Christopher Bedford of the Federalist warns against labeling Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg a middle-of-the-road option.
What are Pete Buttigieg’s politics?
If you read CBS, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, and a host of their friends, the former mayor is decidedly a moderate. According to The Washington Post and a few more, he’s “a traditional centrist” who embodies “the Democratic primary’s rightward drift.” And if you listen to the left-wing activists trailing him around, he’s “Wall Street Pete” and “will kill us.” …
… But just what is so “traditional centrist” or “moderate” about Mayor Pete? From health care and abortion to guns and immigration, and from the Supreme Court to the Electoral College, the man is decidedly a radical. Behind all his carefully selected scripture quotes that so easily confound coastal reporters is a politician whose justifications are difficult to recognize through the eyes of any of the world’s major Christian religions.
But let’s start with health care, where Buttigieg has rejected his prior embrace of the socialist-favored “Medicare for All” in favor of a “glide path to Medicare for All” that, The Washington Post reports, “hinges on [a] ‘supercharged’ version of [the] unpopular Obamacare mandate.” …
… On abortion, Buttigieg leaves even less to the imagination. At Fox News’s Jan. 26 town hall, he assured a lifelong Democratic activist who opposes abortion, “I’m not going to try to earn your vote by tricking you.” Oh, phew. Then he declined to commit to altering the party’s platform language, which rejects Democrats like Kristen Day, the questioner. “He refused — twice — to even answer that part of my question,” she wrote afterward in USA Today, “and instead focused on his unyielding support for abortion and did not really seem to want the vote from me or people who share my view.”
