if he continues his rise in the polls, they will come out to meet him, guaranteed.

No problem with democracy at all that needs to change. No problem with the share of the pie most Americans get.

from the rest of the pack, is that he is actively seeking to figure out why so many people voted for Trump. If I'm not mistaken, he is the only candidate who is from a state that voted for Trump.

Oh, there's Beto, but he's from a state that didn't vote enough for him, either.

Expect attacks on Mayor Pete to mount. Any small thing will be twisted to become in recognizable.

as a sign of progress. Nobody's firing arrows at Tulsi Gabbard, at least not in the media.

I still do not understand what this candidate has accomplished or why I would want to support this candidate

We cannot run a very weak candidate with no accomplishments in 2020 We have to beat trump and I saw no reason in that article to take a chance on Mayor Pete

If the economy is in good shape, trump can win in 2020. We cannot run a weak candidate with no accomplishments

Controlling the media narrative mattered. That's all that matters. Nothing that I thought mattered in 2015 actually mattered. The least accomplished person in presidential history defeated the most accomplished person in presidential history. If you think that will change in 2020, you aren't paying attention.

Buttigieg's biggest accomplishment is that he got you to notice him. Not really all that different from Trump's biggest accomplishment, except that Buttigieg didn't start out with inherited wealth and hasn't spent the last 30 years getting his name plastered over the news. Oh, and Buttigieg isn't a moronic asshole. If that's not enough for you, then fine. But don't imagine that a long list of accomplishments makes a strong candidate. Just ask President McCain.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

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in the history of the world didn't win and that doesn't mean anything? We are YOU pretending that this even REMOTELY addresses what I said was THE ONE REASON to vote for Buttigieg.


Is this really so hard to understand, or are we just going to pretend that a twitter celebrity is some kind of authority on something?

"Here’s a candidate who refuses to talk down to audiences. He does not wave his arms or rely on empty catchphrases. He does not rant nor scowl and finger wag. He has interesting things to say because he’s interested in the world, well-read and thoughtful."

I am not going to take mayor Pete seriously either. I am glad that he is taking fund raising away from sanders.

If you think accomplishments are a requirement, then argue positively for whoever you think is qualified on that basis. Even if you are undecided, at least some candidates must mean your minimum bar.

But you aren't doing that. You are pretending that everyone else has to see it your way and pretend that no reason has been given. Then you provide different reasons to knock down Buttigieg that have nothing to do with accomplishments or lack of them.

You are welcome to support mayor pete. There are a number of candidates who meet my minimum bar including Joe Biden, Senators Booker, Harris, Warren, & Klobuchar, Julian Castro, Governor Inslee, and Beto (my county is blue due to Beto).

The fact that trump had no accomplishments does mean that Democrats need to nominate a candidate without any real accomplishments.

I gave to three candidates last night. My middle child and my oldest (both members of the bar) are pushing Sen. Warren and my middle child's best friend maxed out yesterday for Warren (she is at Neal Katyal's firm).

I will support the nominee of the party but I will be working hard to select a nominee who is qualified. The key think is beating trump and all of the candidates on my list are electable.

I will be busy in other races. We need 8 out of 150 additional house seats to flip the Texas House and two of these seats that are vulnerable are in my county. Texas has six Democrats being supported by the DCCC red to blue program including a candidate who I maxed out for in 2018. It will be a busy time

The qualification of legislative accomplishments means very little to the typical American voter.

The right tried to use a similar tactic against Obama and it didn't work. "He's just a community organizer."
Virtually no one voted for Obama because of his legislative accomplishments.

Thank you for the amusement. You are free to support candidates with no real accomplishments. trump was elected with no accomplishments but that does not mean that Democrats should follow this example.

The key is that we need to defeat trump. We need to nominate someone who has some credentials and who is electable. Mayor Pete is the mayor of a large town and does not meet this criterion in my opinion

Yet those credentials didn't get her elected President.

Accomplishments are important

it around. Yes, national problems are bigger, but four past Presidents were mayors before becoming president. So, we listen to how the person explains how to address national problems, in that area Mayor Pete has been the steadiest candidate in the field, IMO.

Has any mayor ever run for POTUS?

But why not, they have executive experience. Plus leadership is more about surrounding oneself with competent staff that it is about decisionmaking by one person, you have to look no further than Trump to see that.

....all the fines the city put liens on their homes, seized them, and then auctioned them off or tore them down.

When he first ran for Mayor, citizens complained to the then candidate about the vacant houses that littered the city, which had been declining in population since 1960, leading to people simply abandoning homes as they left the city.

After winning the office, the new Mayor set up a task force that studied the vacant housing and substandard housing issue. The article said that just over 1900 homes were identified, of which around 1400 were abandoned or falling down, with caving in roofs and walls. The article pointed out that the city made an effort to find the owners of the vacant and delapidated homes, it also pointed out that NO OCCUPIED home was demolished. One current councilwoman, Regina Williams-Preston (running for mayor to succeed Buttigieg) had three unoccupied investment homes demolished after she and her husband failed to fix them up. She won a seat on the council and brought the issue of demolition of vacant homes that people had plans for to Buttigieg and the council, the result was that demolition was slowed and the city obtained around $2 million to assist owners of vacant homes repair the homes up to code. In the article, Williams-Preston was quoted as saying that the mark of a leader is admitting that some things were done wrong, she said Buttigieg did that AND made changes to make the project of removing blighted homes work more smoothly and he enlisted more people from the communities affected into that effort.

It should be pointed out that the article gave the demographics of South Bend, around 52% White, the rest African American, Hispanic, American Indian. It has been pointed out that Buttigieg won reelection with more than 80% of the vote.

The article pointed out that there are some concerns. As people return to South Bend, there is gentrification taking place (that happens everywhere when a once downtrodden city gets it's mojo back and start attracting higher paid resident back into it). But the article pointed out that Buttigieg has made adjustments to city planning to better deal with gentrification.

On a personal note, living in Florida I see houses that should be torn down. When driving into some places I see abandoned shops and homes. I wish that my city was more proactive in dealing with those problem, but it isn't. I noticed one abandoned shop that was broken into and who knows what is happening inside that building, eventually code inspectors will get around to dealing with it, but there seems to be no urgency in doing so.

But I didn't like what he reportedly said about Trump vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton and found it baffling.

If you tell me what you are concerned about, I'll try to address it, because some of it has been well debunked here on DU.

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I don't think he was disparaging her platform, or her personally. I've only heard him speak positively about Democratic policies. But he thought the messaging was ineffective. Now, I don't know if Clinton personally ever said that America is already great, but it was certainly a Democratic theme in 2016 in response to MAGA. Obama said it during his convention speech, and the Democrats literally sold blue "America is already great" baseball caps for debate parties. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/256571-dems-selling-america-is-already-great-hat and https://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-democratic-convention-2016-live-watch-president-obama-urges-voters-to-1469678869-htmlstory.html

And Buttigieg is mayor of a rust belt town where unemployment was high and things weren't feeling particularly great. People in these towns didn't feel that "America is already great" acknowledged how much they were hurting. For residents of these towns, a nostalgic message like MAGA gave them false hope that they could turn back the clock and have their thriving factory towns again. He's also said that some Trump voters understood that Trump is an awful human being but voted for him anyway because they wanted to try something, anything, different--to "burn the house down." For these voters, too, "America is already great" wasn't an effective message.

So I think this is all Buttigieg was saying, in shorthand. Not "Hillary Clinton ran a crap campaign" or "Clinton didn't stand for anything." It's a very minor criticism, if he meant it the way I think he meant it. And honestly, she had better policies and is so much smarter, more ethical and more experienced than Trump. So what was it about her messaging that prevented her from winning those few critical states? What is so horribly wrong about trying to answer that question?

I think the problem people are having is that if we admit that we did anything wrong it somehow means all the factors outside her control played no role or that Trump actually knew something that she didn't.

Is Hillary's campaign strategy now a third rail that nobody may touch? Why was Buttigieg committing heresy by doing so? Why can't he or anyone else have an opinion about it that's contrary to the received wisdom that it was flawless? And even so, why all the hand-wringing and OMG, now I can never vote for him!? It's ONE COMMENT that was, at worst, artless, but pretty minor in light of his positive attributes; and never mind the fact that if we keep knocking people off our lists because of a single comment, faux pas or other transgression, often distributed by trolls and disruptors, we won't have a list at all and Trump will walk away with another one.

people on the ground see less pie. He talks about how democracy is under attack. Both things go hand in hand. Both things are bad. Both things the GOP pushed and won on in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. Pointing that is how we lost an election as people with financial anxiety can be lured into voting intuitively against an 'other' instead of voting rationally for their economic best interest is a problem democrats need to address is not wrong. Should we not look at the past?

But he made a decent point, IMO. Although Hillary had very good plans for blue collar job creation, how they were messaged overwhelmed everything else, the West Virginia coalminers dustup was the best example, but not sending herself or heavyweights for her campaign into the Midwest was another, Trump's people seemed to take advantage of that. Eventhough Trump lied to Midwesterners, he was there claiming that he cared. I will give a more personal example, Trump campaigned once in my county, we have never gotten a presidential candidate here from either party before. I could see that the visit jacked up the Trump supporters and deflated our side because no one remotely related to Hillary's campaign came to my area or any closer than Orlando. Trump visited a lot of smaller counties like mine in Florida, counties where getting several hundred or a couple thousand more vote matter in a state that was going to be closely contested. So Mayor Pete has a point, even as he stepped on his dick a little making that point, Trump was running around lying "I care about you", while he was not being challenged in smaller areas like mine, where trimming his advantage could have given Hillary Florida.

I've seen him several times now and he seems rather milquetoast. We have better candidates available.

It's a good strategy that can get you far, but unfortunately, it can't win the nomination.

many of whom are white, and the African American base of the Democratic party, excluding, of course, people who are motivated by racism and xenophobia, which he denounces.

The relevant portion of his interview with Van Jones starts around 3:05.

The whole idea of the blue wall was that Rust Belt voters were part of the coalition. We need them back. We can't just write them off all off as racists and expect the non-racist ones to overlook our insults and come back to the One True Party.

Thanks for sharing.

When he speaks he’s so logical, and kind of reminds me of Jim Parson’s character from Big Bang Theory, Dr. Sheldon Cooper.. a character I’ve adored for more than a decade.

a lot with many many voters. He's in good shape for his life...this guy is going places.

Phrases I heard people say back when we still thought Trump had a snow balls chance in hell to be nominated.