All in

Mayor Pete, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O'Rourke endorse Joe B at a rally in Dallas.

Let's hope he doesn't fall over on the way to the White House.

Bernie is already sounding angry and bitter about "the Democratic establishment".

News stories were calling them moderates before this, but now they seem to be echoing Bernie's contemptuous and rather 1960s characterization.

The Stop Sanders movement has gone public

Chris could be right that the point now is to deny Bernie a first ballot victory in order to enable a brokered convention to pick Joe B.

Amy K withdraws, will endorse Joe B tonight at rally

With her 'Klomentum' gone, Amy Klobuchar ends her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who pitched herself as a moderate with Midwestern appeal and the political "grit" to beat President Donald Trump, ended her presidential bid Monday, her campaign said in a statement.

Klobuchar will endorse former Vice President Joe Biden at at rally tonight in Dallas, her campaign said. 

Will Mayor Pete show up at that rally?

Will Tom Steyer?

Bloomberg should drop out now, too, and throw his money and his ads behind Joe B.

But I don't think he will.

Nor will Warren withdraw and throw her support to Bernie.

MSNBC: Mayor Pete and Joe B have spoken on the phone about consolidation of support

Pete Buttigieg mulls endorsement of Joe Biden after talking with Obama as Super Tuesday looms

Pete Buttigieg is reportedly considering endorsing Joe Biden for president Monday after talking to former President Obama about his bombshell decision to pull out of the race.

CNN reported that Mayor Pete is “mulling an endorsement” of the resurgent Biden just a day before Democrats go to the polls to pick about a third of the delegates at stake on Super Tuesday.

Obama, who holds enormous sway over Democratic voters, told Buttigieg that he should consider using his “considerable leverage” at a pivotal moment in the race. 

But he did not specifically encourage him to endorse Biden, according to reports.

Buttigieg, the first openly gay major party presidential candidate, did not mention any plans for an endorsement when he announced his withdrawal from the race Sunday night.

If Buttigieg were to back Biden it could radically reshape the race just as voters face a crucial stretch that will likely determine the nominee who will seek to unseat President Trump In November.

The headline at Fox is little different, aimed at helping Trump stir the pot for maximum destabilization of the Democrats.

Trump says end of Buttigieg campaign is the beginning of Dems' plan to stop Sanders

Bloomberg thinking about pulling out to give Joe B a better shot?

Mayor Pete is out

Buttigieg is out as Democrats march toward Super Tuesday and beyond

Mayor Pete

Really, really smart.

Pete on You Tube at Politics and Prose.

He is a lot smarter than I realized and a lot smarter than his competition.

Maybe.

Can't imagine Trump doing anything remotely like this.

Not so much for Pete as against Bernie

How the Democrats handled Iowa.

The panic of leading talkers at Democratic media at the prospect of Bernie being the nominee.

The shrill insistence that he can't win disguising the desire to keep him and his agenda (not really socialist but really progressive) out of the White House, or anyway from gaining more traction in the Democratic Party.

Some You Tube commentators flatly characterize this as class war within the Democratic Party, with neolibs of the Clintonista variety, old and new, old and young, denouncing Bernie and his supporters as an ideological cult, a cult of personality, a cult of purity, loony lefties far more committed to taking over a party they despise than actually driving out Trump.

His Democratic enemies pretend pushing Bernie aside is all about beating Trump.

But are they just using the necessity of beating Trump as a smokescreen for class war?

Well, yes, of course there's that.

But for some of them, anyway, both concerns could be real.

Did Mayor Pete lie to kill a poll that would have embarrassed him?

Did he demand a recount to deny Bernie a clear win?

MSNBC more and more open to such skepticism about Bernie.

Dale Peck's suppressed piece on Mayor Pete

My Mayor Pete Problem

His problem is that Pete is way too centrist (he refuses to reject capitalism, for instance) and not bursting into flames.

That seems to be about it.

Oh, and the tone is snarky and pissy and, uh, fagotty.

So (1) why did anybody want to force TNR to take this down from their website and (2) why did they do it?

Mary Pete and I are just not the same kind of gay. 

(For those of you wondering about “Mary Pete”: a couple of months ago I asked Facebook what the gay equivalent of Uncle Tom was, and this was the answer at which we collectively arrived.) 

. . . .

Mary Pete and I have a lot in common, but at a certain point we came to a fork in the road and I took the one less traveled and he took the one that was freshly paved and bordered by flowers and white picket fences and every house had a hybrid in the driveway and some solar panels on the ceiling, but discrete ones, nothing garish, nothing that would interfere with the traditional look of the neighborhood or the resale value of your home.

By which I mean: Mary Pete is a neoliberal and a Jeffersonian meritocrat, which is to say he’s just another unrepentant or at least unexamined beneficiary of white male privilege who believes (just as Jay Inslee believes he’s done more for women’s reproductive rights than Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar) that he can make life better for all those people who are not like him, not because he knows anything about their lives but because he’s smart and nice and well-meaning, and when smart nice well-meaning people run things everything works out for the best. 

That’s just, you know, logical. 

It’s like, science. 

Like Kirsten Gillibrand, he believes in “healthy capitalism,” which is a bit like saying you believe in “healthy cancer”: Yeah, you can (usually) treat it, but wouldn’t you rather be cured?

Most of what I dislike about Mary Pete was expressed in this Current Affairs article, which does a good job of using his own words (mostly from, ugh, Shortest Way Home, his memoir pretending to manifesto) to damn him. 

Shortest Way Home conjures a young Harvard student who thinks the word “edgy” is sufficient to describe both proto-Dumpster fascist Lyndon LaRouche and Noam Chomsky. 

His description of Harvard Square takes in those actors who belong to the school; the homeless people who live there are invisible to him, or, even worse, not worth mentioning. 

He seems perfectly content to dismiss left-wing student activists as “social justice warriors” despite the fact that this phrase is paradigmatic in right-wing discourse. 

He speaks fondly of his time at McKinsey, a company regularly described as one of the most evil corporations in the world. 

He joined the military long after 9/11 could sort-of-but-not-really be invoked to justify the U.S. propensity to go to other countries and kill lots of people. 

By 2007 it was no longer possible to pretend that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were anything other than failed, murderous exercises in empire-building and/or revenge, but despite the fact that these were the only places he was likely to serve he signed up anyway. 

And though he loves to talk about the notes he left his family in case he didn’t come back, by all accounts his chances of seeing combat were as low as they could be—but boy, he sure got a lot of cute pictures in uniform out of it!

Every move is simultaneously cynical and morally oblivious.

. . . .

Like Obama, Buttigieg seems always to be saying that the United States is the only place where someone like him could’ve succeeded, and that he wants everyone to enjoy the same peculiarly American successes that he’s had. 

But unlike Obama (whose naïveté was at least partly a pose), Buttigieg’s biography belies the idea that his success was either hard won or particularly unlikely. 

He’s lived the life of a comfortably middle-class white male, but he acts as if it’s his natural gifts (by which he means his intelligence and his ability to speak seven languages and play the piano, although they’re actually his whiteness and maleness and financial security) that have raised him above from the rabble.

. . . .

Free education? 

Why, that’s unfair to the working class! They’ll end up paying for the education of all those millions and millions of billionaires’ children! What are we, czarist Russia?

And so on and on.

Just as a lot of blacks thought O wasn't black enough, alienated enough, angry enough, or radical enough - pretty much that he should've been more like, and publicly more like, Rev. Jeremiah Wright - there is no doubt a lot of gays see Mayor Pete as way, way too tame.

So, that fact needs to be suppressed?

And the reaction of the lame-stream press was pretty weird in its own way.

NBC News:

New Republic magazine pulls down homophobic op-ed about Pete Buttigieg by an openly gay literary critic

Homophobic?

The New Republic has retracted a vulgar and homophobic op-ed about Pete Buttigieg by openly gay literary critic Dale Peck.

The magazine had published the piece, titled “My Mayor Pete Problem,” on its website on Friday.

In the piece, Peck described Buttigieg as “the gay equivalent of Uncle Tom,” and he referred to the presidential candidate as “Mary Pete” throughout the column.

Peck argued that because Buttigieg waited until his early 30s to come out as gay, he would be too preoccupied with sex and drugs to be an effective president. 

The piece also crudely speculated about intimate details of Buttigieg’s personal life.

Almost immediately, social media erupted in widespread condemnation.

. . . .

Hours later the op-ed was taken down and replaced by an editor’s note saying: “Dale Peck’s post ‘My Mayor Pete Problem’ has been removed from the site, in response to criticism of the piece’s inappropriate and invasive content. 

We regret its publication.”

The New Republic's editor, Chris Lehmann, added separately in a statement, "The New Republic recognizes that this post crossed a line, and while it was largely intended as satire, it was inappropriate and invasive."

Satire? Of what? How?

That is what the Bible says.

If you don't like it your problem is with the Bible and the people who adhere to it.

Face that.

Your problem is with Christianity and the Christian God.

Franklin Graham to Buttigieg: Homosexuality 'sin' to be 'repentant of' not 'flaunted'

While Franklin Graham once spoke on behalf of a unified and mighty evangelical voting bloc, today the situation is complicated by shifting attitudes toward homosexuality that are segmented by political party and age. 

A poll conducted this year by the Public Religion Research Institute found that majorities of every religious denomination support extending nondiscrimination protections to LGBTQ people. 

A majority — 54 percent — of white evangelical protestants support extending such protections.

This religious group’s attitudes “are highly structured by party affiliation,” the poll found. 

The poll found that 47 percent of white evangelical Republicans support LGBTQ protections, compared to 58 percent of white evangelical independents and 71 percent of white evangelical Democrats. 

If Graham speaks for any group, it is perhaps for the slender majority of Republican-identified white evangelical Christians who oppose LGBTQ rights.

. . . .

Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, was a vocal critic of former President Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties and wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Clinton’s Sins Aren’t Private” in 1998. 

But after President Donald Trump was accused of having an illicit affair with adult film actor Stormy Daniels, Graham told the Associated Press it’s “nobody’s business.”

Joe still ahead, and he's not even in it yet

It may be that Biden has the best chance of winning, but he does not seem likely to be able to do anything with the victory.

He is too wedded to all that obsolete "across the aisle" and "bipartisan" bullshit.

He will not pack the court.

He may not even try to roll back the GOP tax cuts.

Still, any Democrat is better than any Republican, and at least his victory would get the Duce out of the White House.

Biden Still the Leader with 27%

In a field of 24 announced and potential contenders, Joe Biden currently has the support of 27% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, which is similar to his 28% support in March and 29% in January, according to this morning’s Monmouth University Poll. 

Support for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is currently at 20%, which is down slightly from 25% in March, but still higher than his 16% support in January.

. . . .

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg currently has 8% support. He registered less than 1% in prior Monmouth polls. 

California Sen. Kamala Harris has 8% support, off just slightly from 10% in March and 11% in January. 

Rounding out the field of top contenders are Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 6% (from 8% in both March and January) and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke at 4% (6% in March and 7% in January).

Others who score at least 1% include New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (2%, from 5% in March and 4% in January), former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (2%, from 1% in priorpolls), Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (1%, from 3% in March and 2% in January), and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (1%, from 1% in March).  

The remaining 14 names asked about in the survey receive support from less than 1% of Democratic voters at this time, which is basically unchanged from their support levels in prior national Monmouth polls.

. . . .

Race and gender do not seem to be important factors for Democratic voters when considering who the party should choose to run against Trump. 

Fully 87% say the race of the nominee does not matter. 

Just 5% say it would be better for Democrats to nominate a person of color, which is offset by 6% who say it would actually be better for the party to nominate a white candidate. 

Similarly, 77% say the gender of the nominee does not matter. 

Just 7% say it would be better for Democrats to nominate a woman, while slightly more (12%) say it would actually be better for the party to nominate a man.

MSNBC reports Bernie defends right to vote of all felons, both in prison and out

Bernie made it very clear nobody should lose the right to vote, even for the duration of imprisonment, regardless of his crime.

Murderers, rapists, sexual predators, terrorists, no one should lose the right to vote, even temporarily.

Mayor Pete, asked about this, would not allow felons to vote while in prison.

Kamala Harris, asked, said she would not allow felons to vote while in prison and would not restore the right to vote to some felons, depending on their crime(s).

Asked about his position, people already committed to supporting Bernie fell right into line.

You can tell he's gaining in the polls because now the sharks are circling

Pete Buttigieg Fired South Bend’s Black Police Chief. It Still Stings.

Yeah, jeez, how the heck could he do that?

I mean, a white mayor?

C'mon, man.

Mayor Pete is Beto's smarter brother, says an old white guy named Mike Murphy on MSNBC

A black guy says Pete reminds him of Obama, someone from a marginalized community.

And he's the only Dem who does, he says.

Odd thing to say, really, with Kamala Harris in the race.

What's she, chopped liver?

Mayor Pete on growing up gay

A kind of war

In a speech before an audience of LGBT rights supporters on Sunday, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, did not describe being gay as something he always believed was acceptable. 

Nor did he dismiss lingering questions about his viability as a presidential candidate in a country in which three in 10 adults still say they have some reservations or would be very uncomfortable with a gay candidate, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in February.

Instead, he described wrestling with his sexual orientation as “a kind of war” — one he said he was only able to win when he came home from serving in Afghanistan. 

As a youngster in high school and college, he said, the situation was very different.

“If you could have offered me a pill that could make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you could give me a swig of water,” Buttigieg said at the LGBTQ Victory Fund’s annual brunch. 

“It’s a hard thing to think about now. If you had shown me exactly what it was that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.”

. . . .

On the trail, Buttigieg has emphasized how he and his husband are similar, not different, from heterosexual couples across the country, hoping to defuse an issue that evangelicals and other opponents of same-sex marriage could raise if he becomes the nominee. 

Taking direct swipes at Vice President Mike Pence, he said his marriage last year to schoolteacher Chasten Buttigieg had made him a better man, “and yes, Mr. Vice President, it has moved me closer to God.

“That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: That if you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is not with me,” Buttigieg said. 

“Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

I wonder if Pence would reply like a traditional Catholic that no one is responsible for his sexual orientation, but only for his actual sexual behavior.

That is a view developed and expounded by a clergy that for centuries has proclaimed clerical celibacy and apparently has mostly lied about it.

Anyway, Pete's remarks have not pleased all gays.

Not those for whom wild promiscuity and the most debauched raunch is essential to their understanding of what it is to be gay.

But others are on his side.

A surprise, and maybe not even true

Well within the margin of error.

With all the people in the second rank so close this ordering is essentially meaningless.

As is the ordering of Biden and Sanders.

Pete Buttigieg: 2020 Democratic candidate surges to third place in new poll

The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, won the backing of 11% of likely Iowa Democratic caucus voters in an Emerson poll released on Sunday.

Joe Biden had 25% support, with Bernie Sanders in second place with 24%. But the performance of Buttigieg, who has impressed in a series of TV appearances, is likely to serve as a warning to his better-known rivals.

. . . .

Harris, a senator from California, had 10% support in the Emerson poll – which had a margin error of +/- 6.2% – while Warren of Massachusetts was in fourth place with 9%.

Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from Texas who has captured the attention of the public and the media with a combination of relentless charm and non-committal policy positions, was backed by 5% of likely voters.

Buttigieg is too inexperienced to be president.

But it matters more that he's too short to be a winning candidate.

Would Pence make a better president than Trump? The look on Pete Buttigieg’s face quickly gave away his answer

Buttigieg.

An openly gay mayor who seems as smart and articulate and comfortable in front of a camera or a crowd as O, but not going to be a rock star.

You can hear Trump now dissing him as "Little Butt Gay".

Or even "Little Gay butt".