Buttigieg Reluctantly Embraces his Barrier-Breaking Candidacy

Being the first in breaking barriers in any category can be difficult and leave one fighting stereotypes that others will force upon you even though you do not see them as defining you. Being one of the few, if not the first, openly gay attorney in the area where I live fifteen plus years ago was difficult and not something I really chose - I was forced from a firm for being gay as part of a law firm merger and then found myself more or less radioactive because I was gay when I tried to find a position with a new corporate law firm.  Ultimately, I had to launch my own firm and bide my time until minds changed in the region.  My rescuers, if you will, were largely members of the Hindu community who looked to my legal knowledge and my ability to take care of their legal needs rather define me by my sexual orientation (I was perhaps aided by the fact that the same elements in the region who hate gays also were and still are no fiends to Hindus).  

I say all of this because I get where Pete Buttigieg is coming from when he downplays that he is gay - much to the outrage of radical gays - and wants voters instead to focus on his intelligence and reasoned, analytical approach to issues.  Sadly, he faces an uphill task with black voters who, despite protestations to the contrary in survey after survey tend to be prove to be more homophobic than whites (I have black gay friends who continue to live largely in the closet for constant fear or rejection by their homophobic churches and families).  A piece in Politico looks at Buttigieg's balancing act and reluctance at being a barrier breaker.  Here are excerpts:  

[T]he moment when the candidate and his husband knew that Pete had made history was on Tuesday. They were together backstage at an early evening event in Laconia, N.H. Buttigieg was waiting to go on stage when the Iowa Democratic Party released the bulk of the caucus results, which now show Buttigieg with a one-delegate lead over Bernie Sanders.

“I remember him saying,” Buttigieg told me, “just to stop and think about what this would mean to so many kids that are peeking out of the closet door.”

This was not a story that Buttigieg offered up, but one I had to coax out of him. He likes to say that he’s “not running to be the gay president of the United States,” but rather “to be a president for everybody.” Several packed days on the campaign trail in New Hampshire have featured only a few moments when the history-making nature of his Iowa victory has shone through, most notably when he choked up during a town hall on CNN discussing how his candidacy might affect “a kid somewhere in a community wondering if he belongs or she belongs.”

But for the most part, the historical impact of a gay man winning Iowa has been something that has been thrust upon Buttigieg — by the media, by proud gay activists, by Chasten in that moment backstage — rather than something that he has boasted about.

In recent years there have been vastly different approaches to identity politics in the Democratic Party. Some candidates, like Barack Obama in 2008, have played down their race or gender or sexual orientation, knowing the media and voters who cared about it would play it up. Others have run definitionally as rooted in a specific minority community. The pattern has been that the first to have a realistic shot at breaking a barrier is more circumspect.

Buttigieg is in the complicated space of being a barrier breaker: He’s willing to celebrate and ruminate on the history when pressed, but being defined as a gay candidate is not part of his strategy to win.

When I first asked him if he’d thought much about it, he pivoted to familiar talking points about the race. “No, not really,” he said. “You know, we're very focused on the road ahead now and we’re in New Hampshire, it's a state that thinks for itself and doesn't want to be told what to do by Iowa or anyone else. So really we’ve just been keeping our heads down.”

Almost nobody predicted that Buttigieg would win Iowa. He was a distant third in polling averages and the conventional wisdom held that other campaigns, like Elizabeth Warren’s, had superior organizations. In hindsight perhaps it’s on the nose that the McKinsey guy would be the one to master caucus math. His campaign has frequently been compared to Obama’s and he relied on some of the same advisers who steered Obama’s caucus win with a relentless focus on unity and shared values, a gauzy concept that is often mocked by Buttigieg’s online detractors.

“Honestly,” he said, “I think it was mainly the vision that we're putting forward: this idea that we need to turn the page, that the answers are gonna come from outside Washington, that we needed to reach out to everybody who will have to be part of that majority that will defeat Donald Trump, in rural areas, suburban areas, urban areas, and calling everybody into that vision.
 [E]ven if he wins here, Buttigieg is unlikely to be rewarded with the quick consolidation of his party around him in the same way that Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 — two campaigns that knocked out their opponents by winning Iowa and New Hampshire — did. Those candidates had little to prove among non-white constituencies, but Buttigieg still faces deep skepticism.
 If he makes the turn into South Carolina with a pair of victories, or strong showings, he will be facing an unprecedented situation in which the early — overwhelmingly white — states picked the Democratic candidate who is the least popular among black voters, the most important demographic in the primaries.

Joe Biden, who is relying on limping into South Carolina with support from black voters intact, has been pillorying Buttigieg over his record on race. Buttigieg said he had a simple message to overcome the doubts, one that will be buoyed by the results in Iowa and (perhaps) New Hampshire by then: a relentless focus on electability.

“When I'm thinking about black voters in South Carolina,” he said, “I think a lot of that too is about wanting to know that we're putting together a campaign that can win. Nobody's feeling the pain of living under this president more than Americans of color. So many voters I talk to make clear that their top priority is defeating Donald Trump, and I think we have to demonstrate that.

Buttigieg’s rise is absurdly improbable. He has proven a lot of skeptics wrong and his theory of completely changing the psychology of voters in South Carolina by winning Iowa and New Hampshire can’t be dismissed. “We're now in the process of show versus tell,” he said.

At an event late in the day Saturday in Manchester, I ran into Andy Frank, one of Buttigieg’s fellow students at Harvard who was a year behind him (class of 2005). Frank had been in Iowa as an organizer for his old friend and saw the Buttigieg machine spring into action on caucus day and master the convoluted process.

“He always does his homework, Frank said. “He breaks down a problem and solves it.”