March 21, 2020
by Mickey Friedman
There’s voter suppression. But no one suppressed my vote. Instead, the gracious women at Great Barrington Town Hall made it an absolute pleasure to vote early. Then rewarded me with a sticker.
But my vote ascended to the netherworld. Counted only in the Halls of What Might Have Been. Because I voted for Mayor Pete who, between the time I voted for him and the real and actual election day, realized he wasn’t going to win.
In so many ways this has been an election that has pushed me beyond my usual biases. I’m not talking about Pete’s love for Chasten but about his politics. I’m certainly a lot closer to Bernie when it comes to Medicare For All and to Elizabeth when it comes to a wealth tax but along the way I’d grown to really like and respect Mayor Pete.
He’s smart and articulate and fast on his feet when it comes to answering questions. But his smarts never seemed to obscure his Catholic roots and his middle-class upbringing in a fading industrial small city. He was smart enough to win a scholarship to Harvard; smart enough to make it to Oxford and modest enough to return to South Bend, Indiana. Honorable enough that when he saw the young people of rural America go off to war, he knew it was unfair that the poor did what the rich wouldn’t. And so he ended up in Afghanistan.
It was an unusual act in a world where those with the most options try never to look back, then utilize their advantages to the max. It was remarkably disappointing to see some Bernie supporters, from the safety of their upper middle class haunts, try to demean Mayor Pete on Facebook for a choice they wouldn’t make. Some mocked his service as safe, suggesting he was sort of like an Uber driver, as if IEDs chose who to blow up. As if he should have come home wounded. As if they knew a fig about PTSD.
It’s become so very easy to demean others; to discount their struggles. Used to be we were taught the walk a mile in their shoes axiom before we looked away and walked on.
This election season offered an extended period of holier than thou, and it appears we’re in for a bit more in the Democratic Party in the months to come. How did it become so easy for Bernie supporters to wipe away all those years Elizabeth Warren went after the most powerful men in America, the corrupt bankers and lenders and financial frauds who plunged us into crisis? How did it become so easy for folks in front of their computer screens to discount a woman who defied odds and not enough money to make it in a man’s world, to the Senate where she routinely would call out some of the most powerful men for hypocrisy? It was Elizabeth Warren, after all, who most effectively took on Mike Bloomberg.
I figured a lot more folks in Massachusetts would vote for Elizabeth Warren and I wanted with my vote to thank Mayor Pete for both his personal and political honesty. Seeing him and Chasten work so hard together, with such obvious respect, and knowing a bit about how hard it was for them to find love in an Indiana that tried so hard not to recognize that love, well the least I could do was offer my vote.
And that’s what I mean about acknowledging that he had given me a gift more important than my belief that Medicare For All would accomplish more than Pete’s Medicare For All Who Wanted It. It felt good to vote without reservation. It felt good to vote knowing that Pete’s candidacy was important to me in a way that Barack Obama’s candidacy was.
If others wanted to focus on the fact that he worked for McKinsey & Company, well I once worked for GE Plastics. Who said life was easy? Who said we could live a pure life under capitalism?
What I appreciated most of all was that Mayor Pete apologized. On TV, in front of a national audience. Acknowledging how deeply racism has infected the nation. How hard it was as a Mayor in South Bend to prevent racism from infecting policing? How as a white man he couldn’t fully appreciate what it was like, at best, to be pulled over and stopped, or at worst harassed, even killed for the color of your skin.
Not an excuse but an explanation. So overdue. So terribly necessary. So very refreshing.
To me this is just a clear case of walking the walk. Not just the obligatory talking the talk that passes for run-of-the-mill liberal politics.
Another critical step forward in making America better. In the meantime, while Bernie and Joe bash their brains out, I’ll be missing President Pete.
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“President Pete” was first published in the March 12, 2020 issue of The Berkshire Record.