No, of course he didn’t, hence the wink smiley in the thread title. (Mods, if you think the wink is insufficient, feel free to modify the title as you see fit.)
No question, that description fits someone who attended public schools in Oklahoma before graduating from the University of Houston a hell of a lot better than someone who went to a private prep school, then Harvard and Oxford before working for McKinsey, and then ran for office in Indiana on the strength of his alleged involvement in billion-dollar deals.
So I thank you, Mayor Pete, for your excellent endorsement of your rival!
Pete’s digs at Washington experience are wearing thin.
Dude, you’re 37 years old and have already tried to seek Washington power by running to become the head of the DNC. You lost easily so now thinking you can go from a Mayor of a very small college town to President in one swoop. The others when they were 37 were setting their sights much lower, and much more local. Well except Joe of course who was a US Senator but even his pre-political life was different — he was a public defender, not a headhunted consultant.
I actually do like Pete as my posts in other threads show. But it seems he peaked in the autumn and has nowhere to go after Iowa. He’s got a bright future but he also strikes as someone who was born into relative privilege and had his future mapped out from a very early age for him.
Oh no! Not born into privilege! We’re not ready for that kind of president! And…Harvard? Ew. Have some self respect, dude. Not to mention if George Washington were told we’d chosen a president with military experience, he’d roll in his grave!
Nothing wrong with Pete’s background, but it’s not anywhere close to ‘heartland.’
Now I happen to think the whole ‘someone from the heartland is from the real America’ bit is a pile of steaming bullshit. Hell, at this point I’d assume more Americans of voting age have grown up in the suburbs and exurbs than anywhere else; damned if I know why that isn’t the ‘real’ America.
But if Pete’s going to claim that particular mantle of supposed authenticity - that of being somehow representative of the ‘heartland’ - he totally deserves to be called on it, because his background is extremely atypical of lives in the Midwestern ‘heartland.’ If any candidate fits that description, it’s Warren. Hence the ‘endorsement.’
Actually, Pete is being torched on woke Twitter for that. I seriously had to log off from the faux outrage from private college kids and hipsters in Brooklyn that have never been out of the eastern time zone.
And I agree that I’m sick of the heartland thing being used in every election by both parties. There’s not much I like about 2016 but seeing the New York Values shit blow up in Ted Cruz’s face was sweet.
As a huge Pete supporter, he should shut up about cornfields and the heartland. I get it, everything comes down to Iowa, but enough is enough.
And there’s nothing more cringeworthy than seeing Elizabeth Warren trying to be all folksy.
I don’t give a fuck where she grew up. She’s been in academia and mostly on the east coast for her adult life and I’m sure she’s smart enough to know that folksy nonsense would have her pegged as a rube along the I-95 corridor. Even before she ran for president, I heard a really bad interview where she tried out the working class, Red Sox lovin’ , Dunkin drinking schtick and it was awful.
Even Bill Clinton who did live his adult life in Arkansas dropped the ‘mama’ folksiness pretty early on in his 1992 campaign.
Still, I hope Pete’s communications team has gotten the message that it’s time to dial way back the heartland stuff. The last one was one flag factory too many *
In 1988 the first Bush was campaigning by visiting flag factories to highlight Dukakis vetoing a bill requiring the Pledge of allegiance to be required in public schools. The strategy worked until the media finally began to question if this was really the most important issue of the campaign. Bush admitted later on that he went to one flag factory too many.
