Our Daily Pete: Our Favorite Candidate Dishes The Nitty Gritty on “Morning Joe”

Pete Buttigieg, the first major out gay presidential candidate

As big fans of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, we’re happy to spread his gospel. The first major out gay presidential candidate, the 37 year old Mayor of South Bend, Indiana is making headlines and winning converts. Mayor Pete just recently passed a major fund raising thresh hold and now qualifies to participate in Democratic presidential debates for the 2020 election and he’s also out making the press rounds. He was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show this morning, where he discussed ALL sorts of issues….including declaring the Electoral College has “got to go”.

More from the interview:

Morning Joe: What do we do to take better care of our men and women in uniform, and do you agree with Donald Trump that we need to start bringing troops home?

Pete Buttigieg: So a few things. First of all, one remarkable thing we saw a few days ago was VoteVets, a progressive veteran organization, and a conservative veterans organization coming together to say that we’ve got to put an end to the forever wars and Congress needs to reassert its war powers. 

Now the reality is this isn’t just a story of presidents asserting more and more executive authority, this is also a story of Congress kind of not wanting to get mixed up in that. So right now, we have troops around the world – I mean East Africa — based on an authorization for use of military force that goes back to dealing with 9/11. You can be old enough to enlist today and not have even been alive for 9/11.

What do we do to fix our broken democracy?

We’ve continued to look to people who are in many ways creatures of that order that has established itself in Washington. We accept things that are completely unacceptable. 

We accept the fact that in our so-called “democracy,” the person who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily get to become president. We accept the fact that many of our fellow US citizens, like in DC, don’t even have the same political representation as the rest of us. 

We accept the fact that there are policies that the vast majority of Americans want to see happen, like universal background checks for example on guns, something that 80% of Republicans believe is the right thing to do, and Congress can’t make it happen. 

There’s clearly something wrong, not only with the outcomes in Congress, but with the set of assumptions around them.

And part of how this president got to where he is was that the American people have had enough. I don’t like the way that was expressed in terms of this president getting elected, but the idea that we can just return to the norm, that what we need is just to reestablish the way we were doing things before this president came along, misses the fact that so many people, especially in the industrial Midwest, where I come from, voted to burn the house down because they believed the entire system has failed them. And so turning to, turning back to try to do more of the same, I think just makes us worse off in terms of the causes of which this presidency is the symptom.

Would you support getting rid of the Electoral College?

Absolutely. It’s got to go.

What sets you apart from other candidates?

Well look, the reality is when you take one look at me, my face is my message. A lot of this is simply the idea that we need generational change, that we need more voices stepping up from the generation that has so much at stake in the decisions that are being made right now. It’s why I often talk about how the world is going to look in 2054, when I get to the current age of the current president. 

It’s to remind us that this isn’t just about one election, this is about an era, and the decisions that are being made in our politics right now will decide how the next 20, 30, or 40 years will go.

Can you talk about how the diminishing sense of community is impacting our country?

The loss of community is one of the biggest consequences of automation and artificial intelligence and the way they’re changing work. 

It used to be you got a lot of community from the workplace, because you knew you would have a lifelong relationship with a single employer and that was true whether you were a blue collar worker at a production facility and your spouses got to know each other through the union picnics, or whether you were a white collar worker at a CPA firm and you and your spouses got to know each other at the firm dinners. That model is fading away, people in my generation are likely to change careers more often than our parents changed jobs. And this has serious consequences for our understanding of community, of where we fit in. 

And there are some very ugly things that will move in to fill the void if we’ve lost that sense of community, that sense of identity, that used to come from the workplace – things like white identity politics, things like extremism come in, things like the worst forms of nationalism come in, when we could actually be building out the best forms of nationalism, which is when you rally people around the sense of identity that we’re building each other up, when community, even in the literal sense of the city, is part of how people explain how they fit in to the world.

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Via Pete for America: