Why we can’t trust values without policies.
On April 22nd, CNN hosted a youth-oriented town hall with five candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination: Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg. The featured clips on CNN’s homepage the following day showed Harris talking gun reform, Bernie hitting his usual notes of Medicare-for-All and policies to uplift working families, and Warren laying out ground-breaking proposal after ground-breaking proposal.
Buttigieg’s clips had a distinctly different flavor, with titles like, “God doesn’t have a political party,” or “I wouldn’t be running if I hadn’t come out,” and the priceless, “Mayor Pete’s weaknesses: Sci-fi movies and spy novels.” The inanity of these headlines and the lack of substance in most the coverage surrounding Pete Buttigieg has become nearly cartoonish. Trevor Noah of The Daily Show has begun taking notice, and The Onion recently penned its own satire of the hollow Buttigieg hoopla, with its piece, “Pete Buttigieg Releases Comprehensive List of Fun Personality Quirks to Include in Articles about Him.”
For his part, Anderson Cooper, during the town hall, pressed Buttigieg on his silence concerning substantive policy proposals. “Your campaign website, it has a lot about who you are, what you believe. It doesn’t have…
