over and over, the best prescriptions for change are “long-reach” incremental changes: Increase marginal tax rates on extraordinary incomes. Eliminate the “carried interest” loopholes the giant Hedge Funders drove their truckloads of “earnings” through. Apply a more reasonable sales tax to both services and goods. On the expense side, be clear-eyed and halt expenditures on programs that for years have shown little or no net benefit to the populations they purport to help. Recognize that both rights and obligations exist for all people, no matter how loudly they proclaim victimhood based on long-past wrongs. Oh, and shift billions each year from overseas military expenditures to American infrastructure. And elect the smartest, most cool-headed person in the room, Mayor Pete.
You’re welcome.
13
Calling him Mayor from McKinsey just tells me the rest of your write up is going to be nonsense... so if there were any valid points in your article, you lost at least one reader.
I don't really care who the Democratic nominee is and I will support him or her. But promoting purity tests on Mayor Pete or other centrists is recipe for another Trump term.
32
I am a boomer and have benefited greatly from the systems that have created massive inequality in our Country. In my heart of hearts, I think the only way you can fix the system is to break it.
That said, I am terrified of Trump and have serious doubts whether this is the election to swing for the fences. There's really no way to know. Remember: conventional wisdom had Trump losing to Clinton.
While I have been a supporter of Pete, I thank you for your thoughtful column.
1
Trump does not want to face Pete in a debate - probably more than any other candidate.
Most Americans want progressive policies, but they want a return to normalcy more than anything else. That's not what Bernie and Liz are selling. Compared to them, Pete is the toast we need right now.
And I'm still a Warren voter deep down.
176
@SF Then vote for Warren. Pete's a good VP candidate to me. He's a classic example of the way that accomplished women are grilled for every detail, but young men who've basically done almost nothing are praised for their "potential."
Imagine a 37-year old female mayor of a town of 100,000 who'd only received 8000 votes from anyone, ever, saying she was ready to be president. She'd be laughed out of the primaries. Pete should be, too. Pete's smart (and I like smart, I voted for Obama) but he also repeats Obama's flaw of thinking that the Republicans are going to be willing to compromise if he just uses good reasoning. Yeah, right.
We need a fighter. Republicans stopped meeting in the middle in about 1995. If Pete comes at them from the middle, they'll "compromise" him to the center-right and we'll get more of the same, leading to the same populism that Trump exploited.
19
@SF
Just so, and why Trump is already saying that he will not debate in any case.
@SF I want to see Pete vs Trump. The bipolar difference in every way. I don't think Trump wants always cool Pete.
Too progressive policies are too risky.
I assume Americans see Canada progressive and republicans may call Canada socialism. If so, how do the majority of Americans digest progressive policies, even to Canadians' eye, of Bernie and Warren's? You need a revolution to achieve their goals. Gradual changes are more feasible.
3
I hear one thing consistently from my friends--I like Sanders/Warren, but I'm worried that other people won't. By "other people" they mean white people in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
It's too bad our "democracy" is held hostage by such a narrow band of the electorate.
257
@Jim
As someone on the ground canvassing for Bernie in one of these Midwestern states, I can tell you that Bernie probably has the strongest appeal to this (mythical) "white person in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin" if by that you mean a non-wealthy, non-connected person of any ethnicity because he is viewed as very authentic, a fighter, not elitist or condescending and is for economic progress for the non-wealthy and non-connected. Bernie doesn't pit groups against one another -- except for the freeloading wealthy and those who serve them. People out here like all of that, and why not? FDR was a wildly popular president hated by the rich and powerful, denigrated as a socialist in 1930s America and he won four terms. Give people a real choice, don't assume you know better, and they just might take it.
105
FDR wasn’t pushing for progressive civil rights policy. He slow walked that one allowing for a few incremental wins that stayed below the radar.
How much love would he have received if he actively pushed civil rights?
Those conditions still exist.
4
@Jim I lived in two of those states.
Trump won MI and WI by running against NAFTA. The working class voter of MI are sick and tired of lectures on how free trade lifts all boats in the long term. They want to know why you can no longer work at GM and have a mortgage, car and a cabin up north.
Mayor Pete is going to go to MI, express sincere sadness at what "free" trade has done to the midwest and then make so focus group tested case for keeping the status quo.
Trump is going to sell more snake oil (falsely) claiming that his NAFTA 2.0 and trade war with China will bring back jobs. And then Trump will win again. That is unless we nominate Sanders.
Bernie is the candidate that can win MI and WI because he is the one with the record of campaigning against NAFTA and PNTR.
13
I'm a Millenial from the middle part of the country, and my wish for the Dem nominee is someone moderate and not a white man over 60. Mayor Pete would be just fine.
I have zero problems with his time at McKinsey. I wish he had more. People who work in consulting learn a ton about various sectors of the economy. It's terrific experience.
The hard core Dems would do well to stop alienating anyone with a business degree. You can have progressive values and believe in proposals that at the end of the day make economic sense. Moderates don't like Bernie and Elizabeth because they promise the moon and stars and we all know the math doesn't add up.
Oh and those high dollar fundraisers? It's going to take a lot of cash to defeat Trump. It just is. Every promise to stick with low dollar donors just makes it harder and harder to buy ad time in places like Miami and Phoenix.
Every lefty rant I read about Pete just makes him a little more. He might not be my first choice, but more and more I'm actually starting to think he COULD win if left side of the party would just quite whining and give him a chance.
394
@ebattny-I am a Millennial as well and you hit it spot on. The criticism I hear about Pete from the far left is puritan orthodoxy without context of our Republican adversaries and the electoral college fight we have to win. They dismiss the fact that his policies are actually quite progressive while faulting him for ‘moderatism’. Well, guess what? Trump won the last election, and we need those voters.
69
As a white man over 60, on the coast, with a business degree who cast his first vote for George McGovern I agree with every word of your comment, particularly the need for the left of the left to stop whining about Buttigieg’s perceived lack of ideological purity. Let’s remember Obama didn’t run on saving the auto industry and averting a depression. In 2020 we need a candidate who can respond to the massive crises, as yet undefined, that will inevitably flow from this latest episode of Republican governance. In that context Mayor Pete is as ready as well if not better prepared than the older, more “experienced” people. 
57
@ebattny aq A boomer who agrees with all your points. Mayor Pete I can see crushing Trump in debates, as well as winning.
I can see never ending TV coverage of Trump mocking Biden's latest gaff and hitting hard on the issues with his son. I can see Trump again being effective putting down the other canidates with his bullying. Trump and Sanders doing the two angry men act, just flip a coin for the winner.
But I can see calm, rational, intelligence spot on responses of Mayor Pete, being effective against Trump.
16
Mayor Pete reminds me of a much more likable and polished Hillary Clinton. Highly intelligent, but too willing to morph into the latest flavor in order to get votes. I'm honestly not sure what he stands for, and that lack is becoming exhausting.
171
@Jason
Pete stands for humble, honest, non-reckless leadership. He stands for data and fact driven policies. He is a pragmatist who focuses on what can actually get done and what most people actually want. He seeks to unify, not to polarize.
He has been pretty consistent in policy. What parts of his policies he emphasizes has changed, but there is nothing dishonest in that. He talks about what voters are interested in.
Pete seems more honest and humble than any other candidate, always willing to admit when he was wrong. He will also change his opinion if he realizes it was wrong. As far as I am concerned, that is a good trait.
There are some who say he filp-flopped on Medicare for All, but that is not really true. Medicare for All didn't used to entail the elimination of private insurance (for some it did and for some it didn't). Accordingly, the quote from him supporting it over a year ago, doesn't mean that he once supported the elimination of private insurance and no longer does.
If you want to talk about someone morphing to the latest flavor, look no further than Warren who has become overly slogany and condescending as the race has progressed. Her response to a question on gay marriage comes to mind.
55
@Jason Hillary was highly intelligent? Refusing to campaign in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Michigan was highly intelligent? Not saying anything in the entire campaign that you can remember other than "basket of deplorables" was highly intelligent? Come on, now. Don't smear Pete this way.
11
@EL I would not describe a 37 year old man who has won a single municipal election who thinks he is qualified to be the leader of the free world as "humble".
65
Boomers like him because he is clean-cut and they aren't suffering as badly as most of the rest of us economically. They want status quo before Trump. The rest of us want actual change so that we and our children can live on a habitable planet: ecologically, economically, politically, socially and spiritually. Everyone under sixty realizes what Pete's selling is more of the same. Sanders and Warren have the ideas, ideals and enthusiam, plus the courage to lead, not "compromise" before anything's even on the table.
Sanders/Warren or Warren/Sanders 2020
279
@Parapraxis- I am 31 years old. Though I like Sanders, Mayor Pete is the candidate for me. His ideas are practical, pragmatic, and fair. There is nothing to me that indicates his policies do not heal our nation ecologically, economically, politically, socially and spiritually. In fact, I find his language and tone uniting. As I know other Millenials who support Buttigieg, please don’t make blanket statements like he doesn’t have support in my generation.
348
@Parapraxis I'm a 46-year old Gen X-er living in arguably the most progressive city in the country, and you're wrong that only those over 60 like Mayor Pete. I work in Tech with lots of progressive Millennials, and many of them are also fans of Mayor Pete. We all want the same things as you, but just believe in a different strategy to get them. Some Democrats believe now is the time for a progressive candidate, and others like myself just want to focus on the immediate goal: electing anyone besides Trump and getting control back in the Senate. Given how polarized the country is, the fact we still have the antiquated electoral college system, some of us are just taking a more realistic view of what's possible right now, and Mayor Pete would be a huge improvement to that thing in the WH.
172
@Parapraxis I think Bernie/Tulsi would have the best shot to beat Trump. Tulsi has crossover appeal, rightists like her, she's young, attractive, a combat vet. I think Bernie/Warren skews too far left.
8
Making the argument against the illusion of successful Trump economy sure won't be easy. But I don't see any other candidate who so effectively is able to distil complex ideas into easy-to-understand arguments as Buttigieg. Warren and Sanders may have their hearts in the right place, but create unnecessary conflict with all the class warfare rhetoric.
2
As a Democrat, I am already exhausted by the insistence that everything in America is terrible, just terrible, for everyone who isn’t a billionaire.
Yes, some people need help, and some need a lot of it. That’s why I’m a Democrat. I believe that the government can help people.
But I support Joe Biden because he appears to be the only major candidate who expresses pride about our accomplishments, and optimism for our future.
I’m sure other commenters will be eager to argue with me that, in fact, America is terrible, has always been terrible, and will likely be terrible in the future, unless we elect Bernie Sanders, in which case, we’ll probably still be terrible, but at least the president will acknowledge it.
Sorry, that doesn’t motivate me, and I don’t believe it will motivate many others. Most of us have lives the rest of the world can only dream of. Let’s show some pride, and some fight.
2
So the author would rather have a candidate who promises pie-in-the-sky reform they can't deliver, a la Warren and Sanders than a candidate who has a realistic view of what he can and can't get done given our current political environment. Interesting, but I don't find the argument to be very realistic.
2
Of course, if you want radical changes, you are not going to like Buttigieg. However, to call him the mayor from McKinsey is a cheap shot. After all, he left the firm and is now making $105,000, hardly a representative of the wealthy class. While incrementalism may not bring about deep changes, it is unfair to call it opportunistic. It may be, and it is, another way of looking at what one can be done without complete power to affect changes. The article would have been more useful if it showed balance instead of advocacy.
8
Buttigeig may not be the right candidate, but his political instincts are correct. America has historically been governed from the middle. It may seem like it has been conservative versus liberal, but the history of Presidential elections and of Presidents themselves is that the center rules. Presidents almost always either govern from center-right or center-left. And Presidential elections are usually decided by centrist oriented voters - folks who, depending on the candidate, vote regardless of Party. It's only the hardcore right or the hardcore left who make it seem as if the nation is divided. Fortunately, the extremes of both parties are usually left out in the cold (except in 2016 when anomalies in the electoral college system allowed the loser to "win".) I'm no political whiz, but I predict a moderate will win the Democratic nomination and will hopefully persuade enough centrist Republicans and Independents to bring the country back to the middle.
6
Congratulations to Mayor Pete. He's now in the big leagues as even an obsure "Time" columnest is taking shots at him. Neither Biden nor Bloomberg nor Sanders nor Warren should be nominated. They are too old. Not saying Mayor Pete will get it, but watch out for Amy. Right age, from the right area with the right outlook. Mayor Pete is not going way though and, in a way, I hope he does win and shuts all of you people up.
7
Thank you for articulating why competence without vision is inadequate politics.
You rightly criticize Buttigieg's means-testing and dilution of big ideas, such as supporting healthcare without strongly opposing private healthcare, or lowering student debt without pursuing a world with no student debt. While reading your criticisms, a question popped in my head: why not just endorse Bernie Sanders?
Warren is a true progressive, unlike Buttigieg. But she has also scaled back these big ideas you support, like single-payer and debt relief. She would postpone single-payer and cap debt relief at 50k. I understand supporting her based on the belief that the sweet spot for these ideas is indeed somewhere under 100%, that Sanders goes too far, but that doesn't seem to be your position.
I love your column and would love to read your reasons for preferring Warren over Sanders, if that is still your position.
4
The parade of hit pieces against Democratic candidates from left-leaning commentators marches on!
Liberal commentators keep telling us that the Trump presidency poses an existential threat to American democracy. If they actually believe that, they should be doing everything they can to promote each and every alternative to that existential threat. Anything less constitutes complicity in Trump's re-election. And if you think Trump's first term was bad for democracy, just wait and see what a second term will be like.
I'm going to vote for whoever the Democrats nominate. And since I don't know in advance who that's going to be, I'd really appreciate it if those who want Trump to lose next November would stop trashing the very candidates who may well end up being our last best chance to save American democracy.
12
Yup, Mayor Pete is an invention: a handsome JFK for the world of identity politics. But beneath the suit it's empty. And the political strategy that would follow from his nomination would be more neo-liberal Clintonism, the mildest of reforms made in the name of the barely-existing "centrists" who allegedly hold the keys to election. But that game is long over: it's about mobilization, and the best shot for victory is Bernie Sanders.
10
Mayor Pete is nothing more than a Biden who has a greater chance of not dying in office. And yet, he is the latest prom king that Dems want to elect. It was Obama in 2008 and then Bernie in 2016. And now, Dems are fawning over the latest "savior".
In considering the best candidate, the real divide that we should be considering is the ideological one. Do we continue to nominate "centrist" candidates, with the unrealistic notion that they'll appeal to Trump voters? That strategy has huge risks, as Hillary Clinton saw. Centrism does nothing but demoralize the Democratic base, as it is nothing more than Democratic candidates veering farther and farther to the right.
Now we have the Boy Wonder, Big Money Pete, who is supposed to save the Dems. Pete, of the bundler class, who won't disclose his donors. And he is supposed to be our future?
I don't see America changing one iota under his leadership. Oh, he may get around to closing the internment camps with Hispanic kids, but I haven't seen anything from him that tells me he cares about the historic Democratic base - women and people of color.
I'm a Boomer, and a person of color. I recall Mayor Pete's dismissive comment to the African American lady a few months back telling her, "I'm not asking for your vote." I cannot tell you how many times I've heard that tone of voice from white men over the years. So if Mayor Pete is the face of the future Democratic party, I for one, want no part of it.
11
I agree that the headline numbers do not tell the whole story, but any Democratic nominee will have to ask the American people “are you better or worse off today than you were four years ago?” If the answer is that a majority of the people feel they are better off next summer than they were in the summer of 2016 then Trump will be re-elected regardless of the fact that the wealthy have benefited so disproportionately, and regardless of who the Democratic nominee is. At this point I do not think it matters who Trump faces, it’s Trump’s election to lose.
3
I disagree. Mayor Buttigieg's experience at McKinsey, like many of his life experiences, is valuable but certainly doesn't define him. If there is one experience from his resume that does, it's his service in the military.
Having met the candidate twice during his recent visit to Miami, I was able to see him as deeply thoughtful, incredibly bright, compassionate, and well versed on the challenges facing the country. Of course he could easily list all the details of everything he'd do as president in every policy area, but he's smarter than that. He knows that what actually happens in government is a collaborative process and he's not one to make empty promises. I can think of no better response to the past four years than a Buttigieg Administration. He'll be a uniter. He'll be around to live with the consequences of his policies. How I'd like to see that America and all that it could mean for our neighborhoods, families, and the world.
12
The Dems did not win back the House in 2018 with left-wing wish lists and talks of revolution. They talked of issues that working Americans care about. No 30 trillion dollar healthcare plans, no free college, no give aways that no one can tell them how they'll be paid for.
Sensible reforms, most or ALL which have been passed by this house, were they bait that drew the voters and achieved the victory.
We have to win the office in order to change it. That is what Pete is running on. It was what Obama ran on, but the left is impatient and all want their soccer trophies now; in their constant pursuit of needing to feel good, they sacrifice all incremental progress. That is exactly who Donald Trump is: the destroyer of incremental progress.
Lear a lesson from the Jill Stein suporters and Bernie bros who could not pull the lever for Mrs. Clinton - Trump is here to tear it all down - and you are helping him with every puity test you propose.
Win the game, then change the rules, but don't play it by ignoring them - all at your own peril.
6
@John P Donahue. Yes learn a lesson from the Bernie Bros. If the the DNC did not arrange everything to HRCs liking the world would now be a better place and we would be working on four more years for Bernie. Personally I have profited from the Trump Presidency even though I
Believe he is a horror show. With that being said I plan on voting for him unless the Dems give me a real progressive and not the Boy Wonder
2
Excellent column. I have been distressed this week by the post-mortem analysis of the British election that blames Corbyn’s espousal of radical left policies for Labour’s defeat at the hands of Bojo. What the analysts fail to recognize was the power of a simple, three word message (Get Brexit Done!) against a muddled, overly complex attempt to appeal to the better angels of a nation in the grip of political psychosis. Similarly, I think Mayor Pete’s campaign is trying too hard to create an appearance of calm, technocratic confidence that is exactly what voters rejected in 2016. Silicon Valley money will not save us from the mountain of cash that Wall Street is going to give to the Republicans. Taking back the reigns of government will require inspiration, motivation and commitment to get out all the voters on the sidelines. One doesn’t learn that working for McKinsey.
5
“get Brexit done” sounds like “get judges seated”.
The same underlying theme of listening to simple conservative talking points over well thought out liberal ones is the same across both countries.
You elect Donald Trump? You can elect anyone.
I have heard Mayor Pete speak and will vote for him. He is exactly what we need, young, intelligent, moderate who can beat Trump. Sanders and Warren are too far left and Biden is too old as is Bernie. Mayor Pete is the exact opposite of Trump, exactly what is needed.
14
Left wing activists, ie the Bernie and Warren hard core supporters, keep using phrases like “opportunistic incrementalism’ as the columnist does. In practical terms that translates into denying the existence of the legislative branch. If some critical mass of legislative power had been assembled and public opinion mobilized over a series of elections we could have the dramatic reforms many of us aspire to. But making drastic proposals that Democratic candidates for house and Senate must distance themselves from isn’t bold action - big ideas, devoid of political power is mere bluster. Bernie bellowing about the revolution reminds me of stuff I heard from the socialist worker types in coffee houses in the early 70s on liberal college campuses. Buttigieg appears to be running on plans and positions consistent with Democrats who flipped the House in 2018, more in keeping with Nancy Pelosi, who actually passed health care reform, than chatter from the squad, a couple of not particularly effective Senators from the Northeast and the pundits who worship them.
Much of the Trump destruction is fulfillment of GOP efforts over decades gathering power to implement a radical agenda. Weak bully Trump has the working digits to sign their bills but exposed the GOP’s hollow venality in the process.
The Dems need to win elections all over the country now and in the years ahead. Only people who win elections in this system get a voice to change the system.
22
@John
Sanders and Warren "activists" are not "left wing". They're liberals.
And the longer these voices don't make their case, the further to the right the country moves.
Since Bill Clinton, you folks -- meaning centrists and center-right Democrats -- have had your way. And failed. Witness Trump. Maybe it's time to step aside? Or, as establishment Democrats demand of the "left", hold your nose and vote -- but this time, not for Bill, Joe or Hillary, but for an actual progressive?
4
Buttigieg, far from being "eaten alive" is already serving up exactly what his donors demand. Between the platitudes and the neo-liberal podium beneficence, his one term -- these are convulsive times -- would still buy a lifetime of corporate support.
Followed by another Trump. Or someone even worse.
4
I don't understand why the left is so intent in demonizing the Mayor's success when he was younger, and in particular branding him as "Mr. McKinsey". I understand that populists will want to fixate on his time at McKinsey, but readers and writers of the New York Times who likely all know someone who has worked there, and know what actually working there as a someone straight out of school entails (namely making slides 80 hours a week and not actually shaping policy whatsoever) should know better. Getting a job at McKinsey is incredibly competitive and should be lauded. Don't we all want our kids to thrive economically? What makes Mayor Peter remarkable though his that he didn't stay in that world and climb the ranks to make lots of money. He left it early, well before he earned huge bonuses on which he could retire, to instead go into public service.
If we want to win this next election it's not going to be done by continuing to demonize college educated voters in the suburbs by telling them that success in business is somehow a stain on their moral character.
39
Every populist needs an enemy.
For Trump and his ilk all the evils of the country are due to immigrants or people of color. Its always the us and against them argument. And those "they's" took something that belonged to you -- didn't get that raise ? Its because of immigrants. "They" got it unfairly and "they" have something is owed to me.
Progressives play the same game -- just a different enemy. It started as the blobous corporations and now its anyone who has every been successful -- and thus McKinsey Pete. "They" got it unfairly and "they" have something is owed to me. And they must not only be beaten at the polls but "they" must be destroyed.
This is a denial of inequity that should be addressed -- its not an even playing field but enough of the personal destruction.
Maybe what moderates or the "older" generation long for is decency and what makes democracy democracy, compromise and fact based solutions. I for one don't want to be forced to choose between right wing authoritarianism and left wing totalitarianism -- and the purge and destruction of everyone who doesn't think exactly like me.
10
In our age of slander-as-dialog, this stands out as worthy of notice: "The Mayor from McKinsey is the wrong man to make the case." I will vote for Pete Buttigieg or I will vote for the Libertarian Candidate. I would much prefer to vote for Buttigieg, but that's a choice that's out of my hands.
13
@Charles Becker
I favor Pete as well.
He plays better to voters who are necessary to make
the Electoral College swing state arithmetic work.
If the DEM Presidential primary is won by another
candidate so be it, I will fall in line and vote for them because that person is not agent orange.
But the main thing for me is to get
agent orange out of the WH and get
the Senate turned blue.
So voting 3rd party, nope.
4
I agree with Manjoo. Cooperation, compromise, and "work together" unity is impossible with today's GOP. To even have a chance at moderate improvements, a Dem president will have to be prepared to make Wall Street and Silicon Valley howl in outrage.
Buttigeig, like Hillary Clinton, is asking for the help of oligarchs and big corporations, and that means he is either naive about Big Money's ferocity or disingenuous about what to fight for real change.
13
Pete and Biden and doing ok because a lot of LIKELY voters are comfortable with them. People are not comfortable with progressive ideas that have NEVER been implemented to scale in the USA before.
I would really like to see a really progressive state like Vermont or California demonstrate these ideals in practice.
I am concerned that the author’s ideals will lead us to the same bitter reality being lived by Labour in the UK. That reality rooted in the fact that the people that actually vote will choose a crazy Republican with fascist ideals over a progressive Democrat. Please don’t set us up.
Please show me the numbers? Please show me where these LIKELY voters are in real life. Show me polling where people enthusiastically support a very progressive agenda. Don’t tell me about this support that has never voted before. I’m not into moral victories when we have a proto-fascist in the White House.
America has elected fairly moderate Democrats in Clinton and Obama with significant electoral college margins. There is little evidence that a majority of electoral college voters in 2020 will support a very progressive agenda. America hasn’t elected a progressive since Carter, and he’s an evangelical WW2 Naval Officer and peanut farmer from Georgia.
11
Mt. Manjoo, if the economy doesn't matter to the average American, then we have nothing to fear from a recession.
I disagree, and I offer 2008 as evidence.
2
I feel like I've been up for 24 hours and I am at the grocery store bleary eyed trying to pick between 20 different types of yogurt. But I'm not even picking yogurt for myself. What type of yogurt to people in Michigan like? What about WIsconsin? What about Ohio? I'm fratically googling for information about fat vs nonfat. Are probiotics good or have they been co-opted by Big-Ag? Is that possible? Dang it, google, WHAT DO PEOPLE IN MICHIGAN LIKE! I'm on the floor. Now people are yelling at me, telling me which yogurt to choose. That smart pro-biotic yogurt is a slimy creation of our corporate masters. That one will never get anything passed in the senate. I'm on the floor, reading NYT, with five different open yogurts around me. My stomach hurts (so much dairy)! Mitch McConnel is standing there, in a store apron, laughing. He holds a mop. He laughs harder. He would dance, but that is against the laws of the universe. I see the truth in his eyes. Mitch eats all the yogurt every day for breakfast. For BREAKFAST! I am lost. lying on the floor of the supermarket. Yogurt is everywhere, and yet I have none.
17
The problem with Pete is much more fundamental than whether or not Farhad Manjoo thinks Pete would make an especially bad president. Pete at a much more fundamental level simply does not have the successful life experiences for the hardest job in the world. He is currently mayor of a rather small town with a track record as mayor which at best is problematic, so how does that qualify hime to be Commander in Chief? Obviously being a military veteran does not qualify one to be president, nor being a Rhode Scholars, nor does being a consultant for McKinsey. So what prey tell are Pete's qualifications at age 37 to be Commander in Chief?
16
I was born and bred in the perfect (this is not up for debate...) Pacific Northwest, but I have lived in the middle of the country for the better part of the last decade. I currently am a resident of Mayor Pete’s jurisdiction. I know three (relevant?) things: First—I want my liberal-loving, democratic socialist dreams of universal health care and free college tuition, of billionaire barricades and on and on. Second—this ain’t happening but by incremental change. Not in this country. Not now. I don’t know if Mayor Pete is the man, but (Third)—He’s a decent man who has done demonstrable good in this city, a city still with mounds of problems but fewer than there were before his tenure.
29
I love this comment, great unique perspective and captures how I see it. I want my idealism too, but I want change more than purity and no change.
10
@Steph I could not agree more!
2
@Steph
Thanks for your perspective, Steph.
"The rich own too much." The progressive solution to this, of course, is for everyone to be poorer. Trump has his failings but it is absurd for anyone not to like the current economy, with record low unemployment. Remember the almost 8 years under Obama, with constant almost depressive levels of low economic activity? (But sure, there was less "inequality"). It's amazing people want to go back to that.
1
"Opportunistic incrementalism" perfectly sums up both mayor Pete and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.
Parrot a few talking points while your actual policies show that it is all lip service. Talk about Medicare for All while protecting the Health Insurance Industry. Talk about free college tuition but make it means tested so we will always be "takers" and the program always subject to constant cuts and whining. Try to divide us by insinuating trade schools would not be tuition free.
Pete, like Biden, assures his corporate backers that "nothing is going to change".
11
Incrementalism is the only way to get things done at the Federal Level where you have such a wide dispersion of ideas from Mississippi to Vermont.
Even if you force down everything in one election, there is little to stop the opposition from doing the same thing.
If you are trying something radically different, start at the local and state level. Make it stick. Then tell the country how successful it was.
Nothing stopping New York State from offending free college tuition to Columbia, Cornell and SUNY Buffalo. NOTHING.
5
I beg to differ Mr Manjoo. Now more than ever what this country needs is a young articulate candidate who can and will act like a President . In other words a return to the 'Old Normal'.
The majority of Democrats and Independents just want our country back. We want our Allies to be assured that they can depend on us, we want our children to feel safe in school, we in a nut shell want a return to civility .
In order to achieve this we probably should not be pushing issues that are divisive such as mandated Medi Care for all. As much as I may approve of a National Health care system having lived in the UK and France and know that it works and there is no reason as to why it wont work in America. It seems that the majority of Americans are not there yet .
As far as where Mr Buttigieg gets his campagn funding from, I frankly don't care at this point, as Trump has twice as much as any Democrat in his coffers, and I know that in order to beat him the Democrat will need to also have a pot of money . Mr Steyer and Mr Bloomberg can both probably also out spend Trump but I assume that they also do not pass the far left smell test.
10
It's true that Mayor Pete seems not progressive enough to please young (and not so young) radicals. But in terms of practical politics, the Dem candidate must persuade enough (mainly middle age and older) 2016 Trump-voting centrists to toss him out. Warren and Sanders scare the living you-know-what out of centrists.
There is a case to be made for voting one's conscience regardless of political calculus, but the stakes in this election demand subordination of ideological purity to moral necessity, imo.
6
I am under 60. I do not like Pete. I love Pete.
I think he’s a fabulous wise energetic candidate and would make a fabulous wise energetic president.
Perfect? No, nobody is, but he’s awfully good.
I voted for Sanders for Senate many times. Many reasons to my mind why he is not presidential material. Pete is.
36
I wonder to myself about the "political vehicle" that could make the country a better place for the poor and disenfranchised, and I think about what policies I actually support, and they are really two separate things.
It seems that meaningful change in this country has largely come from grassroots movements, and not so much from politicians themselves. Hell, even the tea party, though political, and though I couldn't tell you what it actually stood for (since Trump is now prez), was not a brainchild of the republican party.
The civil rights movement and women's suffrage came for coalitions of real people that had stuff at stake. The Poor People's Campaign was supposed to be the next phase of the civil rights movement, and who knows what it could have accomplished if Dr. King hadn't been murdered.
When I argue against Mayor Pete, often I fall into arguments about the "political vehicle" - Does electing a clean-cut white guy make us feel safe? Will other people vote for him? Is there any grassroots support? But Trump seems to be a Moskvitch that was spray-painted gold and is leaking oil all over, but somehow drove to the White House, so I'm going to not try and predict the unpredictable.
All I know is I can vote my conscience, and the arc of history bending towards justice doesn't let me off the hook to elect a "nice" candidate. I can see it in the platforms of Sanders and Warren, and while they are still politicians working within the system, they seem like our best shot.
3
Forgive me but I am sick unto death of this particular line of argument. Progressives whine and bitch and complain, but they don't vote - not in the numbers it takes to command an electoral majority. And they're so rigid in their policy demands that they can't build coalitions (hey there, Bernie Sanders, with your nearly thirty years in Congress opposing everything and passing nothing).
I'm sure this columnist means well, but this is as sure a plan for defeat as exists. I haven't settled on a candidate yet and I'll vote for whoever ends up as the nominee, but I do wish progressives would remember that it's a big old country out there and not everybody in it lives in a major city a few miles from the ocean.
14
This is very sad. FM may know the tech field very well, but it's almost embarrassing that he's either been appointed or thinks he's somehow earned a spot in the batting order that has him speaking for young "radicals."
And that seems to come up in every column - there's a monster difference between saying something provocative on Twitter and getting a "conversation going" ... and writing an op-ed piece for the NYTimes that hangs together.
FM seems to fail that test almost ... unfailingly.
Today's "bon mot" is this - "But what matters to me is that they [Bernie & Elizabeth] are making the case." This right after admitting - but not quite (for all he criticizes Pete B., he's even more guilty of not wanting to offend anyone!) saying it in plain English - however worthy their goals, the more ambitious of them are D.O.A.
NO, "saying the right thing" is almost infinitely less important than DOING the right thing. If the best we can hope for is tweaks, let's elect a skilled tweak-meister.
Contrariwise, if "divided government" and an equally divided country is the order of the day, let's NOT elect (or nominate, really - because their chances of prevailing [EW & BS] are worse than poor) a person who doesn't even care if she makes any sense at all "to the other side."
2
"It’s unlikely that they will be able to achieve many of those goals in our polarized political climate. But what matters to me is that they are making the case." That was your comment re: Warren & Sanders. But you also said about the same thing about Buttigieg. Something in your piece just doesn't ring true, and it's not Buttigieg's "inauthenticity".
Eaten alive? You think Sanders or Warren won't be obliterated by the corporate machine?
2
Agree with everything you've written here. Mr.Buttigieg is undoubtedly a bright young man, but I get nervous when I see this much ambition and certainty in someone so young and relatively inexperienced. It might be easier to look past his inexperience if the ambition was accompanied by a bold vision- but the vision seems to be lacking, and that's a concern. Tackling the corruption that's rampant in so many American institutions should be the #1 priority of every candidate- fancy dinners with wealthy donors isn't a good sign...
5
President is a political role. Politics is about building coalitions. Do we need to to follow the recent Britain experiment with Corbyan? And US is in general more right inclined country.
5
“we’ll need a bolder candidate to take on Trumpism and corporate control. The Mayor from McKinsey is the wrong man to make the case.”
On the other hand: “Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders […] They have articulated both far-reaching, structural policy goals and political strategies that mesh with the spirit of those goals. Not only are they calling for fundamental change that will alter vast sectors of the economy; they are also committed to undoing the influence of corporations and the wealthy in their own path to the White House, underscoring their commitment to their goals.”
I agree with these remarks. Real solutions, real sincerity. Persuasiveness & conviction.
8
Coastal cities notwithstanding, this is largely a conservative nation. A far left candidate does not have a prayer in the GE. The candidate who can bring in Independents and Republicans (who haven't been consumed by trumpism) is a moderate, and Pete Buttigieg is exactly the right person to unite these disparate groups. We will end up with four more years of trump if we nominate a Sanders or a Warren-type of candidate.
#PeteForAmerica #WinTheEra
23
Look at the numbers since 2009, and you will see that most of our economic progress was made under Obama; the progress made under Trump is a minor continuation of Obama’s accomplishments. We need the candidate who has the best chance of beating Trump. I’d be happy if Bloomberg bought the election.
3
Everything Mr. Manjoo said about Mayor Pete can also be said about Mr. Biden (though I suspect Mayor Pete is the more intelligent of the two). But Mr. Biden is more worrisome because he is, as the author mentioned, the front runner. I strongly believe that the former VP will fail horribly in any debate against Mr. Trump, as did Mrs. Clinton.
It frightens me that the voting public is falling prey to the fear mongers who are claiming that only a moderate candidate can win in the general election against Mr. Trump. That wasn't the case in the last presidential election and it won't be the case in the next.
12
Insightful article that clarified some things for me. I intuitively lean toward Warren and her persuasive arguments about health-care reform, re-institution of regulations in banking, and addressing gun violence, global warming, and education costs.
Pete is not right for the job. He's not wise enough about the Wall Street squids and sharks. Warren knows how they work and how to curtail their greed.
Pete needs to get some governmental experience beyond South Bend. Way beyond.
5
Yes, once we got that list of his clients at McKinsey, it made perfect sense why Mayor Pete has been so passionate about protecting the insurance industry against the likes of Elizabeth Warren.
1
I wish that more people understood Wall Street Pete isn't supposed to win the nomination, because the DNC knows he can't win the runoff. But his namesake doesn't know how to stop loving him. They'd rather have Trump than Sanders or Warren. But in their heart of hearts, they know Pete would be the best running dog they've had since G.W.
The carpetbagging jackals in charge at the DNC know what most of us know: that his candidacy will evaporate the minute polls start reporting outside areas like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. All of which are "moderate" blue states.
Their plan is to tilt the scales enough to get Uncle Joe nominated. They would rather risk angering their paymasters than suffer another defeat to Trump.
Pete probably doesn't even know that. They can't buy him off with the VP position, because he is neither female, or black. Joe's VP pick will need to be one, or both of those.
Stacy Abrams is right at the top of his list. All their lists, actually.
Warren and Sanders are “calling for policies that fundamentally overhaul corporate control of the economy. As their detractors note, it’s unlikely that they will be able to achieve many of those goals in our polarized political climate. But what matters to me is that they are making the case. “
What comfort do I take in electing someone who proposes policies that have no chance of being achieved? Doesn’t that mean that they will both resort back to incrementalism? Isn’t it more honest to recognize what is possible and talk about what will be done within that limit?
I think there is also a strong part of the Sanders and Warren campaigns that is wildly out of touch with American voters. They look at the country and claim to know what’s best rather than ask what people want. As a result they suggest solutions that are deeply unpopular with a majority of people. Most people don’t want college to be free. Most people don’t want their private health insurance eliminated. Where is the moral superiority in running a campaign based on doing what you think is best even if people don’t want that?
I would rather not vote for a person who attacks large parts of the country. Corporations are not inherently good or bad. Private business is how most people in this country share their skills with each other. A platform that attacks this fails to embrace a fundamental part of the country.
8
The correct statement to make regarding today's economy is this: Saying the economy's good while running a record deficit is meaningless; anyone can live large for a few years by maxing out the credit card. This is not what sustainable growth looks like, it is more like what a spectacular flame-out looks like.
6
Bravo; this needs repeating and linking and forwarding. The centrists don't get that there are fundamental, structural flaws with our system, and there are tons of voters, including Trump voters, who are painfully aware of those flaws. A candidate who ignores those flaws better have something else to run on that is compelling. Trump ignores those flaws but runs on xenophobia, paranoia, and fake-tough-guy crap. That's going to crush the technocratic nice-guy of Pete and the "return to Obama" of Biden. If we really want to beat Trump, we need to offer something that addresses those fundamental flaws. Warren and Sanders do that. Get on board, Centrists, or prepare to lose this next election.
6
I like Mayor Pete a great deal but I agree he is not the candidate for this time. Unfortunately, because "defeating Trump" is the referendum for so many Americans, we may just waste the person who is. For me, that's Warren because she meets the moment. She's courageous. She's a capitalist who believes in rebooting the economic system so it works for everyone. It's up to her to win over the primary voters, to instill confidence that we can make an extraordinary change knowing full well that reaching for the stars you may only get the moon. Everything she needs to do to win she's capable of. It's up to her. Now we just have to find the courage in ourselves.
2
I agree with this column. From the looks of it to me, Mayor Pete will say and do what it takes to get elected. I just don't see any real convictions like Warren and Sanders.
9
This argument is a blueprint for a resounding loss. America, for all its faults and past sins, is one of the world's greatest economic success stories in modern history. It has proven to be innovative and resilient time and time again. It is the envy of most of the world. OK, sure it has big problems, but name me a country that doesn't have them. The notion that American society is teetering on the precipice of a collapse -- and only a Sanders/Warren radical overhaul can avert disaster -- just won't past the smell test with the average American. The only thing the Democrats have to do is nominate someone that people like more than Trump. It shouldn't be a tall task. Nominate Warren or Sanders and it becomes one.
3
I have decided that I don't want things to change very much during the remainder of my life. Bernie and Joe seem pretty safe to me because they probably won't accomplish much. I think I am going to vote for the oldest white guy left in the race next November.
1
I support Amy Klobuchar over him.
3
If it's Pete vs. Trump, you will vote for Pete.
If it's Elizabeth or Bernie vs Trump, you will vote for Elizabeth or Bernie. But will the important swing state voters vote for a socialist or ultra-liberal democrat, or will they stick with Trump?
The democratic candidate can roll up millions upon millions of votes in California and New York but due to the electoral college those votes are meaningless.
11
NEEDED: A WAY FOR THE WEALTHY TO PROFIT FROM INVESTMENTS IN REDUCING POVERTY
Urban renewal projects, private-public partnerships for renovating infrastructure into toll- and fee-paid formats, possibly well-regulated for-profit schools, social bonds with returns conditioned on outcomes, and other such ideas need to be screened for actionability and impact and advanced.
Until the interests of the wealthy are brought more into line with those needing help, there will be class conflict between the two (think Republican tax cuts and libertarian dreams of shrinking government).
Pragmatic creativity is needed here. Fast.
1
I don’t have an issue with this piece other than the use of the slur “Mayor from McKinsey.” It’s distracting and intellectually weak. For a young person fully aware of his own talent, McKinsey is a valid career choice. Maybe we should also disparage the single mother who works at a fast food joint for serving severely unhealthy food to the mostly poor. We should be judged on our actions not on our former employers.
19
He is not “from McKinsey” because he worked there as a first job for a couple of years. He’s from Indiana and is the least wealthy of all the Dem candidates on the stage. He and his husband have loads of student debt but he still chooses public service when he could have a very lucrative business career anywhere he wanted. What an absurd argument. Elizabeth Warren “from Harvard” is hardly a more stirring figure.
84
Leave Pete alone. Watching the Democrats chew up and destroy each other only gives votes to Trump. I am disgusted with the columnists and social media that pick apart every Democratic . candidate with their own bias. You are worse than the Republicans, because you don't acknowledge what you are doing.
I admire Pete Buttigieg and find his calm, rational, nature very comforting in this climate. He will be around long after these pundits are gone.
64
@krista m.c.
Your response is right on. Thank you! I, too am sick and tired of the constant ‘Pete-bashing’, especially by the NYT. After all, who in their right mind could vote for a brilliant young man who served his country in the military and devoted himself to public service?
14
@Goodbye Kitty Right On Kitty! I grew up in Western Mass - we share the same values!
10
Above all, I want change and I want the USA to be more fair. I support Mayor Pete because he will be strategic and have greater flexibility because he’s not bound by the orthodoxy of the far left. Unfortunately, I think Sanders and Warren have permanently and severely limited their policy options and thus will be unable to adapt and compromise on their big plans. Thus, they would enter their presidency with their signature plans dead on arrival. Such an outcome is unacceptable in my view. It promises to be a 4 year masterclass in letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Where others condemn Mayor Pete for pivoting, I am heartened by his commitment speaking with voters, practicing deep listening, and being humble enough to refine his plans and policies. In this case, I think Mayor Pete’s ability to change for the better is a promising sign he has the skills and mindset necessary to get bold, meaningful, life changing legislation passed and enacted into law.
23
@c.s.
Yes, and at the age of 37, doesn’t he have the highest stake in the future? Remember, JFK was only 43 when elected. Go Pete!!
4
This is why I stopped using Twitter several months ago. "Hate" is really too strong an emotion for a Democrat to feel for someone running for the Democratic nomination. I actually had no idea there were people out there who felt this level of vitriol.
OK - I did know it, sort of, but being off Twitter means I don't have to deal with it anymore.
I'll vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is in November.
18
So Trump is potentially going to win a second term - it's going to be tight. So there is only one discussion worth having: who has the best chance of beating Trump in 2020? Biden? Warren? Bernie? Buttigieg? Doesn't really matter because I'm voting for that person. This is perhaps not an ideal moment for socialist transformation and a 180 degree course correction - as much as I would like that. It's more like a 90 degree turn to simply getting back to the baseline and pull out of the abyss before its too late on the environment, the supreme court, etc. etc. The Dems simply cannot lose this election and they will need the support of the center to definitely accomplish it.
22
Even if Mayor Pete could manage to win an election against Trump, we would be saddled with probably another eight years of a Wall Street Democrat. American missed the boat when Al Gore was not allowed to assume the office he rightfully won, and Planet Earth is paying the price. We cannot afford another eight years of kicking the can down the road while the planet heats up even more; pesticides are sprayed all over our food supply; wages are cut for working people; public infrastructure falls further into Third World territory; and the price of everything from housing to health care to education is jacked up out of the average family's reach. Maybe Warren or Sanders won't succeed but at least they will try. The last thing we need is a McKinsey consultant!
20
Yes he seems slick and packaged.
He also has pretty much no political accomplishments by which you can decide to trust him with the job. And what he has is rather underwhelming to large segments of the electorate.
14
So who is it, then? Sanders, who used to admire the Soviet Union, and who gives the same speeches blaming everything on "the one percent"? Nothing original, and America doesn't want it. Warren, who used to work for Dow Chemical, lecturing us? We need a leader. I don't want free college and all tuition paid back, because many entitled Americans don't deserve it. Change the tax system, and provide universal healthcare, free trade schools (ALL trades), govt service employment available to all (like the military, without the war). I like Buttigieg and Klobuchar, not because they are moderates, but because they are realistic.
36
@Jorge
Wonderful reply.
Why is no one speaking of how Sanders took his honeymoon in Moscow and sang Communist songs? Just Google it and read the facts. Think the GOP hasn't?
Why is no one picking up that Pete's dad wrote his thesis on Gramsci, a Marxist, and that was his expertise area. Pete knows that world intimately and utterly rejects the insanity of the far left. For that, they can never forgive him.
6
How can any Democratic voter who lived through the Obama years honestly believe that incrementalism is the most feasible electoral and legislative strategy? Obama wasted half his first term getting the ACA (a Republican market-based plan) passed. Not only did every GOP senator vote against it, Red states refused to take the Medicaid expansion out of sheer spite, dooming their most vulnerable citizens to substandard healthcare. GOP appointed judges pulled the ACA apart piece by piece. There is no difference in how the GOP would act when opposing a more sweeping legislative change because they could not have obstructed Obama any harder than they did; they even stole a supreme court appointment from him!
The GOP has only become even more intransigent in the Trump era. At this very moment, they are attempting to derail impeachment proceedings on the basis of party loyalty. They would defend Trump no matter what the charges. Electing Mayor Pete would lead to more of the same; watered-down policies that will go nowhere, a de-motivated Democratic electorate, expanded corporate welfare and a GOP stranglehold on the judicial and congressional branches of government, all in the name of "bipartisanship". How much more dire does the situation need to become before we can agree that more extreme measures are necessary to save our country?
27
@Greg
Your example of Obama's compromises with the ACA isn't so much an argument against Pete Buttigieg but, rather, you draw attention to the case that keeps getting overlooked in circular firing squad's shots.
The Dems need to win the White House, win a majority in the Senate, and keep their majority in the House in order for any POTUS candidate to make real change. No matter which Dem POTUS candidate we vote for, if we don't have a Democratic majority in both chambers, forget it. No Dem president--Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Biden; none of them--will accomplish any goal on their agenda without making severe compromises. And they will be a one-term President.
1
I think politicians like Warren and Sanders are promising things they'll never get through the Senate which will in turn breed cynicism. That could be one reason some of Pete Buttigieg's early promises for structural change - statehood for DC, eliminating the Electoral College, reforming the composition of the Supreme Court - have since dropped off the radar in his campaign speeches. He realizes he'll never get them done. The smartest politician may be the one who promises small, delivers big. A President can achieve quite a bit using executive orders, for example: denying gov't contracts to companies that do not make their campaign contributions public record. But that sort of incremental progress doesn't get the purists on the left worked up. Bernie and Warren just aren't facing up to what it would take to pass most of their big ideas - a supermajority or possibly a majority in the Senate (depending on numbers).
6
One of Andrew Yang's central positions is that we should change how we measure the economy to focus on our well-being, rather than GDP and unemployment rates, as is advocated for in this article. He is also running on a platform of structural changes to our economy that are designed to empower regular people. He should be on the list with Sanders as an advocate for meaningful structural changes to the economy, and he should be ahead of Warren.
4
Well said, Farhad. This is exactly what is wrong with Pete. Nice guy, speaks well--and absolutely nothing will change. I want the person who is running for President to think big and start big and then you go on from there. Warren and/or Sanders will fight for change. Pete won't.
10
To argue that Buttigieg's decision to spend a few years at McKinsey renders him incapable of advocating, let alone implementing structural change, is presumptuous and unfair.
His proposal for universal health care is an admirable goal and, more importantly, an achievable goal. By contrast, the Warren and Sanders belief that the tens of millions of voters who have better coverage than that provided by Medicare will accept a reduction in their quality of health care is illusory. Multiple Democratic constituencies, in particular labor unions, have publicly expressed their doubts.
The Democrats may indeed select Warren or Sanders in 2020 just as they selected George McGovern in 1972. All three are/were firmly anchored in the left wing of the party and their supporters are/were impassioned and enthusiastic advocates of great changes. My great fear is that on November 9, I will turn on the television to see Nixon/Trump thanking the American public for a resounding victory.
45
Do you honestly mean to say that you don't think his "preserve private insurance" position on Medicare for all has anything to do with the time he spent at McKinsey, working for one of the largest HMO's in the country? I fear most democratic voters aren't so naive. Unfortunately, Republicans are.
I will not support Wall Street Pete for any office.
4
@Quiet Waiting
The reality is that if you want to control costs and expand access, somebody is going to have to give up something.
Pete is smart enough to know that "Medicare For All Who Want It" is not a workable system for the same reason Obamacare was an unworkable system to control costs.
Buttgieg and Biden have zero chance of beating Trump in the swing states where it counts. The polls and donation records show that.
The rest of the country doesn't buy that their corruption is somehow preferable to Trump's corruption.
2
The “realistic” position about universal health care is that the private insurance industry will game any system that includes them. Obama recognized this and gave them a windfall with the ACA, but even that was too much for the Republicans. So why aren’t the centrist Dems discussing this quandary and a way out of it rather than advocating for an incremental public option plan that the privates will game again. How about a discussion of the real issues instead of just badgering Warren and Sanders about how we can possibly afford single payer (count up the costs of 18 years of war in Afghanistan and you have the start of an answer). This endless campaign gets nowhere near the real issues as the centrists browbeat the left and seem to ignore that a lunatic egomaniacal demagogue was elected three years ago. Maybe your thoughts about what’s possible need to broaden.
3
Ironically I care about climate change too much to vote for Warren and Sanders. They have boxed themselves in politically into using their first two precious years in office to move the country towards single payer. Remember that the new president, if they get democratic majority in the congress, will have to choose ONE priority to push through that first two years. Obama chose Obamacare. I want the next president to use her/his first two years to shore up Obamacare but to make their number one priority climate change. That’s Pete, unless he goes for the electoral college reform, which I would also support. I would rather a country with shored up Obamacare and significant progress on climate change than just single payer and a higher likelihood of pendulum swing back to republican congress 2022. I think climate change will bring jobs and we could retain our majority longer.
12
And therein lies the conundrum: Go with someone like Buttigieg who won't scare off moderates and independents against Sanders' and Warren's quite frankly radical views and has a plausible chance of being elected, or go for the max on the progressive side with either (or both) of the latter two and let the votes fall where they may? Can we say as did Yogi Berra "deja vu all over again" of Nixon over McGovern in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984? I understand that your heart wants to remedy the social injustices of the world. But that has to run in alignment with, not scare off, the political reality. I'd prefer to work to steer the course of the ship of state incrementally, not crash like the Exxon Valdez with a guaranteed four more years of Trump.
13
@Patrick
I think this is more of a John Kerry 2004 moment. The safe moderate might not get you there this time either.
2
I am worried that means Biden. Maybe it does folks, at least he is fiery and the non coastal voters forgive gaffes and age. I’ll vote for him even though my heart is with Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg. Yes, all three. I love them all.
1
Mayor Pete can't make the case because refusing said billionaires would mean an end to his candidacy. See Kamala Harris as a reference point. Buttigieg is bankrupt without big money. He's the wealthy anti-Trump alternative to a failing Biden. Things are so dire Bloomberg felt compelled to enter the race. Neoliberalism is dead. Boomers just won't get over it. They are still mourning the deceased.
I can't say I blame them. It's tough to recognize you've been wrong your entire life. It's tough to recognize your actions contributed to the premature deaths of both your children and your children's children. That's a hard truth to recognize. But man, they look at their 401ks and tell themselves everything wrong in their conduct is still okay.
Buttigieg is the young person reassuring them everything is still okay. It's not. We're literally dying. That's why young people don't like Buttigieg.
39
@Andy
Doesn't Buttigieg have 700,000 individual donors?
6
Respectfully, you are wrong. Listen to the people - we are not going to succeed with a true left wing candidate. Pete has a powerful way to talk to conservatives and Christians. He is of the generation which needs to lead. And we need to stop eating our own
28
I have to agree. Pete just doesn’t resonate. Pete seems too packaged, too staged, too disingenuous, too premeditated. His entire career arc seems pre-planned and orchestrated to an uncommon degree.
Put him back at McKinsey and see what other evil machinations he can come up with there.
5
You might not like what you wish for. I, like a number of acquaintances, do not like Trump, but, Sanders and Warren are a bridge too far. We will vote Trump out because he deserves it, but, we won’t vote to wreck the country by voting for the above two.
4
Not to worry, the country is already wrecked... or conversely you could enlighten us by describing what wrecked country means
1
Pete is a nice kid, but he is still a kid.
Too bad there isn't an intelligent adult running for president who isn't also a billionaire.
1
A perfect summation of all of my thoughts and feelings about Buttigieg as well. Great article! #Warren2020
5
Progressives have seen this guy before, in 2008 and they are having not of it.
5
So Mr. Farhad Manjoo alternative way of thinking is that one of three old white people (Sanders/Warren & Biden) running for President are going to do any better against Trump? If anything, either of the above persons will stop any more damage from happening. This, of course, is a good plan, but one that sounds rather desperate.
"Medicare for all" sounds terribly expensive even to the most liberal of ears.
What Mr. Pete Buttigieg needs to do is stop playing it safe. Clinton did that! If she had been blunt, honest and true to herself... She would have won.
Pete Buttigieg needs to: Get upset. Get loud. Get nasty. Trump will use every sleazy trick to win. Mr. Pete Buttigieg does happen to have that Boy Scout mentally, but he's not obvious to Trump's tactics while Pete's military history will give him more advantages than many people realize.
Mr. Buttigieg needs to prove that he can take it as much as he must give it. He needs to surprise his supporters and disarm his opponents while proving to the world that a gay, small town mayor isn't afraid of anyone. That he is willing to do anything to win. Not an easy task to ask of anyone.
Mr. Pete Buttigieg also needs to remember to politely listen to people like Mr. Farhad Manjoo while taking into consideration its source; Mr. Manjoo seems to seethe at the very idea of another "White Privilege" President candidate who just might win the nomination... No matter how good that person happens to be or who they are.
4
Thank you. Well stated. I couldn't agree more.
And for those who will argue Buttigieg's centrism offers the best chance at beating Trump, I say it didn't work for Hillary.
Moreover, it didn't work for Republicans either. In 2016 it wasn't one of the GOP moderates who won the nomination, and it certainly wasn't Trump's "moderation" that got him elected. And yet, many Dems and Republicans argue in favor of the middle ground.
Socially and economically it's time to reverse existential inequality. Politically, it's time to go bold or go home.
13
I'll agree with you on one point. Mr. Buttigieg is a big-time panderer trying to be all things to all people. Otherwise, I disagree.
Opportunistic incrementalism is the lifeblood of building a consensus. While I believe there are many risks to Mr. Buttigieg's campaign, none of what you've written is relevant.
Anyone who has ever maxed out credit card can discredit Mr. Trump's contribution to the economy. It's not hard to do, though I'm confounded by all the Wall St. analysts ignoring the lessons from a decade ago. Government stimulus works even when you don't need it. The problem is what to do when you get the bill, plus interest.
Your argument is that Democratic proposals should be a far-reaching overhaul for the sake of being a far-reaching overhaul. That's a losing proposition.
We need to first defeat American fascism. Then we need to repair the damage the Republicans have done to the public sector. Only then should we even think of expanding the public sector.
You wouldn't add a new story on a house that just had its foundation bombed out without first repairing the foundation.
3
Good points. I keep coming back to the word 'narrative'. Though polls show majority support for lots of Dem policies vs GOP policies, the overall deceitful narrative that the GOP is selling is astoundingly successful with a large part of tthe voting public. There isn't a cohesive Dem narrative to counter that, even though as you point out on the economy and debt, the arguments against are not that hard to figure out. I see Pete as the best candidate to analyze and present a convincing narrative to counter the horror show that actual GOP policies represent.
I like that Pete went after Pence early in the campaign on the subject of religion. Can't think of another Dem that would take that on. Also like that he ran for DNC chair, recognizing that the lack of a consistent Dem narrative is a huge problem. As for corporate money - I want a candidate that can raise money with the people who have it and recognize how this country is sliding off the rails. Let's be real, the corporate interests that want to wring every last penny from working people are going to support Trump - and that's the real enemy. This is going to be a dog fight and progressive purity tests are not going to give us the best candidate to go against Trump and the GOP. We need someone smart, agile, and able to speak directly to Middle America (and that's not a code word for Trump supporters). I think Pete's early success in Iowa and New Hampshire is showing that he has that capability.
3
Good column. I think Mayor Pete could probably go toe-to-toe with Trump in debates and the like, but his success might not ultimately be for the right reasons, ie. a fairer country. The wealthy fundamentally know he'll have to remain loyal to them if elected, and hence they're only too happy to pour the money into his candidacy.
4
There's nothing wrong with incremental change. See: Affordable Care Act, which has changed the conversation on health care and allowed us to boldly think about more public options. Warren and Sanders have bold proposals, yes. But they will have to work with whatever Congress we elect, and incremental change is likely to be the result. Let's not dismiss Pete on that basis.
27
@Ken L. So if incremental change in the likely outcome of bold proposals, where do Democrats end up on healthcare or climate change or campaign finance when they start with incremental changes?
5
@Ken L
The ACA? You mean the one with an individual mandate that just got struck down by a Texas Court? The problem with incremental is that it can be dismantled by regulations/slow cuts. Which is precisely what i happening to the ACA right now.
6
Our country has been built on moderate accretion. The video game people who want wholesale change, by the end of the 30 minute TV show does not understand how revolution is a reaction to a huge pendelum swing, which is not today. Huge swings e.g.:
1. American Revolution begat freedom and Constitution ( 2 tries);
2. Civil War : Freedom for a deserving population by the 13th amendment and a huge change in economy from agarian to Industrial;
3. Great Depression : A New Deal safety net for the population.
4. World War 2: Global outlook instead of Isolationism and the military Industrial Complex.
5. VietNam/ Civil Rights: a catalyst for ending some injustices from the Civil war, reconstruction.
The rest have been the small stuff with small steps, like the cretin we are dealing with now. We'll survive . I have confidence that the population can't be conned much longer however, no burning for a revolution exists today.
13
I love when people bring up that incremental change is cool and then refer to the American Revolution. Um, I don’t remember George Washington’s rallying call of, “Let’s claim a small section of the high ground and leave the rest for future battles!” Was that a thing, our founding fathers calling for incremental change? Or were they brave enough to create their own system that fit their current needs and beliefs? Answer is obvious.
3
Nothing changes the fact that Pete is taking massive amounts of money from the rich and corporations. As I recall that was not a viable strategy for the last Democrat to run for President.
For me, actions speak louder than words and I'm not about to vote for another politician who sells their services to the highest bidder because that bidder is never going to be you or me.
42
I very much enjoyed your article. Mayor Pete to me simply seems like a new version of Obama: a charismatic and charming speaker and a centrist who is not going to make radical change in the ways we need because he is going to cater to those in power. And just like Obama, more than selling his policy ideas or a specific vision for the future of the country, he's selling a personality, a way of being, that is appealing to people (especially because it so contrasts with Trump) but is not going to accomplish what we need. He will bring us back to where we were pre-Trump and go no further, thus simply maintaining this unequal society.
50
Oh sorry, if you have a problem the most popular president Obama,
That’s your own problem to solve.. because majority love him.
If Pete is the Obama, I’m definitely voting for him.
2
Here's what a lot of you don't get, the solution to Trump is not a polar opposite anti-Trump. As much as I dislike the President, I do not want an extremist Liberal replacement for him. I fear people are applying Einstien's theory of relativity here - for every action there (has to be) an equal and opposite reaction. No, what we need a heaping of morality, not hyper-liberalism. We some to have come to a point where we are not even trying to pull in people from the other side. Do we really want to turn our backs to everyone on the right just like they are doing to the people on the left now? At some point we need the bigger person to lead, someone who doesn't lead by anger. That's why I am voting for Pete.
137
@BB8 You seem to be referencing Newton's 3rd law of motion.
Although here is how I could see how the relativity making sense (and I'm about to get conspiratorial), but what if Mayor Pete is actually a cosmonaut sent out into space many years ago, and accelerated towards the speed of light, so that time passed slower for him than here on Earth, and then he came back and ran for President? That would TOTALLY explain how all of his ideas are a relic of the past wrapped in an ostensibly youthful package. It's almost too perfect...
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@BB8 you’re mistaking Einstein for Newton, and a pathologically ambitious corporate shill for a mind and personality strong enough to change the world.
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I'm a boomer. I think Pete is a lovely man. But it's time to turn this ship around, and that's not how he's navigating.
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@teach Pete is a goody-goody, fuddy-duddy old neoliberal/liberal Interventionist. He would do nothing about the sociopathic greed plaguing society, he would invite neocon buffoons like David Frum into his administration. The Democrats who could effect positive change are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard. Anyone else and I'm not sure Trump would be worse.
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I completely agree with this assessment. We need a firebrand, not a feather-smoother. In addition to the astounding levels of income inequality, we are going to see more and more climate change refugees in the form of homeless people displaced by floods and fires. This is the new reality for many people, not to mention the old reality of too much student debt piled on top of exorbitant costs to simply live where the jobs are. The economy's great if you've already made it; not so much for newly minted grads and those who simply cannot find the kinds of jobs that will allow them to pay back their loans.
As much as I admired Obama personally, his coziness with Wall Street and big business was a big demerit on his Presidency, in my opinion. We can no longer afford to coast on business as usual. People--real people--are either suffering or cannot get ahead no matter how many jobs they work. Mayor Pete and Joe Biden are not the right guys to be the Democratic nominee. Yes, defeating Trump is job number one. But job number two is defeating the old notion that what's good for corporate America is good for Americans in general. It isn't. And it hasn't been for at least 30 or 40 years.
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Respectfully what you need or think we need in San Francisco is not at all mainstream.
Please remember that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are far different from your liberal beacon.
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@Mark Respectfully, the country should not turn entirely on the beliefs of a few over the beliefs of the many.
"The longest expansion in history, with little sign of abating..." That is said at some point just before everything falls apart.
With our luck, DJT will be re-elected on basis of jobsjobsjobs and then things will fall apart. This time, however, there aren't a lot of smart people running the show, and it will be a lot worse.
It will be ironic that in a time of global warming, we might have a credit freeze that stops all economies in their tracks. We came within a whisker before, and we removed many of the things to prevent its happening again.
When I hear "the boom and bust cycle no longer operates," then I will hit the stores for food to last more than the 2 weeks recommended for a Mag 9 earthquake.
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"Progressives" who are wild about radical structural reform, and who tend to back Liz or Bernie routinely ignore their potentially disastrous effect on the markets, or minimize this concern as one of the privileged class, making it irrelevant. This is a fundamental error, in my opinion. Millions of Americans rely on the markets in retirement, having worked their whole lives to build up nest eggs which, combined with Social Security, allow them to pay for housing and other rising costs in the modern world. To lose half of that next egg would damage far more people than Medicare For All, etc. would help, relative to Pete or Amy's plan. Not to mention that MFA will never make it though Congress, the majority of Americans don't support it, the wealthy will dodge the wealth tax, etc. Progressives may be well meant, but they are doing more harm than good when it comes to defeating Trump.
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@frank ruggirello
Someone who bases their vote on how their stock market portfolio may be affected needs to check their moral compass.
There is an old saying about people who know "the cost of everything and the value of nothing,"
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@frank ruggirello
You make the fundamental error of mistaking the Times comment section for a "significant portion of America." Young Americans are so bogged down in school debt and high living costs that they don't one red cent to put into retirement. Significant portions of older Americans don't have 'nest eggs' in the markets either. The markets are not the economy and something like 85% of the stocks are owned by the top 10%. MFA would provide greater benefit to far greater numbers. This miserly attitude of "I got mine and I'm hoarding it, the rest of you can drown in medical debt" is fuel for a generational war in the democratic party.
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@frank ruggirello If the middle class has more spending income, the stock market will do just fine. There will be some grumpiness from traders who invest in exotic trading structures that don't actually add any market value, of course, because they'll be restricted from operating the same way. But honestly, who needs them?
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I like Pete, & he'd be several steps up (not just one) from Trump. Like a whole staircase up. That said - I agree that he's way too much a captive of big tech/big business groupthink.
I don't have an issue with him taking their money - in San Jose or in Napa - but I have a big problem with him thinking the way they do.
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@Carol He's made only one promise to his donors... he will use every dime to defeat tRump… and that's good enough for me... what does the tRump campaign have now for cash on hand? $125 million or more? Will we beat that money without some wealthy folks supporting our Democratic candidate? NO.... VOTE PETE IN AND WIN THE ERA...
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Pete is wooden. And as we've seen in the past with Gore, Dukakis, and Hillary, wooden and smart people don't wing well enough to, you know, WIN.
We need someone a little more engaging. The only person at this point is Biden, and I'm not even a Biden fan. I do recognize that he's got something that warms a lot of people's hearts.
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Pete Buttigieg is smart, calculating, and although using ideas and language supportive of the poor, lower middle class, the homeless and others he seeks the support of the very wealthy. He has no experience at the state or federal level and he lacks wisdom and passion. He is a novelty right now but I would like to see him in 2028 or 2032 with a record of working in the complex systems of government and standing for others in our country who desperately need our help. I would like to see him gain in experience, wisdom and mature courage. Perhaps then...
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@Grace Ask yourself a simple question.... is Mayor Pete smart enough to attract the best and brightest folks to his administration?
Reading this column disappoints me in so much that the "objective" read of the economy is really based on the political lens through which one views it.
This economy is sometime's called a continuation of the "Obama economy" when it suits the writer. This week, Trump owns it and Buttigieg isn't the man to fix it, we are to believe.
Why does it require transformational fixing, though? Through 8 years of Obama's "recovery" these pages never shed a tear of the rising inequality in the populace even as jobs and stock markets boomed. Why? Because your side was in the White House.
Now as "Obama's economy" continues to flourish, suddenly it's a disaster and needs fixing because the other side is in the White House. I don't buy it.
We have equal opportunity in this nation, not a guarantee for equal outcomes. Any candidate, be it Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg, who promises equal outcomes will surely lose against Trump.
Americans may have had enough of Trump and his antics but we're not going to abandon our core values of hard work and personal achievement in a misguided quest among some hardcore liberals to strive for equal outcomes. That's about as un-American a tale as it gets.
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@Jason W Here's me criticizing Obama's economic policies along just the lines you're looking for:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opinion/obama-2008-financial-crisis.html
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@Jason W
Much of what you say is reasonable, but I take exception to the claim that we have equal opportunity in this nation. Equal opportunity seems to exist only on paper. Because wealth grants you access to political power and great wealth grants excessive access, and political power grants you greater access to wealth (think taxes, capital gains, etc.) you have a feedback loop that makes prospects very grim for MOST OF THE POPULATION.
One way of thinking about this is to liken it to a poker game: Okay, Jason have a seat. Watcha got there, $100? Put'em up, no limit raises, and I got $500,000,000. How long you gonna last?
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@Jason W No progressive envisions "equal outcomes," that's a red herring. But the fact is that we DON'T "have equal opportunity in this nation." To achieve some greater equality of opportunity is the decent and rational option.
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So your problem with Pte is that he wants to deal in the realm of what's possible. I'd love to see free college, Medicare for all, a top marginal rate of 70%, a truly prohibitive carbon tax with generous tax credits for renewable energy. The problem is all of those require majority vote in the Senate and the House -- and that isn't going to happen absent a record-breaking wave election. There are no tidal waves on their way, so incremental beats the heck out of the reversals we've got going on now.
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@Russ Usually you start with the stretch goal and then work your way to what's possible through negotiation. If you'd love to see free college, fight for free college.
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@Russ This is the problem with Democrats and why they tend to lose so many fights - they start negotiating against themselves before anyone has sat down at the table. Why start making concessions about what is arbitrarily deemed "possible" instead of starting with what the end goal is and working your way towards a compromise?
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@Russ All that stuff is possible in the rest of the developed world but the people who pay Pete don't want us to have it because their taxes would go up and their profits might go down. It's that simple.
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Calling Pete "The Mayor from McKinsey" is a bit disingenuous. Sure, he worked there, but early on in his career. His net worth, if that matters, is also way lower than Warren's, Sanders's, or Biden's.
Also, there is a myth that Pete's policies aren't progressive. While this may be true relative to Warren or Sanders, his policies are far more progressive than any US president up until this point. Furthermore, unlike Warren's policies or Sanders's policies, Pete's policies actually have a chance of passing in Congress.
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@EL except they'll get stripped down even further than he's already stripped them down because he started negotiating against himself before anyone sat down at the table. That's his problem (that and the fact that he's moved further towards the center seemingly every week, and despite what he claimed to believe in early in his campaign.)
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@Ted
I don't think his policies have changed much. If anyone can list policies where he has clearly changed or moved toward the center, feel free to list them.
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@EL in February he tweeted that he supports Medicare for All, in debates he's stated that he supports free college but last month he put out ads in Iowa attacking both of those positions.
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In lieu of what just took place in the UK regarding the Labour Party vis a vis idealism, maybe Farhad needs a dose of reality. I’m not disagreeing with the sentiment, just the resultant re-election of those doing what Farhad says he doesn’t want. Victory starts with obtaining the office and holding back the tide of mendacity. Not having the highest ideals, at least in this America.
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Everything that's wrong about a political commentary. Pete has good ideas but "I get a feeling about him." "I think he'll get eaten alive." All code. Just like the bad old days of job interviews.
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@Chris Late This would be a good retort about a candidate who has really sold policy as their main thing. Like, if I'd written this column about Warren -- "she's got great, detailed, fully formed ideas but I don't like her personal style" -- you could ding me for preferring style over substance.
But your argument doesn't work for Mayor Pete, because he's not the substance candidate. He's a 37-year-old mayor! He's not selling policy detail, experience, or any other substance; he's selling style, a demeanor, a generation, a look, a way of speaking, a resume. I'm saying that even his style doesn't work — his whole brand is wrong, for this moment.
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@Farhad Manjoo It's interesting that the "policy candidate" ended up walking back her "great, detailed, fully formed" Medicare proposal to incorporate exactly the kind of public option proposal that Pete "not the substance candidate" Buttigieg was pushing. Sure, she still says that she wants Medicare for all to be the end result, but I think it's pretty clear what a massive concession this was to Pete (and Biden)'s way of thinking. Which is exactly the kind of "opportunistic incrementalism" that you claim to hate. There are a lot of ways you can describe a candidate who makes big promises and then backtracks on them later, but "substance candidate" isn't one of them.
Less "progressive" candidate like Buttigieg might not strike fire in the hearts of young people (and for the record, I'm a millennial, if on the older end of the term), but they're also not filling people's heads with unachievable goals that they will later betray (or fail spectacularly at if they don't betray them), either. As for me, I'll pick the candidate who isn't actively deceiving me (and likely themselves) every time they paint a picture of the future and how we'll get there.
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@Farhad Manjoo His whole brand is what's right for this moment. We don't need a "fighter". Trump and his discourse and the media's coverage of it for the last four years has turned political rhetoric into violence. We don't need anymore fighting. We need a calm, level-headed person leading the front. One who can also win Republican and Independent votes. That person is Pete. He has just as much substance (if not more) than every other candidate out there running.
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I agree about Mayor Pete, but neither Warren nor Sanders will beat Trump, precisely because their proposals are too scary to too many swing voters.
Which, in my mind, leaves Biden, with all his many faults. I hope the Sanders and Warren backers will still come out in force for Biden in the general, but I worry that they will not.
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@Mark S Sanders polls better vs Trump than any other candidate in the primary. He also beat Hillary in Michigan in 2016 and polls well in those and other swing states. Where do you get this idea that their proposals are too scary to swing voters? From your neighbors in California?
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@Mark S "I hope the Sanders and Warren backers will still come out in force for Biden in the general, but I worry that they will not." And us Sanders and Warren supporters sure hope Biden backers will show up in force if either Sanders or Warren is the nominee . . .
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@Ted California has 40 Million people and is diverse. It also is the 5th Largest economy as a stand alone entity, (1/8 of the United States in economic output.)
I'd be glad to hear what your neighbors think as well.
That's the whole point of this discussion. And to your point about Mr. Sanders' polling numbers, those were before his heart attack. That fact makes Mr. Sanders a question mark in some minds, and would make the choice of VP very relevant. Mr. Buttigieg?
I bet if it was a Dem in office you would be singing their praises claiming that Dems are betting at managing the economy as such. I personally, and many people I know, have benefited greatly in this economy. I am no billionaire let alone millionaire. Tread with caution by continuing to deny reality because you don't like who's in charge. People vote with their wallets. Any indication of rocking the boat (Sander, Warren, et al), is going to turn people off. You've been warned.
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@Skeptical Not all people vote with their wallets just look at all those people in red states who keeps voting against their economic interest.
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