Meghan McCain Dismisses Mayor Pete as ‘Sparkly, Shiny Object’
Mayor Pete Buttigieg seems like the kind of reasonable Democratic candidate that Meghan McCain, who has made her disdain for progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren well known, could get behind. But on the Monday morning after he surged to the top of a very reputable poll in Iowa, The View co-host dismissed him as little more than a “sparkly, shiny object.”
After Joy Behar accurately characterized Buttigieg as a “moderate,” McCain said, “He wasn't, and now he is. He was both campaigning extremely left sort of in the Beto [O’Rourke] lane, kind of saw the tea leafs on that, and now he's moderate.”
Behar tried to make the case for the South Bend mayor, saying, “Unless you are a homophobe, he's married in a very traditional marriage, totally monogamous. That should appeal to the silent majority out there, whoever they may be.” She added, “Unless people are going to not vote for someone like him because he's gay, I think he's got a shot.”
McCain wasn’t convinced. “I’m not going to try to burst the bubble here,” she said before doing just that. “There's always a sparkly, shiny object in primary politics,” she explained, comparing Buttigieg to someone like Herman Cain, who once sat atop the GOP field in 2012, or Howard Dean, who nearly captured the Democratic nomination in 2004. “There's always a bright, shiny candidate.”
“I don't know if we would be talking about a candidate polling with 0% or 1% with white voters the way we're talking about the candidate with 0% or 1% with black voters,” McCain added, highlighting Buttigieg’s “serious problem and blind spot” with African-American voters. She also condemned the “sloppy and disrespectful” stock photo of a Kenyan woman and her child that was discovered on his campaign website.
“What was wrong with that picture exactly?” Behar asked. When McCain replied, “those aren't real people that supported him”—to which Whoopi Goldberg chimed in, “Well, they are real people.”
Finally, after hailing the fact that “is a lane for moderate Democrats across the country,” McCain asked, “Do I think Mayor Pete is going to be the Democratic nominee? Absolutely not.”
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