A Thousand Milliseconds of Peace

I'm actually kind of glad that Pete Buttigieg is running for President, because it gives me an answer to a question I didn't really expect to see answered.

A number of black friends have complained since 2008 that I just don't understand how much it means to them to have a black President, and that my lack of enthusiasm for Barack Obama is at least partly because I'm white.  During the 2016 campaign, a number of women I knew had the same complaint: because I'm male, I just didn't understand how important Hillary's candidacy was to them.  In both cases they regarded the candidates' policies and record as minor distractions compared to the historic significance of a black or female president: they found it irritating, even upsetting, to be pressured to think about them. 

I still think they were wrong, and that I did understand very well what it meant.  I just thought that their candidates' policies were more important than his race or her sex, and that the boost to the self-esteem of their fans was, while not completely unimportant, much less important than the lives of the many people (including women and people of color) their policies would materially harm.

Just in the past few days, a woman argued angrily on Twitter that white male contenders (Sanders, Biden, O'Rourke, Buttigieg) were once again getting all the attention, and that it was time women of color had a chance to show what they could do.  I didn't think this was entirely unfair until I remembered that similar claims were made for Obama and Clinton.  Obama did not, as far as I can tell, govern differently than a white male of his class.  Clinton was not elected, but her record of warmongering and her glee over other people's deaths does not inspire confidence in me that she'd have brought woman-wisdom and Earth-based grandmother-compassion to the Oval Office.  (See her gloating over the death of Qadafy in the clip linked here, for example.)  That doesn't mean that we shouldn't elect another black man or a woman of any color to the presidency, only that sex and race are not qualifications for the office.  I think that the examples of Obama and Clinton confirm this.

Still, I admit to some qualms about my position.  If an openly gay person became a viable candidate, would I cut him or her more slack than I have to Obama or Clinton?  Would the world-historical significance of a homosexual presidential candidate, and what that would mean to young gay kids in America and around the world, sweep away my concerns about such a person's policies and record?  I couldn't deny that until it happened, I wouldn't know for sure, and I didn't really expect to see it happen in my lifetime.  So it's mildly gratifying, for selfish reasons, to find that my faculties remain intact in the face of Pete Buttigieg's campaign.  And what I saw during the Obama and Clinton campaigns is happening again: Buttigieg's fans don't care about his policies, they care about irrelevancies (often charming ones, but irrelevancies nonetheless) and their fantasies about him.

Jacob Bacharach wrote an entertaining essay on the gayness of Mayor Pete, and while it's not his best work, nor is it as good as Nathan J. Robinson's close reading of Buttigieg's autobiography, it's worth reading.  It reminds me of Sarah Schulman's discussion of American commodification of homosexuality in her 1998 book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Duke), which was brilliant then and feels prescient now.  I may return to that some other time, but for now I want to mention one other thing about Buttigieg that concerns me.

One of his selling points, one he stresses in public statements and that is echoed by many of his fans, is that people are tired of divisiveness, and that he can bring us together.  That's how Barack Obama marketed himself, and it's how many of his fans see him to this day.  And if that's what Pete Buttigieg wants to be, he should not be president, because while he wants to play nice, his Republican opponents do not.  Obama and his crew claimed to be, and maybe were, taken totally by surprise at how mean the Republicans were: You guyzzzzz!!!  This is so unfair!  Why won't you work with me instead of against me?  Obama threw staff they targeted to the wolves, rather than fight for them.  If the Republicans can't keep Pete Buttigieg out of office, they'll set out to block him from the get-go, as they did with Obama.  It'll be comforting to blame the Rethugs for the next Democratic President's failures, but it's a comfort we can't afford.  We need a president who can fight back, and it doesn't appear that Buttigieg has had to deal with that kind of total war yet, so there's no way to know how he'll cope if he's elected in 2020.  Of course, he'll also need good advisors and a Supreme Court and Democratic-controlled Congress that will work with him.  Playing board games, having a husband who's followed on Twitter by Lin-Manuel Miranda, liking Joyce's Ulysses, performing with Ben Folds -- all these are cute, but if we get a third Obama term, we are truly doomed.