There’s a lot of gleeful hand wringing going on here based on the premise that Pete Buttigieg is blaming Democrats for running up Deficits. That’s B.S. Most folks making this assertion are taking Buttigieg’s comments out of context. Here’s what he actually said:
"My party's not known for worrying about deficits and the debt too much, but it's time for us to start getting into that business because what we've seen in Washington is that the party that talked a lot about the deficit when they were trying to kill off programs, when it came time for the corporate tax cuts, it turns out they don't care. There is a trillion-dollar deficit now created under a Republican administration, which means if my party doesn't start getting interested in deficits then nobody will."
The smear is based on the italics. The assertion is that Pete is blaming Democrats for creating deficits. This smear has two major problems.
First, the smearers ignore the full context of the quote, starting with the word “because,” where Pete explains who it is who actually has run up deficits: The Republicans.
When Pete says “the party that talked a lot about the deficit when they were trying to kill off programs, when it came time for the corporate tax cuts, it turns out they don't care,” he’s calling out Republican hypocrisy on the mismatch between their anti-deficit rhetoric and their actions.
When Pete says “There is a trillion-dollar deficit now created under a Republican Administration,” he’s placing the blame for deficits on the Republicans in unmistakably stark turns.
And when Pete says “if my party doesn't start getting interested in deficits, then nobody will,” he’s saying the only Party that can solve deficits is the Democratic Party.
The smearers on this site should be ashamed of their grossly dishonest spin.
They should also be embarassed of their ignorance of public perception of the two parties. Like it or not, Democrats have long had the reputation of not caring about deficits. This is largely because the Democratic Party for many years, starting under FDR, embraced Keynesian economic views that deficits were unimportant and, in fact, could be beneficial.
Very very few Democrats run on deficit reduction and balancing the budget. That’s the rhetoric of the Republican Party — where that line is quite common.
So the public perception that Democrats don’t care as much about deficit reduction as Republicans is entirely understandable despite the fact that it is largely counterfactual (although a good case can be made that the best check on deficit spending is a split government).
What Mayor Pete did here was attempt to appeal to an audience in a fiscally conservative state using the classic rhetorical tactic of building affinity. Rather than tell his audience that everything they think they know is false, risking an audience reaction of outright rejection of his message as knee jerk distrust sets in, Mayor Pete effectively told them: “Hey, I’m on your side, but the facts are a little bit different than you think.” It’s a good tactic. And, no, viewed as a whole it is not reinforcing negative stereotypes of Democrats, it is instead rebutting them in a persuasive fashion without alienating the audience to whom he was directing his remarks.
So, my apologies to the folks who are grasping at straws to smear Buttigieg, but this dog does not hunt.
Do me a favor, don’t spam this diary with more dishonest smears of Buttigieg. I promise I’ll get to the major smears over the next few days in future diaries, and we can talk about those there.
We need to be better than the smear jobs I’m seeing on this site.