Every Politician Is a Lying MF

Mayor Pete Buttigieg isn’t the only candidate caught spouting BS

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

By Isvari Mohan Maranwe

Since the dawn of time, politicians have been liars. This is not news. Sure, not everyone is a bald-faced criminal like Donald Trump, but elected officials are trained to sugarcoat, hide, and obfuscate. If they tell the truth by chance, they never tell the whole truth or nothing but it.

Maybe “cancel culture” can change that.

On Monday, The Root’s Michael Harriot called out 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg for being “a lying MF.” He wrote about how Buttigieg whitewashed minority education issues and bragged about being a Rhodes scholar and Harvard graduate when he was, in fact, just very lucky. Readers responded on Twitter with scathing comments against the mayor. Within a few hours, #PeteButtigiegIsALyingMF was trending.

Much of the attention focused on a quote that Harriot unearthed from Buttigieg’s mayoral run in South Bend, Indiana:

“Kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them,” Buttigieg explained whitely, when he was running for mayor in 2011. “You’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your education, there is a reward; there’s a stable life; there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids — especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods, who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t someone who they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”

Compared to scandals involving blackface or fabricated Native American ancestry — or everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth — Buttigieg’s comment seems relatively bland. In fact, many minority communities do think that their neighborhoods need more successful POC leaders. This is the type of quote I have heard from liberals of all stripes, including ones who actually work in this space.

So the problem isn’t that Buttigieg said this sequence of words. It’s that he didn’t say anything else. He didn’t acknowledge his privilege. Harriot says that Buttigieg shouldn’t say it can all be “solved with a vision-board.” And Harriot is right. It can’t be. But did Buttigieg say it could?

Instead, he just offered the same type of vague drivel that every politician delivers day in, and day out.

In the old days… a small group of white men in the media decided who got canceled and created the rules everyone followed.

Everyone who is capable of running for president in the United States is lucky. They were born here. They have fridges full of food and decent incomes. They have cellphones and social media and supporters. Anyone healthy is really, really lucky and doesn’t necessarily “deserve” it.

But no politician is ever going to acknowledge that. No politician is going to admit that they want fame. No politician is going to risk getting facts wrong, or talk about painful realities, when they can get thunderous applause from platitudes like “God bless America.”

The prevailing wisdom is that if you’re a politician who is brave enough to be honest, to talk about difficult issues, or to admit you’re fallible and undeserving, you won’t win. I’ve been told by well-meaning advisors that I should avoid going to therapy if I want to run for office in the future. That’s the way things are.

Conservatives (both Democrat and Republican) blame this on progressive, liberal cancel culture. They say that liberal Twitter will jump down your throat for anything you say. Your words will be taken out of context. If you go to a college party, they say, those images will be on the front page of the New York Times someday.

But I think cancel culture is actually making things better.

If you look hard enough, you will find quotes like Buttigieg’s from everyone running for office.

For example, in 2008, President Barack Obama criticized his former pastor for saying “God damn America” in protest of American racism. Obama said, “It’s that [the pastor] spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”

He was hedging like every politician, too. We are irrevocably bound to that past. It’s an ugly, awful past. And recognizing it — allowing people to protest it — is crucial to our democracy’s long-term success. Obama didn’t just lie, he used a lie to talk about how awesome his campaign was.

If you’re wondering why Obama didn’t mention the LGBT community in that diversity list, he didn’t publicly support marriage equality in 2008. We know now that he did support gay marriage, but that he lied because opposition to gay marriage was strong in the black church. As early as 1996, Obama had favored legalizing same-sex marriages.

So Barack Obama was a liar. And then he was the best president this country has ever had.

No one’s perfect. Politicians more than most. I don’t blame people for saying vague platitudes or for changing their minds about opinions they once held that were less than optimal. In fact, I love seeing politicians admit they were wrong.

But it is really hard to know who to vote for when everyone is lying all the time. When everyone is so filled with vapid statements and nice catchphrases that I have no idea what they’re going to do once in office.

In the old days, advisors like Obama’s David Axelrod (who told him to support civil unions, but not same-sex marriage) controlled news cycles and coverage. A small group of white men in the media decided who got canceled and created the rules everyone followed.

Today, yes, you can follow all the rules and Twitter might cancel you anyway. You can say things that sound nice and some smart kid with a phone can call BS on it. Then if you want, you can argue back. That’s a beautiful thing.

Look, politicians, no matter what you say, it isn’t “safe.” You can’t predict responses or context or impact on your polls. You can’t pull a Pete Buttigieg and say optimistic fluff that misses the point.

So maybe just tell the truth?