Democratic Primaries

babylonsister

(171,059 posts) Tue Mar 3, 2020, 11:19 AM Mar 2020

Mayor Pete Was Good for the Left

Mayor Pete Was Good for the Left
He made moderates comfortable with progressivism.

By William Saletan
March 02, 202011:49 AM

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Astonishingly, this minor league mayor raised a boatload of money. A lot of it came from high-dollar fundraisers, and that aroused suspicions. Some of my friends and colleagues bought the argument, made by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, that Buttigieg was a tool of billionaires. It’s one of those arguments that makes you think you’re seeing beneath the surface of politics, but it’s actually shallow. Yes, it’s good to know who’s funding whom. But that’s no substitute for studying what the candidates have done and what they’re proposing. From education to health care to taxes, Buttigieg’s platform, like Sanders’ and Warren’s, was about helping ordinary people, not the rich.

Buttigieg wasn’t as aggressive as Sanders or Warren. He didn’t agree that a state monopoly on basic health insurance should be federally imposed. His alternative, “Medicare for all who want it,” reflected a different approach to governing. He believed that most people, after experiencing public health insurance and comparing it with private plans, would prefer the public option. But he refused to mandate that result. “If progressives like me are right that it’s the best plan, then everybody will choose it,” he reasoned. “But if we’re wrong, and for some people their other plan was better, we’re going to be really glad we didn’t kick them off of it.”

That’s a prudent way to introduce progressive ideas. It allows for the possibility that a program will turn out to be a disappointment or a mistake. It also respects freedom of choice. Buttigieg knows that well-intended policies can fail. And as a gay man from Indiana, he understands that sometimes you have to connect with people who don’t see things your way. In his withdrawal speech on Sunday night, he saluted, as he always does, the “future former Republicans” who supported him. They supported him because at every opportunity, he reached out to them. He spoke for a movement “defined not by who we push away, but by how many we can call to our side.”

Many critics on the left saw Buttigieg as a sellout who tugged the Democratic Party to the right. In reality, he did the opposite. By sending signals of inclusion to moderates and disaffected Republicans, he made us comfortable with a candidate whose ideas were often well to our left. I didn’t agree with him that the filibuster should be abolished or that justices should be added to the Supreme Court. But because those ideas were coming from him, I was willing to listen to them.

He also spoke bluntly about his Christianity. Many secularists don’t appreciate this, but it’s important. Democratic politicians tend to treat religion as an implicit threat. Buttigieg doesn’t. He defends Christianity as a progressive faith, and he attacks Trumpism as a perversion of it. In his remarks on Sunday night, he pointed out that Trump “cloaks in religious language an administration whose actions harm the least among us: the sick and the poor, the outcast and the stranger.”

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/pete-buttigieg-2020-campaign-good-for-democrats.html