Pete Buttigieg gets a standing ovation on Fox news
Dems don't darken the doorstep at FOX news. Pete Buttigieg thinks that needs to change.
Buttigieg headed over to FOX news in May, 2019 to talk with a crowd who at that time saw him as a presidential candidate. I don’t know if he would head over there now (I hope he would) or that he would be welcome if he did. I only viewed the You Tube video the last week before the presidential election and read it in the context of our vastly more polarized nation one year later. And for the first time in a long while, I felt like there was a glimmer of hope. Not that Biden didn’t offer at least some of that, but it was scripted, so inevitable. Buttigieg is talking with this audience like he means it, like he cares about what they think, like he intends to one day win them over. And they seem pretty winnable.
He characterizes them not as the hard core blind followers of Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, but as ordinary people who—he makes very clear—have not had the chance to hear his message. They haven’t heard it because Dems don’t darken the doorstep at FOX news and vice versa. And he thinks that needs to change.
It should not look so brave and radical for a candidate to talk with a news network audience. But it is radical. And he has thought very carefully about what he wants to say to them so that he articulates his positions without alienating the other side through inflammatory use of language. Watch how he handles the question of late-term abortions, for example. His values are clear, but he believes his audience is worth the trouble it takes to address them in terms that keep them listening. He is changing his discourse, not his stances.
There’s far too little of that!