I have never voted for a candidate with whom I agreed 100% on specific policies.
Instead, I think I do what most people do; we vote for candidates who share our values, candidates we feel we can trust, who possess personal characteristics we deem admirable. If the Trump presidency has taught us anything, it is the supreme importance of those characteristics–sound judgment, integrity, intellect, diligence, respect for the institutions of government and the rule of law, and a genuine desire to work for the common good. A little humility helps a lot.
Trump possesses none of those qualities– I doubt he is even able to recognize them.
Character does count, and it counts far more than this or that specific policy prescription. (Which is why Democrats’ predictable “circular firing squads” and insistence on total purity drives me nuts.)
There are a lot of talented people running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I like several of them, dislike others, and worry that still others would not be as competitive as necessary. That said, I will obviously vote for anyone who emerges as the party’s choice. (Hell, I’d probably vote for Beelzebub if he was running against Trump and his cabal.)
But my top choice so far is Mayor Pete, for a number of reasons.
As I have previously written, I am convinced that it is time for younger leadership. Mayor Pete’s performance thus far–and his rise from obscurity to third place in national polls in a matter of months–bodes well for a general election. His obvious intellect, extensive knowledge and thoughtful demeanor are all reassuring and would be a welcome change from the embarrassing ignorance bloviating daily from Trump’s White House.
Above all, I appreciate his authenticity; everything I’ve seen or read, and everyone from South Bend I’ve talked with, says this guy is the “real deal.”
I think a recent article by Ezra Klein at Vox best captures why Pete’s message so attracts me.
Some excerpts:
There was a word missing from the speech Pete Buttigieg gave in South Bend, Indiana, announcing his presidential campaign. It’s a word you heard twice in Bernie Sanders’s and Beto O’Rourke’s announcement speeches, nine times in Cory Booker’s, 21 times in Kirsten Gillibrand’s, 23 times in Kamala Harris’s, and 25 times in Elizabeth Warren’s.
That word? “Fight.”
Instead, Buttigieg returned to a word those speeches shied away from, a word whose relative absence from the Democratic primary is all the stranger given its potency in past Democratic campaigns.
That word? “Hope,” which Buttigieg said eight times, Gillibrand said three times, O’Rourke uttered once, and Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Booker avoided entirely.
Klein cites to 70 years of research confirming that fear motivates conservatives and hope motivates liberals.
At the core of this worldview divide is hope, in its most basic, literal form. Are you hopeful about new things, new people, new places? Does change excite you? Does difference? If it does, you are more likely to be liberal. If you look at the new, the different, and feel a spike of fear, you’re more likely to be a conservative….
Obama and Trump, in their respective campaigns, took this subtext of American politics and made it into bumper stickers. A black man with a strange name won the presidency tying together the words “change” and “hope.” He was succeeded by a white man who won the presidency promising to turn back the clock, who built a campaign around the word “again.”…
A lot of liberals, temperamentally and psychologically, don’t want a fight. They don’t want politics to be an endless war; they believe that mutual understanding is possible, that the country will respond to someone willing to believe and call forth the best of it. That’s not just their view of politics; it’s their view of life. It’s the view that Obama spoke to in the speech that made him a star:
Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
Klein compared aspects of Buttigieg’s announcement speech to Obama’s messaging, and then quoted Pete saying :“It’s time to walk away from the politics of the past and toward something totally different.”
I don’t know about other people, but I am so ready for something totally different. I am so ready to hope again.
There’s an old political maxim to the effect that Republicans fall in line and Democrats fall in love. I think I’m in love.
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