John Kerry’s windsurfing outings. John Edwards’s $400 haircut, along with footage showing him primping in front of a mirror. Now, Pete Buttigieg is the latest Democratic presidential hopeful to face the “elitist” charge.
The South Bend, Indiana, mayor, 37, Thursday got pummeled by rival 2020 Democrats over a recent Napa Valley fundraiser with wealthy donors. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren led the charge, accusing Buttigieg of hobnobbing with millionaires in an ultra-exclusive “wine cave” in Northern California.
“The mayor just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave, full of crystals, and served $900-a-bottle wine,” said Warren. “He had promised that every fundraiser he would do would be open-door, but this one was closed-door. We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms would not pick the next president of the United States. Billionaires in wine caves should pick the next president of the United States.”
The jab capped weeks of sniping between the pair over their relationships with wealthy donors. Warren, 70, noted many of his fundraisers included bottles of wine costing nearly as much as an average American’s weekly paycheck.
Fair or not, Buttigieg joined a long line of Democratic presidential candidates who faced blistering attacks about being out of touch with average voters, including Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
In most cases, the charges have stuck. Obama was the exception, incurring minimal political harm in August 2007, after asking a group of Iowa farmers, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”
Also, during the 2008 Democratic primary cycle, Obama’s campaign spread opposition research about primary Edwards’s $400 haircuts, a stark departure from the North Carolina senator’s “two Americas” populist message. The haircut revelations proved particularly damaging because it came shortly after a YouTube video of Edwards emerged fawning over himself in the mirror set to the West Side Story song I Feel Pretty.
“We did much less of this [opposition research] than other campaigns did,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in 2009. “But there were times we indulged — it was our researchers who found John Edwards’s infamous $400 hair cut expenditures.”
For Buttigieg, seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, elitist charges are particularly sensitive. Being a Harvard College graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and former McKinsey and Co. consultant makes him appealing to a certain set of professional-class Democrats, but also a more remote figure to the majority of primary voters living paycheck-to-paycheck.
For many of Buttigieg’s supporters, who are disproportionately wealthy compared to those backing Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Vice President Joe Biden, his background is exactly the antidote to the populist, elite-disdain dominating the Republican Party under President Trump.
But history shows embracing elite hobbies is often a liability of Democrats.
The phrase “limousine liberal” was first used by New York City Democratic mayoral hopeful Mario Procaccino in 1969 against incumbent Democrat John Lindsay, who came from a wealthy background and relied on funding from wealthy Manhattanites.
In the modern political era, the “elitist” epithet has become more and more of a common refrain against Democrats. Clinton lamented in 2008 that Gore’s and Kerry’s defeats the prior two cycles were due to them seeming “out of touch” with the public.
“You don’t have to think back too far to remember that good men running for president were viewed as being elitist and out of touch with the values and lives of millions of Americans,” she said.
During the 2004 presidential election, President George W. Bush’s reelection committee, led by chief strategist Karl Rove, hammered Kerry for his ritzy hobbies like skiing and windsurfing. A month before that year’s election, a New York Times article, “John Kerry: the wealthy Democrat,” profiled his family’s former estate in France.
A GOP ad that election ridiculed Kerry’s largess.
“Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. Hairstyle by Christophe’s: $75. Designer shirts: $250. Forty-two-foot luxury yacht: $1 million. Four lavish mansions and beachfront estate: Over $30 million,” the script went.
Obama himself remained sensitive to questions about his appearance or personal grooming habits. After the Chicago Sun-Times endorsed Obama for the 2008 Democratic primary, his campaign called the newspaper to issue a complaint regarding their questions “about his pedicures.”
And despite Clinton’s criticisms of Gore and Kerry, her own presidential ambitions were hampered eight years later by her perceived resentment of working-class whites, culminating in the infamous “basket of deplorables” comment that continues as a rallying cry for Trump’s supporters.
