Can Mayor Buttplug Save the Democrats?
15th April 2019
Jim Goad pulls no .punches.
Say hello to Pete Buttigieg, who is so kind and helpful that his Twitter page phoneticizes his Maltese surname as “BOOT-edge-edge” so you don’t have to spend half a day trying to figure out how to pronounce it. Because his last name is so ridiculously inscrutable, many prefer to simply call him “Mayor Pete.” Buttigieg is the out-and-proud mayor of South Bend, IN, who declared his candidacy for president yesterday amid a wave of hype touting him as “the hottest thing in politics.” Almost entirely unknown a month ago, recent polls show him trailing only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in a cluttered field of Democratic candidates.
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Like O’Rourke, Buttigieg is young—if elected, he’d become the youngest president ever—but what sets him apart from the rest of the Democrats’ unfashionably white males is that he is gay. Therefore, even though he’s Harvard-educated and independently wealthy, he’s “oppressed.” And in the modern Democratic Party, you’re not a winner unless you’re a loser, at least in historical terms.