The decision to release his client list came slowly, in political terms. As the calls for him to be more transparent about his consulting work got louder, Buttigieg initially resorted to saying he was bound by his NDA, which was true. But the pressure was clearly getting to him. In three years of covering Buttigieg, I’ve never seen him stumble as much as he did in a brief press conference after an event last Friday night in Waterloo, Iowa, where Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, had confronted him, asking him why he didn’t just break the NDA. Battered by rapid-fire questions from reporters about both McKinsey and his fundraising, he was curt and unrepentant, coming across as squirmy if not downright suspicious. On The Daily Show a few days later, Trevor Noah compared him to a teenager pretending he’d done his homework and then getting mad while trying to hide the evidence he hadn’t.

Realizing his position was untenable, Buttigieg asked McKinsey to release him from his NDA (his campaign said he’d first asked in June), and the company complied. Yesterday, his campaign announced that he would be publishing his list of McKinsey clients today at 6:30 p.m. eastern time. When I talked with him earlier today, he repeated a point he’s made several times previously: He said he’s disappointed in some of the work the company has done. “Since I’ve left,” he said, “there are at least four cases that I can think of where someone at McKinsey has done something upsetting.”

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By releasing the names of his clients and talking about his work at McKinsey, Buttigieg is trying to end this conversation. And he recognizes that the sudden public interest over his time there proves both that he’s being taken seriously as a threat by other campaigns, and that they’re not focusing on more substantive issues his campaign is truly concerned with.

“I think people are going to pounce on things no matter what. The best I can do is to explain my story—as much as I can responsibly share,” Buttigieg said. “But if folks are going to come up with a fanciful theory based on consulting work I did four and a half years out of school, chances are they’ll find a way to do it no matter what I say or do.”

But if McKinsey is doing bad or unethical work now, wasn’t that likely when he was working there? It was only a few years ago.

“It’s a place that is as amoral as the American business community in general, or at least the corporate community, can be. And that’s one of the problems with it,” Buttigieg said. “I never worked or was asked to work on things that I had a problem with, but it’s a place that I think, like any other law firm or firms that deal with companies, just thinks about client work and doesn’t always think about the bigger implications.”

Buttigieg has intentionally tried to position himself as the next Barack Obama, another “young man with a funny name,” as he put it in a big speech in Iowa last month. But this is among the points where they diverge. Obama took two years after college to work for a few thousand dollars a year as a community organizer in Chicago. Buttigieg came back from Oxford a Rhodes Scholar, and could have had almost any first job he wanted. He chose McKinsey, working out of a Chicago office a few miles from where Obama had been knocking on doors to fight for issues like tenants’ rights. To his critics, going to work at McKinsey at all says something about what the mayor values.