Pete Buttigieg, The Actual Front Runner

At the 2016 Democratic Convention, with Hillary Clinton’s introduction as the Party’s new nominee, there was a creative video production of historical time passing, culminating in the breaking of a glass ceiling. What happened over the following four months has been and will be a subject of controversy, university classes, and endless publications stretching past the lifetimes of all Clinton’s contemporaries.

There was another glass ceiling just above the one that broke. Donald Trump, a buffoon of historical proportions, should have lost in a landslide. Was it the wrong time for a woman to win the US Presidency or was she simply the wrong woman? In the vernacular of stable genius Donald Trump, maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t…who knows?

Even though this Country (and the World for that matter) is long overdue for a woman to lead the “Free World”, an early review of the six female candidates for the Democratic nomination can’t keep me from speculating that five of them have not risen to a level necessary for a woman to break that ceiling of National leadership.

The possible exception is Elizabeth Warren who has demonstrated decades of clarity regarding social issues. However, in her zeal to point out and counter the excesses of money based minority power structures she has allowed herself to be marginalized as an extreme left wing kook. Of the six women, Warren would make the best President, but even with a devoted following, her intellectual arguments would make her (after Kristen Gillibrand) the most likely to lose the election.

Many view Kamala Harris as the go-to female candidate. I’d like to, but I can’t. Her rising star has been the result of demonstrating her prosecutorial talents, which have been impressive. In that arena she demonstrates the necessary strength that Clinton lacked. Yet when it comes to policy she lacks the confidence and conviction that we see in Warren. Instead, she grabs a hold of various positions and sound bites taken by others, notably Bernie Sanders, like she’s forever reading a teleprompter with copy that someone else wrote.

So what are we left with…just another white dude? Joe Biden is just another white dude, the epitome of white dude. Worse than that, he’s an old white dude. The same could be assigned to Bernie. Both good and, I believe, honest men who carry plenty of baggage. The stampede of remaining white dudes, save one, will never make it to the corral.

Cory Booker isn’t white, but despite his polished delivery he is almost invisible beneath the shadow of Barack Obama. At this point there is only one Democratic candidate who can transcend the stereotype that is so repulsively represented by Trump and the bulk of the Republican Congressional caucus and help make the possibility of a female President in 2028 a reality.

At this point, when you strip away the negatives from all the candidates, the true front runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination is Pete Buttigieg.  That accepts the reality that he has not been publically vetted, as have others, with disclosures from honest and dishonest sources in which he must weather.

Mayor Pete is virtually the antithesis of Donald Trump. That cannot be emphasized enough. I could run through the adjectives that describe his personal accomplishments, decency, and intelligence, but for brevity sake let me just say that he would be the ultimate antacid for the stomach churning policies, personality, and behavior of our President.

I had to grapple with the one factor that made me initially question his electability, his homosexuality.  The more I considered it, the more I began to view it not as a liability, but as an asset to his candidacy.

The fact that Buttigieg is gay allows him to bring to the office the same social issue that Obama did, and would be brought by a female President; that being the necessary evolution of anti-discrimination in America.

Prejudice is an entirely human aspect of social behavior. All of us gravitate toward those who are like ourselves, physically, mentally, or both. The true evil occurs when we apply that prejudice to discriminate against certain human beings and treat that discrimination as being ethically correct or acceptable. In the Black experience this existed from the origins of slavery, for women it began centuries earlier, and it is all the LBGT community has ever known.

We know that discrimination still extensively exists in America; the election of Donald Trump is in no small measure a testimony to that fact. There will still be plenty of good people who would vote against Buttigieg simply because he is gay. However, in the past 50 years we have turned a monumental corner. No longer can Americans exercise discrimination and not know it is wrong. That Rubicon has been crossed and we’re not going back. It is the reason why the rants of white supremacists ring so absurdly hollow, or why so many wince with bowed heads as they try to defend Trump’s Presidency.

Pete Buttigieg already leads this Democratic contest even if a majority of Americans don’t know him yet, let alone pronounce his name.  His potential to be not only an inclusive leader for the United States, but also to be the international leader the Free World is desperate for since Trump entered the stage. It is simply an added bonus that his sexuality will turn more people away from discrimination than the bigotry Donald Trump and Republicans could ever convince people to embrace.

Donald Trump not only needs to lose the 2020 Presidential election, he needs to lose in the landslide that never happened in 2016. This would be the healing the US and the World needs after Trump, and, at this point, I feel Pete Buttigieg is the only one who can make it happen.