Pete Buttigieg: Trump is drawing 'very bad things' out of his supporters - Washington Examiner

SPENCER, Iowa — Pete Buttigieg offered a frank assessment of President Trump's supporters while on a three-day swing of Iowa counties that once voted for former President Barack Obama, but turned out for Trump in 2016.

"When you vote for this president, particularly when you vote for him a second time, you are at best tolerating bad things and at worst having very bad things drawn out of you," the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and White House hopeful told reporters over the weekend.

My latest questions on the Popeyes-less tour bus w/ Mayor Pete.
"If Donald Trump has -- like you said -- enabled bad things, things like racism and sexism and homophobia -- how are the people who've voted for him not "bad people," as you said at last stop?"
Buttigieg: pic.twitter.com/Rkka2Py87W
— Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) November 4, 2019

Buttigieg, 37, made the comments as broad swaths of the Democratic electorate say they want Trump to be the central point of their party's attacks. Policy concerns have often proved a lower priority to anti-Trump die-hards in the Democratic coalition, and all the party's 2020 White House candidates have looked for ways to straddle the divide.

Buttigieg has repeatedly dismissed the idea of "good" and "bad" people when asked by Democrats in Republican areas of the first-in-the-nation state how he planned to unite the country should he win his party's 2020 presidential nomination and the White House next year.

"I promise a presidency that will seek every possible way to do it. One of the things I have in mind for that first day is to ask people across the country to reach out to people you love, who voted differently, and call them up and not talk about politics, but talk about why you care about them," he said in Waverly, Iowa.

The mayor added that he didn't believe the world was made up "of good people and bad people," nor that a person's self-worth was based on how they voted.

"But I do think that the people we vote for can call out what is good in us or can call out what is bad in us. And we have leaders right now who call out what is worst in us, who make us resentful and small, and backward looking, and mean," he said. "If we get this right, not because I'm better or somebody who votes for me is better than my opponent or somebody who votes for them, but because we'll have leadership that reaches what is best in us."

Buttigieg regularly appeals to centrist Democrats by showcasing his pragmatic approach to politics and referring to his Midwestern roots. But his efforts to position himself as an alternative to former Vice President Joe Biden didn't stop him from potentially offending soft supporters, independents, and moderate Republicans considering caucusing for him on Feb. 3.

"We all love this country. We all recognize a flag that is supposed to be the thing we all have in common, but there's a difference between patriotism, real patriotism, love of country, and using the flag as a weapon to tell some people, they don't belong," he said in Algona. "That's not what I'm talking about when I talk about loving our country. I'm talking about a much deeper understanding of what it means to love our country, one the recognizes that our country is made of people, Americans, and you cannot love our country if you hate half of the people in it."

Buttigieg's trip, a three-day bus tour to make his pitch of hope and belonging, started in Des Moines after the Iowa Democratic Party's Liberty and Justice Celebration and ended with a town hall in Spencer. His visit kicked-off with the release of a New York Times/Siena College Iowa poll that showed him surging in the state and positive reviews of his speech at the "LJ" Celebration. His momentum, however, was blunted by an unforced error, receiving backlash over an interview with Showtime's The Circus, in which he said he foresaw the Democratic primary winnowing to himself and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

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