The Case for “Mayor Pete”

[For a brief apology for my doubting the strategy and savvy of the House Democratic leadership, click here.]

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is an anomaly. He’s a modest, small-town mayor running against United States senators, a former Vice-President, a billionaire and a less affluent executive. He’s openly gay and happily married to a man.

Yet somehow he seems to be every Democrat’s favorite second choice. He’s mine, too. If the Dems had ranked-preference primaries—which everyone seems to think would be better than what they do have—Mayor Pete would win the Democratic nomination hands down. (The caucuses in Iowa apply a variation of ranked preferences, which may be why Pete now seems to be leading there.)

Why is this so? What’s Pete got? What makes him potentially the best Dem to beat Trump? Let’s analyze.

The first thing to note is something I think everyone sees, but hardly anyone comments on. Pete is preternaturally calm. He exudes inner strength. His flawless, clear and simple English never fails him. I’ve never seen him raise his voice publicly, even when attacked in debates.

This unusually attractive aspect of Pete’s personality makes him a “natural” politician. Just like Barack Obama, he never loses his cool. He comes across as invariably thoughtful, reasonable and decent. In a nation whose media pander to Donald Trump and snarlers like Doug Collins and Jim Jordan, many Americans crave leaders with even tempers as balm for their tortured souls. Pete is not just the antithesis of Trump, but perhaps an antidote.

The second thing about Pete that few seem to have noticed is his extraordinary education. Alone among the leading Democratic candidates, he was a Rhodes Scholar. After graduating from Harvard, he went to Oxford University (UK) to study philosophy, politics and economics.

But here’s the thing. Pete didn’t use his fellowship just to enjoy England and polish off his undergraduate majors in history and literature. He worked hard to become a “quant.”

Here’s how he described his higher education in quantitative economics:

“One calculus equation at a time, I came to understand in thorough mathematical detail why supply and demand cannot be expected to deliver fair prices or efficient outcomes in many situations. Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and buyer have different levels of information about the product.”

At the end of the day, Pete earned a “first” at Oxford, the highest grade in the English system. But he didn’t stop there. He spent an additional 2.5 years at McKinsey & Company, the American consulting behemoth famous for using quantitative analysis to save promising but faltering businesses.

At the moment, Pete’s rivals are using his time at McKinsey to dig for dirt, hoping to prove he consulted for firms that broke the law or abused the public trust. But that’s a fishing expedition at best. The primary significance of Pete’s 2.5 years at McKinsey is that he learned thoroughly what makes business tick, what business people value and demand, and what they do right, as well as wrong. He undoubtedly left McKinsey of his own volition: no one lasts that long at McKinsey without meeting its exacting standards.

So what does all this mean? Private businesses in America are busy supplanting, if not usurping, many of the functions once performed by government. (See this essay for the practical side and this one for the legal side of this phenomenon.) In some ways this transition is inevitable, even a mark of progress, like the last millennium’s transitions from Church to monarchy to democracy.

In order to control or manage this transition successfully, any president must understand business, not just oppose it. Through her detailed academic studies of bankruptcy, her work creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and her work in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren understands better than any living pol how business can go and do wrong. She knows in depth and in detail how bankers can cheat consumers, deprive workers of good jobs, garner riches unfairly, and risk our entire economy to sate their own greed. That’s why, still today, Warren is my favorite candidate.

But that’s only one side of the coin. Pete Buttigieg, it seems, understands (better than anyone with experience in political office) the other side of business. He knows how it works, what makes it run, how it can do good, and how to turn its failures toward success.

From Facebook and Twitter, through Tesla, Ford and Chevy, to the fossil-fuel giants and the solar-array and windmill makers who are trying to replace them, modern business is complex and intricate. You don’t just command it like King Canute trying to command the tides. You have to understand it and regulate and adjust it carefully for the general welfare. And the best way to do that is to convince the masters of business, who by and large are probably smarter than the average pol.

That’s why I think it essential that both Warren and Buttigieg be in the White House. I’d like Warren to hold the top job, if only because it’s long past time that a woman did. Yet I’d be almost as happy if Mayor Pete took the top job, because I believe they’re both smart and decent enough to work well together.

Pete’s final three advantages are practical points that oughtn’t to matter but inevitably will. First, he’s the youngest candidate running. With his brains, his executive experience as mayor, and his superb education, his youth is an advantage: it augurs stamina, vitality and strategic flexibility.

The gravest problems the next president will face are all problems of the future, not the past. Among them, global warming (which threatens to accelerate soon) and the sewer of disinformation and fake news on the Internet are the most urgent. Experience in facing past crises is not much help in facing these unique, rapidly worsening existential threats.

Second, as an openly gay man, Pete may have an unknown but powerful source of private funding. Gay couples, many (if not most) with two jobs and no children, may prove to be an uncorrupted and incorruptible source of campaign funds. Whether this fount of money will exceed that of women (many of whom have husbands and children) backing Warren is an open question. I hope that both will prove equal to the avalanche of corrupted corporate money cravenly backing Trump.

Finally, Pete is not only young but fit and trained in combat for country. It wouldn’t hurt at all for us once again to have a commander in chief who knows what it’s like to spend days in a “kill or be killed” environment before sending others to face it. And it also wouldn’t hurt for the casual bully Trump, who used his size to “stalk” Hillary on the debate stage, to understand in his gut that he faces a better man in every way.

At the end of the day, what matters most is who can beat Trump. I still hope that Warren will prove more practical, drop her politically suicidal push for forced Medicare expansion, and prove wily and flexible enough in debate (whether on the same stage or through Tweets) to defeat the monster now in the White House.

But if she falters, I’m ready to give Mayor Pete my full support, just as are my fiancée and an old friend who’s now a leader in planning for higher education. Both recently told me, to my surprise, that if they had to vote now, Mayor Pete would be their choice. As the days roll into weeks, “now” is getting closer and closer. Sometimes choices made on intuition while under pressure are the best ones.

An Apology for Doubting our House Leaders

Last week, I criticized Speaker Pelosi and the House Dems for appearing to squander our second-to-last chance to get rid of Trump, by making the current impeachment proceedings a truncated affair. Now I’m afraid I owe them all an apology. I failed to factor in the third branch’s calendar.

Officially, the Supreme Court’s current Term ends on October 5, 2020, the first Monday in October. But practically the Court nearly always decides its most important cases by the previous June, in this case June 2020. Either way, our Supreme Court will decide on the release of Trump’s tax returns and his Entire-Executive-Branch stonewalling well before next November’s election.

Trump and his lawyers have made unprecedented, extreme and sweeping claims of privileged secrecy for his tax returns and his actions and discussions as president. No one who has ever attended law school long enough to take constitutional law could imagine that our Supreme Court would uphold those claims. In particular, there is little chance that the Court will protect his tax returns against criminal investigations of others, or that his either his tax returns or discussions with his Executive minions will be immune from investigation in aid of impeachment.

Trump himself can stonewall all he wants. But his tax returns are in the hands of independent corporations, whose managers have promised to do what the courts command. Similarly, his Executive minions are mostly waiting for instructions from the highest court. So it seems highly likely, if not inevitable, that the tax returns and the testimony and documents of Bolton, Giuliani, Mulvaney, Pence and Pompeo, among others, will have been delivered under penalty of perjury before, if not long before, next year’s general election.

Most likely all this will happen by July, when the Democratic primaries will have ended and the party will be united behind a single leader. In the worst case, it will happen by early October, causing an “October surprise” to make Comey’s “inappropriate” remarks about Hillary’s e-mails look like mere trivia.

This schedule will give the Dems three solid advantages. First, it will allow them to complete the vital task of selecting a presidential candidate without the distraction of an ongoing impeachment or trial. Second, the release of the real dirt on Trump will occur after both House and Senate Republicans have irrevocably branded themselves as Trump toadies in the impeachment proceedings and his trial, respectively. Finally, the new revelations will throw the whole general election up in the air—in an atmosphere tainted by facts that Trump has tried strenuously to conceal, thus far successfully—just as the vast majority of voters is starting to focus for the first time.

The timing of these revelations will heavily favor the Democrats. Voters will want to know, for example, why dozens of House Republicans yesterday delayed casting their votes for or against impeachment until long after the official “clock” had run out. What had the GOP leadership, Trump or others offered them, and how had they been threatened, in order to get 100% of them ultimately to vote against impeachment, and a lone GOP dissenter even to change his/her vote? And why did the Senate insist on a show trial without evidence or witnesses?

So my apologies to Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler and the others for doubting them. Br’er Rabbit could not have done a better job of suckering the boss men into the briar patch. It will be fun to watch not just the president, but his lackeys and sycophants in Congress, as they succumb, one by one, to their own greed, impatience, grasping for power, and short-term thinking, on global warming, democracy, the rule of law, the gravity of impeachment, and just about everything else.

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