WTF, Mayor Pete? (With Correction)

My story about @PeteButtigieg ends with him referring to the “failures of the Obama era.” That’s an inaccurate quote — the result of transcribing a noisy recording at a loud rally. His exact words were “failures of the old normal”

— Evan Halper (@evanhalper) November 11, 2019

The story referred to originally had said:

“My message is not about going back to where we were,” he said. “The failures of the Obama era help explain how we got Trump. I am running on building a future that is going to have a lot of differences.… One thing I learned in 2016 is to be very skeptical of any message that relies on the word ‘again.’ ”

but I'm going to have to say that the interpretation many if not most Democrats will take from that isn't a particularly good one: blaming Obama for Trump? Let's don't! As constructions of what Democrats need to do go, the "This is how we got Trump" trope is the one that simply shuts down receptivity to anything else that person is going to say. It always seems to boil down to: Democrats being Democrats is how you got Trump.

CORRECTION: The LA TIMEs story has been updated to correct the quote to:

“My message is not about going back to where we were,” he said.

For a lot of people, “‘normal’ has been a real problem for a very long time, and I think the failures of the old normal help explain how we got Trump. I am running on building a future that is going to have a lot of differences.… One thing I learned in 2016 is to be very skeptical of any message that relies on the word ‘again.’ ”

Because I'm largely dealing with "This is how we got Trump" in my post, I'm not altering what I said, but this correction of what Buttigieg said is significant since he's not slamming Obama. I still remain skeptical about how he's going to achieve his version of change, in rather the same way I am about, say, getting Sanders' or Warren's economic visions through.


And no, that isn't it. Trump is a wholly-owned product of a trajectory that Republicans have been on since at least Nixon, as far as I can tell. He is the product of an anti-intellectualism and paranoid style that is very much part and parcel of right-wing media--he says the things people on the right want to hear, because he's saying the things he heard on the media they and he listen to. Obama, to be clear, uh, didn't build that. He was, during his presidency, the target of that mindset in the Republican party that rejected dialogue and promoted Birtherism, death panels, cries of "appeasement" and "communism" and "radical secret Muslim terrorism" and whatnot. Obama was doing what he could.

To be fair to Buttigieg, though, there is a chance that what he meant was something a bit more nuanced:

The central lesson of Obama’s presidency, Buttigieg argues, is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.” The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.

“You can only go so long with this divergence that we have between the center of the American people and the center of the American Congress,” Buttigieg says. “Donald Trump was not exactly a corrective, but he was a consequence of the fact that people watched their government drifting further and further away from them in terms of what it would deliver.”

As to the first part of that--quite right. Assumption of good faith by Republicans has become a dead end. Our government is dysfunctional and divided. We are living in a kind of political Groundhog Day, except it's always Infrastructure Week, and nothing changes. To say Trump is "not exactly a corrective" is awfully mild: it might be more exact to say that Trump should be slapped with the political equivalent of an FDA warning label. He is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any problems of state. But anti-government sentiment and the idea of political gridlock both predate the Obama era, and it could be accurately stated that Obama's caution regarding pushing big changes was that Republicans were already the anti-everything party. Any structural changes to get around that were liable to (and are still going to be liable to) be viewed as a takeover, a coup, a civil war, argggghhhhh!

There just isn't a way to get the structural changes without changing the makeup of congress itself by actually getting an effective progressive governing majority in place. It's not a policy thing--it's a political movement thing. I'm not 100% sure that Pete is the guy to lead a movement when he just (I think inadvertently) came off as blaming one of our most respected recent presidents for Trump.

(As Mayor Pete didn't actually literally blame Obama, of course that end line isn't exactly right. But I still think he will have a hard time of it because the reaction to the misheard quote by people already skeptical of his appeal was, to be blunt, along the lines of "That's what we thought he would say." It's unfair, but that impression may stick.)