DES MOINES, Iowa — Pete Buttigieg’s Democratic presidential rivals took turns trying to portray him as a small-town mayor as the 37-year-old surges in Iowa.
At the Iowa Democratic Party’s fall fundraiser on Friday night, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet compared the size of the budget he managed as Denver Public Schools superintendent to the budget Buttigieg oversaw as mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
“I want to talk to you not as a senator, but as the only superintendent of schools who has ever run for president of the United States,” Bennet said. “I worked for the kids of the Denver Public Schools before I went to the Senate. It’s a school district that’s got about a billion-dollar budget. For reference, that’s about three times the size of a certain municipality in the state of Indiana. I’m just saying.”
When speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the state party’s Liberty and Justice Celebration, Bennet insisted he wasn’t implying Buttigieg was ill-prepared to be president.
“But I do think there’s a huge difference between running a city where it takes 8,000 votes to get elected mayor and running the Denver public schools or getting elected twice in a statewide election,” he said.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock piled on when asked by reporters about Buttigieg’s rise in the first-in-the-nation state, pulling ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden in a New York Times/Siena College Iowa poll released Friday. He trails only Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“He got 9,000 votes in a college town that last voted for a Republican for mayor in 1964. So from the perspective of being able to win back those places that we lost, I don’t know that he has it and, by the same token, from the perspective of what it will take to pick up the pieces afterwards,” Bullock said.
Buttigieg has irked his some of his competitors by taking shots at them after calling on the historically crowded field to stop deploying Republican talking points against each other. Before the October debate, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke pushed back at Buttigieg for criticizing their gun policy positions and using the term “gun confiscation.”
“Calling buyback programs ‘confiscation’ is doing the NRA’s work for them, @PeteButtigieg — and they don’t need our help,” Booker tweeted.
Warren, another candidate enjoying momentum in the Democratic race for the White House, didn’t escape scrutiny from her rivals at the Friday night’s gathering.
While many hit Warren for her proposal to pay for “Medicare for all,” Kamala Harris, her senatorial colleague from California, took a veiled swipe at her corporate legal work.
“I have spent my career as a prosecutor. I’ve only had one client in my entire life, and that has been the people. Unlike other people, unlike others, I have never represented a corporation. I have never represented a special interest,” she said.
Harris told reporters on Saturday her statement was more about her own legal career as a former San Francisco district attorney and two-term California attorney general.
“I mean there are, I think, probably at least half-a-dozen people in the race who have worked for corporations or in the private sector,” she said at Des Moines NAACP’s Economic Freedom Presidential Town Hall.
