The Washington deputy bureau chief of The Boston Globe reported that Democratic primary candidate Pete Buttigieg said that “My party’s not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much but it’s time for us to start getting into that,” during a New Hampshire town hall Thursday.
This is quite a thing to say. It is factually incorrect, for one. It is historically inaccurate, for two. It is a longstanding and well-understood lie told by “fiscal conservative” pundits and officials that has allowed the Republican Party to cut taxes on the rich, bankrupt our economy, and spend on wars while blaming the political party that has cleaned up their messes for decades now.
So regardless of your feelings about Mayor Pete of South Bend, Indiana, his statement has got to be alarming.
Buttigieg’s young age has always been tempered by the fact that he served in Afghanistan and was a Rhodes scholar. But if you want to believe that Buttigieg is a truly intelligent person, his pandering to a more conservative audience by lying (while not explicitly lying) about Republican tax cuts and ballooning deficit spending by conservative administrations is not only intellectually dishonest, it is dangerous. If you want to say that Buttigieg believes that the Democratic Party is “not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much,” then he is a stupid person. Because only a dumb, unsophisticated man who shouldn’t hold high office would believe that kind of a statement.
If your argument is that the ends will justify the means, that wooing conservative voters in a primary will lead to national victory, then it is Mayor Pete himself who should know better. Buttigieg has both said (and proven) that no matter how much you reach across the aisle and regurgitate Republican talking points, conservatives will call you a socialist and use their full propaganda machine against you as soon as the need arises. You can look up what conservatives are writing about him now that he’s taken bigger steps towards becoming a front runner: Headlines like “Pete Buttigieg, Progressive Saint,” paint him just to the left of Bernie Sanders but still to the right of Karl Marx.
So, why would Pete Buttigieg say this? Because Pete Buttigieg believes it will get him votes in New Hampshire. This is something to consider as we head into the next few months.