"While it is important that we apprehend the trees we must also comprehend the forest."
----from "The Quotations of Chairman Joe"
There's
a star rising in the Midwest. His name is Pete Buttigeig, pronounced
“Buddajudge”. He is mayor of South Bend, Indiana and he
is a declared candidate for President of the United States. He is
also, for the record and because it will become an issue, homosexual.
He is the darling of the L.G.B.T.Q. Community but his candidacy isn't about gay rights. Buttigeig, instead, has become the apostle of the possible.
He
has made the customary appearances on MSNBC, interviewed by the likes
of Chris Matthews, Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow, but he has
also taken his message to Fox News and the rest of the country. He
has even captured the imagination of some stalwart conservatives.
Today, it was conservative columnist David Brooks praising “Mayor
Pete” in his opinion column in The New York Times. In it,
Brooks had this to say:
“PETE
BUTTIGIEG HAS some kind of magic right now. His campaign bio,
'Shortest Way Home,” was the 25th-best-selling book on
Amazon when I checked on Monday. That put him just a few dozen
places behind Michelle Obama, and thousands or tens of thousands of
places ahead of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and other candidates
who have campaign books out now.
“In
a recent Iowa poll he surged to third place. His campaign just
announced that it's raised an impressive $7 million since January.
And I can't tell you how many Democrats in places as diverse as
Nebraska, Indiana, New York and Washington have come up to me over
the last few weeks raving about the guy....” (1)
What
is driving this sudden fascination, after all—as Brooks points
out—until recently no one had ever heard of the guy until his
recent appearances on national television, including a CNN town hall
meeting on March 10.
Brooks
thinks that it is, in large measure, a response to the tRUMP era that
is driving the interest in this candidacy.
“The
Trump era has been all about disolving (sic) moral norms and waging
vicious attacks,” observes
Brooks. “This has been an era of culture war, class
warfare and identity politics. It's been an era in which call-out
culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have
overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing.
“The
Buttigeig surge suggest that there are a lot of Democrats who want to
say goodbye to all that...
“They
are sick of the moral melodrama altogether. They just want a person
who is more about governing than virtue-signaling, more about
friendliness and basic decency than media circus and rhetorical war.”
(2)
Brooks
feels that the Mayor of South Bend transcends the tension, and is
somehow above the pettiness and cruelty of contemporary politics.
He
is young, at 37 perhaps too young. But, Brooks observes, “he's
an older person's idea of what a young person should be. ” (3)
Perhaps, but is it enough?
He
has crammed a lot into his 37 years. He's graduated from Harvard, is
a Rhodes Scholar, has served in the Navy. But he is not—as Brooks
duly notes—a social justice warrior. This begs the question: will
his standing in the L.G.B.T.Q. Community once again—if he should
gain the presidential nomination—present us with a
candidacy that sacrifices the middle class in the name of making a
social statement?
Brooks
addresses the gay issue by telling his readers that although “he
is gay and personifies the progress made by the L.G.B.T.Q. Movement,
...he doesn't do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive
to social conservatives. He has conservative family values; it's just
that his spouse is a husband, not a wife. He speaks comfortably
about his faith and says that when he goes to church he prefers a
conservative liturgy to anything experimental.” (4)
While
Brooks and many of our fellow progressives are comfortable with that,
one is left to wonder just what will be the dictates of, for
instance, Southern Baptism? It is difficult, at this writing, to
imagine an openly gay candidate for President not fueling the culture
wars.
Finally,
Brooks points to the humility and lack of grandiosity in the man.
Brooks describes meeting the mayor and finding him “modest and
self-effacing, and I can't square that impression with the assumption
that at 37 he's qualified to be president of the United States. “
(5) But then, we in Michigan have experience with youth. In
1820, President Andrew Jackson appointed Stevens Mason territorial
secretary at age 19 and at age 22 Mason became Acting Territorial
Governor of Michigan. It isn't the years it's what you do with them.
And tRUMP has so debased the standard it seems that everyone, down to the maintenance man at an apartment complex in Athens, Georgia, now looks into the mirror and conjures a president of the United States.
It
is good that the mayor talks about local issues, fixing the potholes,
repairing the sewer system. This appeals to the likes of David
Brooks who waxes poetic about the virtues of the town hall. But what I
find much more compelling is the Mayor's philosophy
best expressed by the approach that “he'll do whatever works”.
(6).
I
like that lack of grandiosity, the emphasis on ways and means rather
than, in Brooks' words, the “grand ideological conflict.”
(7)
But
perhaps this candidacy is a bit of an overreach. It isn't simply
that the Mayor, if he were the first open homosexual to win the party's
nomination, would add fuel to the culture wars. It would have been
helpful, one supposes, had we been taught our history with some
honesty. An openly gay President would be our first, but not our
first gay or bisexual chief magistrate. One immediately thinks of
James Buchanan or Abe Lincoln and Joshua Speed. But there can be no
doubt that his elevation will add fuel to the fires of intolerance,
drowning the debate over the much needed new direction; and the high
crimes and misdemeanors, as well as the boorishness of our Caesar
Disgustus.
Moreover,
as much as we are drawn to the particular, the granular as opposed to
the spectacular, these are not ordinary times. The yawning abyss
confronting humanity's violations of mother nature must become
all-consuming.
There
can be no other approach: the ecological crisis must now become, as
anti-communism was in my youth, the organizing principle around which we must all now gather. We must confront this head on for, as the United
Nations and other reports are now telling us, we have about a decade
to get our house in order. This calls for draconian measures. This
calls for, in the words of the young Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a
“Green New Deal”.
I
appreciate that Mayor Buttigieg is governed by the politics of the
practical. We must also be governed by the politics of the possible.
While it is important that we apprehend the trees we must also comprehend the forest.
Roosevelt's
New Deal was a struggle to find new solutions. The operative
approach was, like Buttigieg's what works. But the ultimate
goal was to fashion a more just society. At some point, we must join
means to overarching ends. Yes, that means wealth redistribution,
re-organizing the labor force, campaign finance reform, Civil Rights,
infrastructure, education and a host of constituencies and issues.
But, we must now confront the fact that all of these must somehow be
woven into a tapestry that forms a banner around which we organize to
save ourselves and this planet. This must be the organizing
principle, there can be no other.
I
haven't heard that yet, except from the Governor of the State of
Washington Jay Inslee, and he polling well behind in the pack.
It
we are to realize real change, getting rid of tRUMP is the necessary
but not the sufficient condition.
Getting
rid of tRUMP and ending the culture wars are only a beginning. I
like the mayor. I find him intelligent, sincere, honest and capable.
But his candidacy says more about not only the vision within the
Democratic Party but the depth of its bench.
A
dozen years ago we faced a similar crisis and produced a young
upstart promising “hope” and “change”. We are living in the
aftermath.
We
don't have the luxury of making another social statement.
“An
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach
and Imprison
___________________
- Brooks, David. “Why You Love Mayor Pete”, The New York Times. Tuesday, April 2, 2019. Page A27
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
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