2020 Presidential Primary Candidates: Up-And-Comers Buttigieg and Klochubar
Day two of my presidents week coverage of the 2020 Democratic primary focuses on two candidates who’ve outlasted most of the lesser known contenders to make it to Super Tuesday, namely Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Unlike their competitors, Buttigieg (Indiana) and Klobuchar (Minnesota) are not creatures of the coastal political scenes. Both have election strategies aimed at capturing what might be called the pragmatic liberal vote.
To hear some on the left talk about them, you’d think they were just a few centimeters away for Donald Trump on a linear political scale. Those in the former Biden / now Bloomberg camps would like us to believe they’re lacking the gravitas to take on the incumbent.
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About this series: I will be voting this week, and although I’ve maintained a fluid attitude about who will get their circle filled in on my California Primary ballot, my political lean has been and is towards Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Monday’s coverage focused on Biden and Bloomberg. Wednesday, I’ll look at the candidacies of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Thursday, I’ll review this week’s debate. Friday, I’ll turn in my ballot.
I’ll wait until after Wednesday’s debate, which I consider to be a critical juncture, to make my final decision.
Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has graduated from lurker status and bought himself a slot on the Nevada stage. He’ll be joined by Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.
NBC/MSNBC, along with the Nevada Independent, will host the debate, with Vanessa Hauc, Lester Holt, Hallie Jackson, Jon Ralston, and Chuck Todd acting as moderators. Broadcast time is 6 pm PST. It will also air live in Spanish on Universo, as well as the Noticias Telemundo mobile app and website and Noticias Telemundo’s Facebook page.
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The question to be answered on Wednesday will be which candidate(s) will survive a $300 million advertising onslaught, which has Bloomberg now polling near the top of the pack in some states.
My read on the polling is that Democrats are headed for a brokered convention for the first time since 1952. As things stand at present, Bernie Sanders will be a contender in Milwaukee, Bloomberg (or Biden if lightning strikes) will also be there, along with one other candidate.
If history is any guide (and the many of the circumstances back then were very different) a compromise candidate will emerge as the nominee.
Unless Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klochubar (and Elizabeth Warren) can round up 60% of the delegates in the next few weeks, their best shot at winning will occur after a deadlock at the convention.
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Roge Karma’s analysis at Vox.com of the differences in the Democratic Party serves as a good starting point for evaluating the candidacies of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klochubar. (Just pencil in “Bloomberg” wherever you see “Biden” to bring it up to date.)
The core fault line of the 2020 Democratic primary is not policy — it’s systems. Specifically, whether you think America’s political and economic systems are fundamentally sound — but temporarily damaged — or fundamentally and irredeemably broken.
Those who take the former view, like Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden, believe in a politics of restoration. This approach is primarily supported by a cohort of older voters who remember a time when American institutions served them well. It presupposes the existence of social and economic systems that are functional and inclusive at their core, and merely need to be reformed to work well again. As purveyors of restorative politics, candidates like Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar aim to make student debt more manageable, higher education more accessible, child care more affordable, and health insurance less volatile — but without upending the core institutions and ideals that those systems are built upon.
Those who take the latter view, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, believe in a politics of transformation. This approach is primarily supported by a cohort of younger voters who, over the course of their lifetimes, have watched system after system — the financial markets, the health care system, the national security apparatus, higher education — fail them in profound ways.
Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg started out his campaign sounding like a transformer, but has shifted his approach as his candidacy has gained traction.
His youth, status as a military veteran, experience outside the DC bubble, and upfront expressions of his religious faith all make the Buttigieg brand an attractive one for many voters, And then there’s the gay thing, which he’s done an admirable job of presenting as a matter of fact asset in an era where dominionists are ascendant in government.
Beyond the common sense veneer, there’s another side to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign that nails down his status as a restorationist, as noted in the Vox article:
Buttigieg’s actual governing experience — two terms as mayor of a mid-sized city — is unorthodox for a presidential candidate. But Buttigieg’s résumé tells a more conventional tale of meritocratic mastery: He’s a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar, a polylingual military veteran, and a former McKinsey consultant. For many, this résumé gave Buttigieg the allure of a political wunderkind — the “perfect Democratic candidate,” as the New York Times’s Frank Bruni put it.
As Bernie Sanders points out, the Buttigieg campaign has benefitted from the largess of no less than 40 billionaires, many with ties to industries at the heart of any restorative legislative changes.
Ryan Grim at the Intercept profiled the Buttigieg fundraising (they call high dollar donations “investments”) effort, focusing on the role of the campaign’s national policy director, Sonal Shah.
Shah’s background positions her well to connect with the high-net-worth individuals within the Democratic Party that are powering Buttigieg’s bid and are concerned about income inequality, climate change, health disparities, or other social inequities. While she was a top official at both Goldman Sachs and Google before joining the Obama administration — spanning the two dominant elements of the corporate wing of the party, Wall Street and Silicon Valley — she worked in the divisions of those firms publicly dedicated to doing social good. At Goldman, she designed environmental strategy. At Google, she did global development. More recently, she became founding executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation.
The attempt to marshal corporate resources in the service of society is in line with the Buttigieg approach to economic policy and politics, which aims to leave the system largely untouched but divert some resources toward charitable efforts and social and technological innovation.
Is Buttigieg tapping into the knowledge base of his donors to craft his policy ideas, or are they counting on him not to rock the boat?
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Minnesota Senator Amy Klochubar brings a different sensibility to her campaign.
She’s the Minnesota-nice, Republican vanquishing, never say die, common sense candidate, who has no problem owning her policies of restoration. After a so-so start, her campaign has been on the upswing in early state delegate contests.
It’s safe to say she’s been the dark horse candidate that many (pre-Bloomberg) centrist pundits have hoped would save the day when Biden faltered, as Libby Watson suggested in her 2019 New Republic exposé of what a terrible boss the Minnesota Senator can be:
Despite Klobuchar’s consistent position just outside the top tier of candidates, pundits cannot get enough of her. She satisfies every self-evident truth in the pundit bible about what Americans want. Most importantly, she is Midwestern. But she is also this field’s queen of Tellin’ It Like It Is—by which they mean being outspoken about what Beltway elites consider to be objective truths about the limits of political possibility in policymaking.
By the way, Klochubar proved her mettle by turning those early criticisms of her management style into an asset, as Eric Lutz suggested at Vanity Fair:
Statistically, Klobuchar is one of the most productive lawmakers on Capitol Hill. In leaning into the tough-boss persona, she may be positioning herself to pitch “high expectations” as a selling point to voters looking for a tough contender to square off against Trump. “Her job wasn’t to be my mentor and cheerleader,” an ex-staffer told BuzzFeed last week. “Her job was to get shit done for Minnesota.”
Harry Truman had a temper; so did Lyndon Johnson. I think a good part of this “Amy is mean story” is rooted in the sexist assumptions about what women in politics are supposed to be like.
The problem with Senator Klochubar as I see it is the limitations she places on her ideas about restoring the system. Her willingness to use or even acknowledge right wing talking points does nothing but encourage the Big Lie industries favored by the current batch of so-called conservatives.
She’s played fast and loose with the GOP mythology about third trimester abortions as a real thing. (They are rare and almost always about medical necessity.)
She’s okay with funding for building the useless effin wall if it’s part of a package of immigration reform. That might be something you’d admit in a back room negotiation, but given the unmitigated racism of how things have turned out over the past three years, it’s a lousy starting place.
With nuclear power and charter schools, Klochubar also fails to acknowledge the reality. We have no place to dump nuclear waste even if “safe reactors” can be built.
Policy around charter schools has been largely crafted by theocrats and segregationists, not to mention the unbridled corruption unfolding almost daily. This needs to be acknowledged before the right wing's "government schools" smear becomes an accepted talking point.
And while I always hesitate to bring up Israel, I can not overlook her support of moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem (something thrilling to theocrats and horrifying to most of the rest of the world) and her pledge to increase support for a nation-state already listed by the Congressional Research Service as the #1 recipient of foreign aid since World War II.
Can we talk about the military-industrial complex for a moment here?
On a positive note, Klochubar seems to have jumped off the cap-and-trade train as a centerpiece for responding to climate change.
She agrees with Warren and Sanders about strict federal regulations as a more effective approach. (The free markets aren’t really free, folks; gaming cap and trade is now big business in its own right.)
The biggest hurdle for both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klochubar in terms of winning the popular vote is and will be their lack of connection with voters of color.
Outreach coming off both candidates better-than-expected showings in New Hampshire and Iowa is going to be a challenge in the face of campaigns (Biden, Warren, Sanders) with more infrastructure or piles of cash (Bloomberg.)
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I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: despite any criticisms of candidates I may have or point out, there is no situation I can conceive of where I would not vote Blue in November.
I care enough about people who will be hurt even more by four more years of the current administration, than I do about any disagreements I may have with the people who will challenge him.
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