Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg Are Not to Be Trusted
Pete Buttigieg shakes hands with Joe Biden.
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg greets former Vice President Joe
Biden after a Democratic debate in Ohio last year. (John Minchillo / AP)
In a recent New Yorker profile of Pete Buttigieg, one sentence stands out:
"Watch Buttigieg long enough and you notice that he uses abstraction as an
escape hatch." Evasive platitudes are also routine for Joe Biden, the other
major Democratic presidential candidate running in what mainstream
journalists call "the center lane."
Jim Hightower has observed that "there's nothing in the middle of the road
except yellow lines and dead armadillos." Or, we might say, party lines and
deadening politics.
Like other so-called "moderate" politicians, Buttigieg and Biden dodge key
questions by plunging into foggy rhetoric. They're incapable of giving a
coherent and truthful account of power in the United States because they're
beholden to corporate-aligned donors. Those donors want to hear doubletalk
that protects their interests, not clear talk that could threaten them.
"Forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg's
presidential campaign, according to an analysis of federal election filings,
making the South Bend, Indiana mayor a favorite among America's richest
people," Forbes reported last month.
The magazine added: "More than one-third of Buttigieg's wealthy benefactors
got rich in finance and investments. That group includes seven who built
their fortunes from hedge funds, including Bill Ackman, Philippe Laffont and
Seth Klarman."
Mega-money manipulators are bullish on Buttigieg. "The financial sector,
blamed by progressives for spawning the 2008 economic collapse, is lining up
behind Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign," the Associated Press
explained in late December. He "has collected more campaign cash from donors
and political action committees tied to the financial, insurance and real
estate sector than any other White House hopeful, according to data compiled
by the Center for Responsive Politics."
AP added: "One top Wall Street law firm could pose particular challenges for
Buttigieg with progressives. He's the top recipient of cash this cycle from
Sullivan & Cromwell, which has worked on some of the biggest corporate
mergers in recent history, including Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods,
AT&T's purchase of Time Warner and Bayer's merger with Monsanto. The firm
also represented some of the largest financial institutions that received
federal bailout money."
Buttigieg is a very new darling of corporate America compared to his main
centrist rival. Biden - who has a decades-long record of scarcely legal
corruption while serving corporate interests in Washington - is also heavily
reliant on wealthy donors and foggy abstractions.
But the basic contradiction - between serving enemies of working people and
claiming to be a champion of working people - is an increasingly difficult
circle to square. And a barrier to credibility with many voters.
"The mainstream Democratic storyline of victims without victimizers lacks
both plausibility and passion," said the report "Autopsy: The Democratic
Party in Crisis," released in October 2017. "The idea that the Democrats can
somehow convince Wall Street to work on behalf of Main Street through mild
chiding, rather than acting as Main Street's champion against the wealthy,
no longer resonates."
That report (written by a task force I was part of) anticipated that a
continuing upsurge in populism "will be filled by some political force or
other - either the cruel and demagogic forces of the far right and its
billionaire backers, or a racially diverse and morally robust progressive
vision that offers people a clear alternative to the ideological rot of
Trumpism."
Most of the Democrats running for president don't want to acknowledge the
actual power wielded by economic elites. Biden is the most experienced at
blowing smoke to obscure those elite forces, as if no fundamental conflicts
of interest exist between billionaires and the huge numbers of people badly
harmed by extreme income inequality.
That was a subtext when Biden declared in May 2018: "I love Bernie, but I'm
not Bernie Sanders. I don't think 500 billionaires are the reason why we're
in trouble. . The folks at the top aren't bad guys." (At last count, 44
billionaires and their spouses have donated to Biden's campaign.)
Abstractions and evasions of the sort practiced daily by Buttigieg and Biden
amount to papering over class conflicts. In sharp contrast, Elizabeth Warren
and even more so Sanders (whom I actively support) are willing to name the
names of corporations and billionaires growing even wealthier in ways that
undermine the lives of most Americans.
It's understandable that corporate-backed candidates don't want to be
cornered by questions that touch on realities of political and economic
power. They'd much rather take evasive action than be candid. It's not
enticing to name victimizers when they're funding your campaign.
Norman Solomon
Columnist
Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group
RootsAction.org...
