Like the recently released comedy adventure film, “Sonic the Hedgehog,” based on the video game of the same name, Mayor Pete Buttigieg resembles the anthropomorphic hedgehog from another world come to earth to escape malevolent players while using his own powers for world domination.
The baby faced, immature, inexperienced, naïve, gay (did he tell you he was intersectional and gay?), and victimized Democrat from South Bend, Indiana, a city of about 100,000, has become all the rage. He is literally the new Barack Obama. He has tremendous momentum and gets constant flattering press, even if, given his meteoric rise, the knives are about to be unsheathed.
After winning—or perhaps rigging the botched Iowa primary by playing foul with an app developed by former members of his team and a company with the dubious name, Shadow—Pete (or Sonic, if you prefer) has unbelievably become the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
Sonic has zoomed to the top of the list, or very close to it. He is the flavor of the month. Who will the hedgehog character pick as his veep, CNN asks? Well, it would have to be a she or Zhe, of color, and maybe somebody with some real political clout: Stacy the pretend governor from Georgia? California’s “best girl,” Kamala Harris? Radical Muslim Rashida Talib?
The Democrats must be very hard pressed, of course, with a dozen candidates, many big names, senators, billionaires, and a former vice president to pick, after all of that, Mayor Pete. Why not go with something new, a bit different, grab at some straws? A newbie? Take a flyer on the unknown? A tabula rasa?
Buttigieg couldn’t even win the unimpressive post as head of the Democratic National Committee when he ran three years ago. He was beaten by the lame Tom Perez, after Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) was fired in a scandal involving Hillary Clinton’s email leaks and fixing the delegate selection against Bernie Sanders. So, Mayor Pete is picking up where his party left off and keeping the socialist senator from Vermont out of the White House and as far down the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue, as possible.
Pressing for “Generational Change”
You have to admit, Mayor Pete does have quite the résumé. Only 38 years old (but constitutionally old enough to run for president) the elite Harvard graduate in literature and Oxford Rhodes Scholar was elected Phi Beta Kappa and went on to serve as a naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
One problem: he practically shouts, “white privilege!”
After a stint in the controversial, naughty, cutthroat big business consulting firm McKinsey, where he worked on bad (oil and gas) energy projects and saved transnational companies money while cutting workforces, the whiz kid had a yearning to get into politics. He needed to tick just one more box. Another looming issue: his clients included the likes of ICE, Purdue Pharma, China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, all of which are causes of considerable consternation to the Left.
Pete’s big idea was, you guessed it—generational change. You spell that Millennial Power and who better to embrace it than the superboy himself—Pete.
His father studied to be a Jesuit priest before coming to America from his native Malta and later went on to become a professor at Notre Dame. His influence on his son is telling. “St. Pete,” as he has been called in the media (OK, Tucker Carlson on Fox News), is a self-righteous, scripture thumping, junior theologian who has cast his entire political spell around being more moral and holier than thou. He is the very definition of virtue signaling.
The political bug first bit Mayor Pete back in 2004 when he signed onto Senator John Kerry’s losing “Unfit for Command” campaign for president. He was hooked and never looked back since he was out to “change the world.”
Pete lost his initial bid for public office as Indiana’s state treasurer in 2010 to the conservative Republican incumbent. His next stab saw success in a crowded field to become mayor of his home town.
But bad blood in the mayoralty with the police and the black community have made him a less-than-perfect urban ward politician. He is still trying to mend those fences and has tallied close to zero support from the African American community, which is so essential in the coalition-building necessary to become the Democratic Party’s nominee. Professor Pete is best at giving lectures, not governing.
SJW Faith Is Front and Center
The hedgehog look-alike does have one big thing going for him, however. Only coming out of the closet late in 2015 to express his solidarity with the LGBTQ community, Pete is now openly gay. He married a junior high school teacher as his sweetheart husband who took his name and would presumably, if everything panned out, become the country’s first “first husband.”
Pete has admitted that he has the gay vote all tied up or down. Already in 2016, the New York Times published an article asking if he might be “the first gay president.” As Seinfeld once satirically pronounced, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
As a self-described uber-progressive, Pete has linked himself to the Social Gospel Movement. His social justice warrior faith is front and center in his campaign which comes off as entirely self-righteous and congratulatory.
Supporting any and all abortion and repeal of the Hyde Amendment, Buttigieg is clearly not within the tradition of Catholic orthodoxy.
He is adamantly for the Green New Deal and zero net carbon emissions by 2050. As a globalist, he would re-enter the Paris Climate Agreement on day one of his administration and go all-in on multilateralism. Against coal, the mayor would subsidize solar to the max and impose a hefty carbon tax.
Wanting to end the death penalty forever, the Millennial would also legalize marijuana and decriminalize the possession of hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Of course, he favors free college tuition, up to a point. He also prefers open borders.
Sonic was for the war in Iraq but now wants to pull out and drastically cut military spending. One thing Pete hopes to achieve as soon as possible is to abolish the evil and racist Electoral College and change both the Senate and the makeup of the Supreme Court. He wants to enlarge it and make sure that liberals dominate.
He is for restoring voting rights to all felons and criminals, even those in jail or on death row. With a hand on and out to the big Wall Street funders, Pete is vaguely for somewhat higher taxes and wants Medicare for all but is not necessarily in line with what Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sanders propose. He loathes capitalism much less than his rivals do. After all, he was a McKinsey guy and his socialist friends have dubbed him, “Wall Street Pete.” He knows who is funding his campaign and to whom he would be beholden.
Sonic wants to be seen as a “pragmatic” type of lefty, which is why he is after the so-called “centrist” Biden vote. Mayor Pete is not quite doing a “Bye Bye Birdie” musical skit where they want to kill everyone over 30 but his generational theme would make him a radical and desperate choice for the impeachment-prone party of Pelosi in 2020.
Will he be a one-hit-wonder and vanish away in the rough and tumble of the primary season or does he have true staying power? Will Mini Mike Bloomberg get behind him and become his puppet master?
How would “The Donald” campaign with a gay teenage idol as his opponent? Would he use kid gloves? Watch and see . . .
The backlash against Sonic Pete may actually be mounted in his own party first. They often eat their own. Vice, a barometer of such sentiment, has already called his version of America, “basically a caste system.” Poor hedgehog.