WATCH: This Clip of Mayor Pete Making Birther Joke Had His Campaign Staff Livid on Twitter

Tommy ChristopherDec 3rd, 2019, 12:34 pm
 

South Bend Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s 2018 joke about the racist “birther” smear against former President Barack Obama sent his 2020 campaign into attack mode when a clip of the quip was posted on Twitter, without commentary.

At a Kansas Democratic Party event in 2018, Buttigieg devoted a portion of his speech to “values,” and mocked the “alternative facts” at play in national politics while explaining his love of local politics.

“Freedom, fairness, family, those are our values, not because they make for nice speeches, or good theory, but because we know what they mean to real people living everyday life,” Buttigieg said. “And it’s time for Democrats to speak that language of real life like we know how to do in this part of the country. To build a new politics of the everyday that will light our path forward.”

“Radical conservative experiments have failed when you look at them in the harsh light of what actually happens on the ground,” he continued, and added “What I love working at the local level is that there are no alternative facts when it comes to people’s everyday experience. I filled in the pothole or I didn’t. It’s not like proving whether I was born in the U.S., it’s right there for everybody to see.”

That clip, replete with several paragraphs of context, was posted on Twitter without any commentary on Monday by Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher, who is me. The tweet simply read “‘I filled in the pothole or I didn’t, it’s not like proving whether I was born in the U.S, it’s right there for everyone to see.’ – Mayor Pete with the Birther joke (from March 3, 2018)”

In fairly short order, there were a few negative reactions to the joke, including from MSNBC commentator and former Hillary Clinton senior staffer Zerlina Maxwell, who retweeted the clip with a frowny-face emoji.

Maxwell’s reaction prompted a response from Buttigieg campaign Rapid Response Comms Director Sean Savett, who explained that President Obama also mocked birthers.

Buttigieg Senior Advisor Lis Smith retweeted the clip with the notation “Oooh a top secret video unearthed from ***checks tape*** 1000 person Dem dinner where local and national media were in attendance. I’m pretty sure @PeteButtigieg is not the first Dem to mock birthers and their alternative facts. In fact, I recall @barackobama doing the same.”

Smith then attacked the clip of Buttigieg’s own words as the work of “bad faith merchants,” and Buttigieg Traveling Press Secretary Nina Smith similarly called the tweet a “bad faith, desperate attack.”

The clip of Mayor Pete’s joke was also called “disinformation” and “misleading.”

But the campaign couldn’t really explain their reaction to what was an accurate conveyal of their own candidate’s remarks, except to accuse “opponents” of… spreading an Obama-esque joke?

Alas, not everyone agreed about Mayor Pete’s joke.


Maxwell tried to explain her objections to Buttigieg’s staffers, and others.


This apparently wasn’t even the first time Buttigieg used the joke, as another user pointed out:


In the end, the campaign’s rapid response — simultaneously defending the joke as Obama-esque and attacking it as an attempt at devastating opposition research — contributed to making the clip go viral. Now you can watch it above, via the Kansas Democratic Party.

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