Just a few weeks ago, people on the left were swooning over Beto O’Rourke, but things have shifted. Ever since South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg entered the race, Beto has been left in the dust.
Buttigieg, who is gay, scores higher on the intersectional hierarchy than Beto. Progressives are very excited about him. He speaks multiple languages! He went to Harvard! He picks imaginary fights with Mike Pence!
The media can’t get enough of him.
Jack Shafer writes at Politico:
Why the Media Dumped Beto for Mayor PeteBurning with the velocity of a prairie fire on a gusty Indiana day, Pete Buttigieg scorched the airwaves, seared the podcasts, and charred the press this week as he ignited his presidential campaign, temporarily torching his Democratic competition in the process.The secret to Buttigieg’s publicity run was no secret, wrote Matthew Yglesias in Vox. Like Molly Bloom in his favorite novel, Ulysses, he can’t stop saying “yes”—to media invitations. In recent weeks, he’s appeared on a CNN town hall, Ellen, A-list podcasts and Morning Joe, and been featured in New York, POLITICO Magazine, the Atlantic and much more. But saying yes is never enough to hold the press spellbound.Buttigieg has satisfied the ravenous press corps’ appetite by offering them an entire menu of newish things—no, make that an entire food court of newish things—to write about. He’s the youngest candidate in the field (at 37, he’s the only millennial except for Tulsi Gabbard), he’s gay and married, he’s an Afghan war veteran, he’s a Rhodes scholar (as is Cory Booker, but never mind), he plays a decent piano, he’s a churchgoer, he’s the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana, he once gave a TEDx talk, he worked as a McKinsey consultant, he’s a polymath, he’s as earnest as a preacher, he’s an old person’s idea of what a young person should be like, and he’s figured out how to package progressive ideas as moderate…Having stripped the Kennedyesque Texan of his novelty, the press corps has dumped him for the Kennedyesque Hoosier like a speed-dater on the rebound from a Tinder relationship gone bad.
Shafer is not exaggerating. The folks at the Washington Free Beacon put together this clip reel of people in media slobbering all over Buttigieg:
Kyle Smith of National Review also wrote about this:
Buttigieg Replaces Beto as the Media’s New BFFThe rise of Pete Buttigieg has been fairly astonishing to behold. It’s an entirely media-driven phenomenon, but then again the media can chauffeur a guy straight into the White House. As we’ve seen.New polls have Mayor Pete in third place in both Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s a pretty distant third, but when you consider that Buttigieg was completely unknown until ten seconds ago, and recall the years of adoring media attention given Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, not to mention a ton of favorable coverage of Kamala Harris and nearly a year of nonstop propagandizing for Beto O’Rourke that would embarrass Kim Jong-un’s press chief, it’s astonishing that Buttigieg is even in the same group as these other candidates, much less ahead of them (by very small margins in some cases). (Oh, and Kirsten Gillibrand, your candidacy is already over. You’re at, or close to, zero. This is as good as it gets for you. Enjoy your lovely parting gifts.)…Buttigieg is fresh, and that counts among members of the media who may have gotten just a teensy-weensy bit fatigued with all the fawning over Beto. And Buttigieg is impressive in some ways.
Liberals in media love to “make” a candidate. Just look at what they did for Obama in 2008.
Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro discussed this issue a few days ago and declared Beto “toast.”
Featured image via YouTube.
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