South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg can’t have it both ways. Either he lied a few years ago about having a good working relationship with Vice President and former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, or he is lying now about his stated dislike for the vice president.
Either way, you should disregard anything the mayor says now about Pence. This entire one-sided “feud” is a cynical ploy meant to whip up enthusiasm among the Democratic base.
On Thursday, during a 2020 Democratic primary debate in Houston, Buttigieg once again took an unprompted shot at his former governor, who is both a devout Christian and pro-traditional marriage. The moment occurred after ABC News’ chief anchor George Stephanopoulos said as he wrapped up the evening, “No president can succeed without resilience. Every president confronts crises, defeats, and mistakes.”
Stephanopoulos added, “So I want to ask each of you, what’s the most significant professional setback you’ve had to face? How did you recover from it? And what did you learn from it?”
When it came time for Buttigieg to speak, the mayor highlighted his decision in 2015 to come out as gay.
“You know … as an elected official in the state of Indiana when Mike Pence was governor, at a certain point, when it came to professional setbacks, I had to wonder whether just acknowledging who I was, was going to be the ultimate career-ending professional setback,” the mayor said.
Oh, please.
Buttigieg is talking about a decision reached in 2015, not 1965.
Indiana is not Gilead.
Pence is not Buttigieg’s great oppressor.
In fact, prior to the mayor’s run for president, Pence and Buttigieg had a warm working relationship.
But that was then. That was before the vice president became low-hanging fruit for 2020 hopefuls looking to score a few cheap and easy points with the Democratic base.
Since launching his candidacy, Buttigieg has taken every opportunity available to attack Pence.
“Please don’t judge my state by our former governor,” the mayor said in March, adding that the former governor has become the “cheerleader of the porn star presidency.” The mayor has also accused Pence of advocating for “social extremism.” Buttigieg said elsewhere that Pence is “at best complicit” in encouraging white nationalists to grow their ranks. Later, during a discussion about his life as a married gay man, Buttigieg brought up the vice president unprompted, saying “that’s the thing that I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand. That if you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
The funniest thing about all of this is that Pence’s reaction this entire time has been merely to shrug his shoulders and say the mayor “knows better.”
On Thursday, Buttigieg continued recounting his decision to come out as gay.
“I came back from the deployment and realized that you only get to live one life. And I was not interested in not knowing what it was like to be in love any longer, so I just came out,” the mayor said. “I had no idea what kind of professional setback it would be, especially because inconveniently it was an election year in my socially conservative community.”
As it turns out, it was not a professional setback at all. That “socially conservative community” that Buttigieg said he feared would react negatively reelected him with 80% of the vote, six percentage points more than the mayor won in 2011.
Perhaps Buttigieg is the one who struggles with being small-minded and prejudiced. It is either that or the mayor is playing a cynical game where he knows his stated fears about the people of South Bend are total nonsense, and he is relying simply on Democratic voters assuming that all of Indiana is some sort of backward flyover wasteland.
That makes for a much better tale about resilience and heroism than anything that resembles the real story.
