The latest boomlet from small, liberal, college-town Mayor Pete Buttigieg appears to have finally faded, as the hits incurred in the last debate take effect. Yet the 7%-8% he still gets nationally in the Real Clear Politics polling aggregate is still an embarrassment for our party, as if we haven’t learned the dangers of electing an unqualified, untested man president. Yet here are people raising tens of millions for a man who has never had to win more than 11,000 votes for anything (here are his mayoral election results in 2011 and 2015).
But if you weren’t already rolling your eyes at the ridiculousness of his candidacy, this great investigative piece by The Root should change that quite fast, while further highlighting why Buttigieg is scoring a big fat ZERO among black voters. There is simply too much to summarize. There’s the three high-ranking black city officials who were gone three months after Buttigieg first took office, including the demotion of the police chief for recording racist beat cops being racist. Those racist cops? Three were promoted; the fourth moved away. Buttigieg claimed he fired the chief because he was the target of a federal investigation, except he never was.
Ultimately, half of the city’s black police officers made discrimination complaints during Buttigieg’s tenure as mayor, and not a single one got justice. Ultimately, this led to an exodus of black police officers. “When Buttigieg became mayor in 2012, the SBPD was 11 percent black (29 of 244 officers),” writes Michael Harriot. “There were 28 black officers in 2013; 26 in 2014, and by the time Buttigieg announced his run for president, the South Bend police force was six percent black, with 15 black officers.”
South Bend is 26% black.
During a debate in June of last year, when challenged on the race problems in his police force, Buttigieg said, remarkably, “It’s a mess. I couldn’t get it done.” It was a canned, prepared response, tailor-made for political opponents for the rest of his career. “Pete Buttigieg … (Roll tape) … ‘I couldn’t get it done.’” That admission was particularly amazing given the context—he couldn’t handle a small town’s race problems, yet he still thought himself worthy of promotion to the presidency? The whole situation was patently absurd. Everything about his candidacy is absurd.
And now that absurdity is compounded by the details found in Harriot’s investigative work.
Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson best summarized the Buttigieg narrative: “He’s from the Rust Belt so he’s authentic, but he went to Harvard so he’s not a rube, but he’s from a small city so he’s relatable, but he’s gay so he’s got coastal appeal, but he’s a veteran so his sexuality won’t alienate rural people. This is literally the level of political thinking that is involved in the hype around Buttigieg.” That’s it, pretty much. Throw in exaggerated tales of speaking eight languages and other such assorted nonsense, and add a willful ability on the part of his supporters to ignore his lack of political conviction or ideological core (beyond what his donors want him to say, apparently).
But if anyone needs a concrete, policy-related reason to say HELL NO to Pete Buttigieg, his shameful handling of his city’s police force and its deep racial issues should be more than enough.