Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg has ended his candidacy and in a farewell address to his supporters he all but endorsed the moderate poster boy Joe Biden. After a typically lucid and asperational address, Pete and husband Chasten waved arm and arm to the now uncommitted crowd, setting up a consolidation behind the South Carolina victor.
I have to admit, though, I was surprised by the timing of the move. Buttigieg losing in South Carolina was entirely predictable, as he had some baggage from his time as mayor that created some distrust among voters of color, and without them, South Carolina was certainly lost. So why was it the existential red line for Pete? His was one of the campaigns that had the money to continue through Super Tuesday effectively and his early success seemed to indicate he had some momentum to build on.
I can’t help but think that this was almost surely a backroom deal. After garnering only 8% on his southern swing, it seemed the work to woo the black vote may have been insurmountable and without it his presidential hopes were pipe dreams. With that in mind, perhaps he was savvy enough to take the unprecedented rise in his political star and leverage to his best advantage. VP? Cabinet post? Dropping out before Super Tuesday has huge implications in the primary, creating a potential tidal wave toward Biden.
While Bernie has dominated the early states and built a slight lead in delegates and a real bump in Super Tuesday polls, the total number of moderate votes was clearly higher. By consolidating them behind one candidate before the huge Super Tuesday delegate grab, the race changes once again. Just as it looked like Bernie might run away with it, my sense is we will now have a dogfight that will split the party in two and almost guarantee a brokered convention. Sanders was Buttigieg’s biggest target, thinking he was every bit as divisive as Trump so imagining Pete hunkered down in a bunker with Joe to defeat the evil socialist is not a scene that would require an experieced focus puller. It snaps sharp pretty easily.
Did it happen? Who knows. We will find out if Joe wins and names his team, but until then, what else did we learn from Mayor Pete’s run?
Intelligence can be sexy to voters. It was the hallmark of 8 years of Obama oratory, regardless of how you align politically. This was a literate, informed, sober guy making decisions based on what he found to be the best information available gathered from people with greater expertise than his own. Mayor Pete had a similar vibe on the stump, rarely raising his performance temperature, preferring to be the adult in the room despite being the youngest candidate for the presidency since William Jennings Bryan lost his first of three attempts at the age of 36. Despite his age, he always seemed to have, if nothing else, the solid temperament to be in charge in a crisis.
Being gay is not, in itself, a disqualifier for the office of POTUS. For the greater part of the race, this was not a focal point in his candidacy. This was partly due to a deliberate strategy to downplay it by the candidate while not ignoring it altogether, a decidely thin, fine line that in my opinion he walked brilliantly. Never embarrassed by who he is, he never indicated it had any relevance to the campaign, and until South Carolina the electorate seemed to agree. Was that a factor there? Hard to speculate, but a typically moderate older African-American electorate rejected him out of hand. Since his politics would seem to be appealing there, his spotty racial history perhaps combined with his sexuality proved to be disastrous. But he won in Iowa and was damn close in New Hampshire. Even if you are in the camp, and it exists, that sees Pete as the poster boy for the Party Machine, we can still pat ourselves on the back that his sexuality was predominantly irrelevant.
The other lesson learned is you don’t become a democratic president without a considerable portion of the black vote. Ain’t gonna happen. Buttigieg never overcame the negative narrative about his relationship with the people of color in Indianapolis. Something killed him in South Carolina, and this has to be the missing link for Mayor Pete.
Pete’s a very smart guy, and a very young guy. We will see him again, and if I read him correctly he will have made inroads into the narrative of his past and wage a future for himself that overcomes the shortcomings that stood in his way. How he does it I won’t speculate on, but he will soberly evaluate what went sideways and address it head on.
And then there were four.