Thursday, November 21, 2019

Fear, Loathing and Mayonnaise in the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination Contest


Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a lengthy thread posted during November 21st, 2019 on my Mastodon account - there may be a few reference links I didn't feature here, that appear at the bottom of that thread if you're interested in that sort of thing.





Over the past few months, I've extensively covered the US corporate "liberal" media's clear attempts to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party nomination process in excruciating detail.

From NY Times smears designed to make the Sanders campaign look like a sexual harassment factory, to endless hours of coverage defending Palooka Joe Biden's racist babbling and on through the nonexistent coverage of a bigoted Liz Warren surrogate, a clear pattern of anti-Bernie bias has emerged. While this bias often expresses itself it many different and subtle forms, I think at this point it's safe to say that the pattern has been clearly demonstrated and the American corporate media is openly (and increasingly frantically) trying to influence the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest against Sanders - and in favor of candidates who are perceived by the liberal establishment as capable of beating Sanders. 

Clearly the machine is no longer sure that Joe Biden is such a candidate either.

This brings us to the “liberal” corporate media coverage surrounding an unlikely rise in the “First in the Nation” state polls of neoliberal candidate-like substance Pete Buttigieg; who will hereafter referred to in this space as Dollar Store Macron, or Mayo Pete - as befits his soulless, plastic & relentlessly focus-tested politics. To note that Mayo Pete has become the mainstream liberal establishment's latest "Great White Hope" is both not a metaphor and indicative of their open desperation.

If at this point you are still blissfully unaware of who Dollar Store Macron is, or precisely why I would describe his politics as "plastic and soulless" I'd encourage you to take a moment to stop and read this excellent profile of Mayo Pete by Nathan J Robinson over at Current Affairs - a piece recommended by  Noam Chomsky himself:

All About Pete



To learn more about the super villain factory Mayo Pete used to work for, a corporation called McKinsey & Company; check out this article by an anonymous former employee of the company, also published at Current Affairs: 

McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners



Finally, if you're still on the fence about whether or not Dollar Store Macron is an objectively terrible candidate for both the nomination and the office of POTUS, please read this extremely detailed and well sourced Twitter thread by user @niktaylorde for more information:

Why You Shouldn't Vote For Pete Buttigieg - A Thread



In other words, Pete Buttigieg is not only a terrible candidate for the labor class, but also a reasonably horrible human being - not that you'll really hear much about any of this in the media of course; the fact that he's young, gay and currently skullf*cking a "catchy" Panic At the Disco track to generate false enthusiasm at his campaign events, is pretty much as far as the corporate media's analysis is going to go when it comes to Mayo Pete.

This is unfortunate for the American voter because the Dollar Store Macron campaign has a serious problem that not only makes his campaign nonviable in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest, but could imperil his general election chances even if he somehow managed to win - Mayo Pete is currently polling below "raisins in potato salad" with African American voters; depending on which poll you examine, we're talking about a number between zero and one percent, literally.

Why? Well if you believe the insinuations of obtuse Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Lis Smith, it's because African American voters are homophobic; a narrative that even Dollar Store Macron himself has since (wisely) rejected:

Sharpton: 'We don't have an epidemic of homophobia' in the black community

  

Of course, that didn't stop the Buttigieg campaign from quietly leaking a focus group study that explicitly said Pete's sexuality is why black voters don't like him, back in October:

Buttigieg focus groups found being gay ‘a barrier’ for some black South Carolina voters



For a more accurate (and less "objectively racist") picture however, let's turn to The Intercept's Ryan Grim to study an example of the staggeringly tone-deaf, low-key racist way Mayor Pete has approached winning over African American voters in the run up to the 2020 Democratic Party primary season: 

The Problem with Pete Buttigieg's "Douglass Plan" for Black America



Whoa boy, so let's get unpack this for a moment here:

Mayo Pete, a man who is already haunted by anger over a court battle brought on by the South Bend, Indiana mayor's firing of a black police chief for recording his racist co-workers, and accusations of racist policies in his "model college town" of South Bend, is reaching out to black voters with a policy program named after cherished African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass - and amazingly enough, that's only strike one here.

Efforts to promote the Douglass Plan revolved around a published list of 400 prominent South Carolinians who were behind the plan, but this too demonstrated a willful attempt to mislead and deceive by the Buttigieg campaign. The list was represented as consisting of prominent African Americans, and yet almost half of the names on it were from white voters. The list also featured a cover letter that by use of the phrase “there is one presidential candidate who has proven to have intentional policies designed to make a difference in the Black experience, and that’s Pete Buttigieg” strongly implied the signers had endorsed Dollar Store Macron for the Democratic Party nomination; that wasn't true either - in fact, some of the "signers" worked for the Sanders campaign and others didn't even mean to endorse the Douglass Plan itself, let alone Mayo Pete.

When asked about this discrepancy directly the Buttigieg campaign offered up the wholly unserious answer that the so-called signers were sent an email encouraging them to "opt out" of endorsing the plan; you probably don't need me to tell you that this is absolutely *not* how endorsements work in American politics but as a side note, I'd like to point out that only a soulless cockroach McKinsey consultant would try to use the Columbia House Records scam to swindle endorsements from black leaders.

The final cherry on top of it all, and indeed the only part of this whole sad saga that received any significant amount of attention in the mainstream media at all, was that the Buttigieg campaign included a photo of a black woman who hadn't endorsed anything or anyone, had no connection to the campaign and had no idea why she'd been used in Dollar Store Macron's promotional material - because she's from Kenya. 


Pete Buttigieg says he was unaware that stock photo on his website depicted a Kenyan woman



And therein lies the crux of my argument and the definitive proof that the corporate "liberal" media is openly campaigning for anyone but Bernie in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest.

Imagine just for a moment the absolute righteous fury that would have consumed "liberal" mainstream pundits and influencers if it was Bernie Sanders who'd lied about African American endorsements to prop up his credentials with black voters? Imagine if it had been Bernie who'd responded with "Ma'am, I’m not asking for your vote" when confronted by a distraught African American voter about a police shooting of a young black man in the city he served as mayor? What if Bernie had started his political career by forcing out a black police chief on behalf of clearly racist cops inside the South Bend power structure?

Keep in mind that we're talking about the same guy here, Dollar Store Macron is responsible for all of these actions.

Frankly, you really don't even have to imagine - contrast the utter silence on Mayo Pete's (at best) obtuse honky nonsense, with the mainstream media dogpile Sanders was subjected to when he advised a young African American man to focus on not getting shot first, when pulled over by the police; after a question I won't describe as "unfair" but tragically, I cannot say there was a possible "good answer" for.

All throughout the 2016 primary process we were told by "Very Serious People TM" in the liberal media that African Americans, in particular black women, were the most important demographic in the electorate, and that a Democrat victory would not be possible in either 2016 or 2020 without the support of non-white voters. Specifically this narrative was used to hammer Bernie's campaign as supposedly "too white, and out of touch" or perhaps even outright racist - the last of which is absurd.

Now, today we find that the polling numbers show Sanders has*the* most diverse group of supporters, while pumped-up chosen "Bernie Slayers" like Elizabeth Warren and now Dollar Store Macron are driven by the same "too white, out of touch" voting demographic that supposedly rendered Bernie unelectable - and the response from the mainstream "liberal" media has been literally some combination of excuse-making apologia to go with complete and utter silence.

Of course none of that is to say that Dollar Store Macron hasn't been in the news; corporate "liberal" media in a America are falling all over themselves to type up a 255 respondent poll with dodgy methodology and an admitted 6.1% margin of error that shows Mayo Pete up an astounding +15% and leading New Hampshire - this of course pairs nicely with an equally dodgy recent poll from Iowa that once again showed Buttigieg leading, this time up by a mere (and implausible) +14%. Even that coverage demonstrates a considerable amount of bias; after all the media is hardly mentioning that Pete is dropping a massive amount of money to try to win one of these two (mostly white) "First in the Nation" primaries, or that if he doesn't win at least one of them the puffed up narrative (again aided by this same "liberal" media) surrounding his presidential aspirations is going to look like a pathetic punchline - instead, the corporate media would rather continue to attack Bernie Sanders.

Like all truly good lies however, there was a tiny bit of truth in the mainstream media's smearing of the Sanders campaign - it is in fact awfully hard to win a national election as a Democrat with only white voters, and doubly hard to win a Democratic Party nomination contest by that same measure; the trick is that this isn't a problem for Bernie (who appeals to young people and women especially across all demographics) it's a problem for candidates like Mayo Pete and Pow Wow Chow Liz Warren.

Furthermore, if one presupposes that most of the people reading this are in fact not racists and would prefer to live in a word where the fight against racism is undertaken seriously, the fact that the liberal media cynically used cries of racism to burn down the Sanders campaign, but has hardly chirped a note about the kind of cracker nonsense Mayo Pete's campaign is engaging in, represents a troubling continuation of longstanding enabling of structural racism by affluent liberals and Democrats.

The truth here is that no matter how hard the so-called "liberal" mainstream media in America tries to shove Mayo Pete into the spotlight and generate a plausible theory by which he can become president, Dollar Store Macron isn't going to win the 2020 Dem Party nomination contest - and it's not because he's gay, or because black people aren't thankful enough for his casual displays of obtuse racism; it's because he f*cking sucks as acandidate and bougie "liberal" pundits are getting desperate.



- Nina Illingworth


Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

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