| THE LEDE The biggest story in Democratic politics remains simply that Joe Biden is still strong. So much of the analysis of what’s to come in the primary — Warren and Sanders duking it out, Buttigieg or Bloomberg rising — depends on his collapse. Still not happening.
How We Got Pete: Marriage equality was, in some sense, a conservative cause — it was about bringing LGBTQ people into existing social institutions, rather than reimagining them, and one of the great conservative lawyers was the one who took the case to the Supreme Court. Shannon Keating’s perceptive piece from the left about Mayor Pete captures this: The political transformation that made his campaign possible also means that the first major openly gay presidential candidate would be a man of the center.
What the hell is Loblaws? One of my favorite things about covering presidential politics is that it’s simply a window into…everything. Whatever it turns its hot spotlight on. In this case, it was Canadian bread prices, and somehow this was our most popular story when I was in the newsroom yesterday afternoon:
Pete Buttigieg had nothing to do with a decade long scheme to fix the price of bread across Canada, his campaign said in a statement, despite an internet theory that bubbled up after Buttigieg disclosed that he had done consulting work on supermarket pricing for the Canadian chain Loblaws during his time at McKinsey.
TEXTING WITH Deval Patrick I texted this week with Deval Patrick, the successful and well-regarded former governor of Massachusetts who left office in 2015. He ran on elements of Barack Obama’s message (and even the same language)…before Obama did. And I think he might well have had the 2016 nomination had he run then. But he’s getting in awful late now, and I began by asking him about that. ON THE TRAIL WITH BUZZFEED NEWS Here’s Henry with the full list of clients Pete Buttigieg worked with while he was at McKinsey.
Also from Henry, a terrific on-the-ground account of Buttigieg’s relationship with the black community in South Bend, Indiana.
Deval Patrick spoke with Darren and took some not-so-subtle digs at Elizabeth Warren.
This past weekend in Iowa, Nidhi spoke with Cory Booker, who had a scathing critique of how the Democratic party has run the primary process.
Nidhi also was on the bus with Joe Biden, when he offered a forceful defense of how he handles criticism of his son.
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