Mayor Pete's Middle Path

Pete Buttigieg has returned to the scene of the crime, or at least the site of what some progressives see as his original sin. He is back at Stevens High School in Claremont, New Hampshire, on a desultory Saturday in January. The ancient gym walls were bathed in red, white, and blue spotlights last time he was here, for a Fox News Town Hall with Chris Wallace last May. The night was seen by most as an overwhelming success, a breakthrough on the path of a 37-year-old gay mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city becoming a plausible presidential candidate.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party saw it differently. To them, Buttigieg had not only granted an interview to Hannity Enterprises, but espoused a litany of milquetoast half measures that revealed he was a centrist at best and, according to the more conspiratorially minded, some kind of Republican sleeper agent.

Buttigieg has often said that he is immune to the type of taunts that Donald Trump dishes out. “I grew up gay in Indiana,” he says, suggesting he’s not susceptible to bullying. But Buttigieg admits the slings and arrows from his own party bug him. “It can be more frustrating when it’s folks I’m 80 or 90 percent aligned with,” he told me sitting in the gym’s tiny office.

His sins are voluminous, according to progressives. His work as a junior staffer at McKinsey, a giant consulting firm, was proof he was a corporate American toady, willing to slash jobs for a better bottom line. (It is often said McKinsey was his first real job, but Buttigieg worked before as a conference organizer for the Cohen Group, a D.C. lobbying firm, a fact that does absolutely zero to assuage the left’s fears.)

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mayor-pete-buttigieg-iran-trump-progressivism-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-937203/