The Buttigieg Campaign Should Really Stop Comparing Him to Obama

Last month, Lis Smith—the senior adviser credited with transforming the South Bend, Indiana, mayor into a serious contender—made a bold claim about Pete Buttigieg. “I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Pete brings a talent and that ineffable ‘it thing’ that Obama had,” Smith, a former Obama campaign staffer, told Bloomberg News. The Buttigieg campaign has been pushing the narrative of Buttigieg as heir to Obama for some time now.

Since last year, Buttigieg has returned to the refrain of “a young man with a funny name," making the link between himself and Obama. And another campaign senior adviser, Larry Grisolano, says his boss is "rekindling the same excitement I felt at this time in 2007." The effort hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Washington Post’s Stephen Stromberg dubbed Pete an “Obama clone.” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost spoofed Pete as a “White Obama'' who sounded “like a bot that has studied human behavior by watching 100 hours of Obama speeches."

For all of the Buttigieg campaign’s efforts, the comparisons are a long stretch. While both politicians attended Ivy League schools, they made drastically different choices after that. Obama cut his teeth community organizing in Chicago’s black neighborhoods, advocating for voting rights and working as a civil rights attorney before winning a Senate race, with 3.5 million votes, to represent Illinois’ 12 million constituents. Buttigieg took the more lucrative consulting-firm track, burnishing his résumé at the prestigious McKinsey & Company and then working on Democratic political campaigns before winning 10,000 votes to govern South Bend’s 100,000 residents; he lost his one state-wide Indiana race for treasurer by almost 25 points.

Experience aside, central to Obama’s “it thing” was his ability to both lean into his identity while transcending it—a trick Pete has yet to master. Back in 2008, three weeks after winning the 90 percent white state of Iowa, then junior Illinois senator Barack Obama stood in the pulpit of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on the eve of Martin Luther King day. With the clergy to his back and the black congregation staring in his eyes, he delivered an impassioned speech on Dr. King's calls for unity that spanned from the horrors of Hurricane Katrina to the scandal of the Jena Six to the inequities of systemic racism. “For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man,” he preached to the enraptured crowd. “All of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays on the job and in the schools, in our health-care system, and in our criminal justice system.” Recounting history as he made it, Obama stirred the Georgia church audience into a flurry of claps, amens, and shouts.

Six days later, he dominated in South Carolina, beating Clinton by a 28-point margin.

Range. That was Obama’s “it” factor. Obama won states as disparate as Iowa and South Carolina. He garnered endorsements as divergent as Cornel West and Andrew Sullivan. Obama was transracial. He was transregional. He succeeded as a political phenomenon melding a hyper-diverse racial coalition. It’s a sharp contrast to Pete, who has proved his strong support among whiter electorates in Iowa and perhaps New Hampshire, but remains anemic for voters of color. In a January Washington Post–Ipsos poll, Pete Buttigieg’s presidential support registered at 2 percent among black Democratic voters. The New York Times’s Reid J. Epstein wrote in November that Buttigieg had so few black elected officials supporting him, “they could all fit into a single S.U.V.” And even in white Iowa, which Obama won handily while boosting turnout, Pete doesn’t quite measure up: While he claimed to be “victorious” there in a fraught delegate count, he failed to win the popular vote and turnout was down from 2008. Pete is in bad shape.

Last month, when Buttigieg visited Los Angeles, he was met by a throng of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Outside of his tour of a homeless shelter, protesters waved picket signs and placards. In the middle of the demonstration, they unfurled a banner with the words DEATH BY NEGLECT printed prominently in the middle. Over bullhorns, they continuously chanted: “1-2-3-4, anti-black and anti-poor, 5-6-7-8, Mayor Pete, you're fake!”

During last Friday's New Hampshire debate, ABC moderator Linsey Davis pressed Pete on why black arrest rates for marijuana possession rose during his administration. Pete initially rebuffed the facts, saying that in South Bend, “the overall rate was lower than the national rate.” Davis retorted, “No, there was an increase,” citing how marijuana arrests were lower before he was in office. Flustered, Pete was reduced to an un-Obama-like answer. “We adopted a strategy that said that drug enforcement would be targeted in cases where there was a connection to the most violent group or gang connected to a murder,” he said. “These things are all connected, but that’s the point.”

“He looked like a deer in the headlights," said Chris Christie on ABC, skewering Buttigieg for “outright lying about his record on African-American arrests and marijuana.” For Democrats fearful of repeating a 2016, a candidate who sags under low enthusiasm among black voters and a controversial history of biased criminal justice policy should trigger cold sweats and flashbacks. Though Pete likes to style himself after Barack, on the campaign trail he looks more like Hillary.

Buttigieg has sought to assuage these concerns with bold policy proposals and campaign stops with black celebrities like Al Sharpton and Charlamagne tha God. He supports H.R.40, the commission to research reparations for African-Americans. Last year, he revealed his Douglass Plan, which draws inspiration from civil rights–era proposals for quelling racial inequality. Designed as a domestic Marshall Plan for black Americans, Buttigieg's Douglass Plan is a multiprong effort to provide concentrated investment in black neighborhoods, send millions of dollars to historically black colleges, and aim strategic development at formally redlined communities. But the campaign botched its rollout, using stock art of Kenyans to depict black Americans and circulating a letter supposedly signed by more than 400 South Carolinians in support of the Douglass Plan; the Intercept later found half the signatories were white, and the chair of the state’s Democratic Black Caucus hadn’t signed it at all.

The larger problem, of course, is that Pete’s track record doesn’t reflect his presidential plans. When he had the chance to enact those policies in Indiana’s fourth largest city, where 26 percent of residents are black, he didn’t seize the opportunity to do so. After the firing of a popular black police chief, the killing of a black man by a white police officer, and related controversies, Black Lives Matter activists called for Buttigieg to step down. Despite the former mayor’s hype for the city’s post-recession comeback, black residents still suffered with a 16 percent unemployment rate at the end of his term—and South Bend awarded no new contracts to black-owned firms for three straight years, while simultaneously granting contracts to campaign donors and lobbyists. Pete himself admits that he was “slow to realize” that South Bend’s schools were “effectively segregated.” And, in one cutting exchange following a police shooting, Pete told a black protester that "I'm not asking for your vote."

That trouble at home spills into Pete’s problems with black voters nationwide. According to a January Washington Post poll, “concerns about his experience” stand among the chief impediments when it comes to Buttigieg’s appeal to black voters. And his presidential campaign has mirrored an apology tour for his mayoral performance. In the MSNBC presidential debate, when asked why the South Bend Police Department was only 6 percent black, he apologized. When he was confronted about his use of the phrase “All lives matter” during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, he apologized. After a scathing essay in which the Root’s Michael Harriot skewered him for claiming that a lot of lower-income, minority kids don’t have “someone they know personally who testifies to the value of education,” he apologized. Along with his notably ungraceful comparison of his struggles as a gay man to the oppression of black Americans, or his disagreeing with Bernie Sanders over whether prisoners, among which blacks are overrepresented, should be able to vote, the Buttigieg campaign has created enough gaffes and missteps to make even Joe Biden cringe.

For black voters, there is no need to speculate about Pete Buttigieg. They have his record—high arrests, high poverty, high unemployment—and it does not comport with his projected image as a racial reformer. While Pete’s Douglass Plan could close the racial wealth gap, it can’t close his authenticity gap. Black voters have seen Joe Biden serve as a loyal vice president to Barack Obama for eight years, and watched Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren fight for economic justice for decades. Pete’s diversity problem isn't that he is “this new, young white guy” but that he is a politician with a history of underperforming on racial justice who’s leaning into comparisons with America’s first black president. As Pete likes to say, what made Obama a great president was his ability to “meet the moment.” For many black voters, pressed under an obtusely racist Trump administration, this moment calls for an authentic candidate with either a proven track record of winning, strong racial-justice bona fides, or both. And unfortunately for Mayor Pete, his meticulously crafted résumé just doesn’t have “it.”

Aaron Ross Coleman covers race and economics. His previous work appears in The New York Times, The Nation, Buzzfeed, CNBC, Vox, and elsewhere. He is an Ida B. Wells Fellow at Type Media Center.

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Originally Appeared on GQ