During the years that their careers overlapped as ambitious and rising young politicians, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg appeared to have a collegial and friendly relationship.
Imagine the shock when Buttigieg’s campaign book revealed this wasn’t the case. Pence made “numerous appearances” in the memoir, the Daily Beast reported, “where he is depicted as a holy warrior, whose obsession with social conservatism embarrassed the state.”
“It really made my life harder,” the mayor wrote. “He seemed intent on sending us back to the past.”
Pence’s wife expressed surprise that Buttigieg, a self-outed gay married to a man, had never mentioned this earlier. She said that she and her husband have “a view of marriage that’s defined by our faith … but that doesn’t mean that we’re critical of anyone else who has a different point of view.”
The mayor replied that Pence’s refusal to support a bill in support of same-sex marriage was itself a sign of hostility, in which case he was forced to fight back. “People will often be polite to you in person while advancing policies that harm you and your family,” he explained.
One group of people against whom the mayor is not ‘pushing back’ are America’s many black voters, some of whom are religious and social conservatives, much like the Pences, and see social issues in much the same way.
This is why Mayor Pete, who is leading the pack in the white state of Iowa, languishes at about 0% in the heavily black state of South Carolina, and among blacks nationwide. Strangely enough, the mayor has not turned on these voters the way he did on Pence and other right-leaning social conservatives but instead tried to meet them halfway.
“I welcome the challenge of connecting with black voters in America who don’t yet know me,” Buttigieg said last Thursday. “I do have the experience of feeling like a stranger,” he said a day earlier. On Tuesday, he said, in a more hopeful manner, ‘It is remarkable how Americans are capable of moving past old habits … old prejudices, making history, and getting the president who will serve them best.’
“While Mayor Pete rises in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, it is a delight to watch the media tiptoe around his very weak appeal to black voters,” writes Steven Hayward in Power Line, who notes that “black voters in California voted the most heavily of all ethnic groups against same-sex marriage in the 2008 referendum.” Whenever acknowledged, that fact blows every fuse in the intersectionality switchboard to bits.
There is no hypocrisy more rank and more obvious than the double standard by which the Left looks at social conservatives based entirely whether they are the kind of people they run against, or the kind whose votes they desperately need to win by 80-point margins. “Intersectionality” demands that what it considers the oppressed of the world — non-whites, gays, and women — have the same interests and must band together, but this is an instance where they part ways. This is the problem with going all-in on all the demands of all factions.
Either this is an issue on which decent people can differ, or else black voters are bigots. Democrats are not allowed to say either of those things.
