He Is Through Playing Mr. Nice Guy, but He Has Also Become a Target

That call for unity became a signature part of Buttigieg’s bid for the White House. In the September debate, Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, interrupted a testy exchange between former Vice President Joe Biden and former housing secretary Julián Castro to warn that going on the attack against fellow Democrats would be counterproductive.

“This reminds everybody of what they cannot stand about Washington, scoring points against each other, poking at each other, and telling each other that — my plan, your plan,” Buttigieg said. “Look, we all have different visions for what is better.”

One week later, though, Buttigieg shifted his approach. He called Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts “evasive” on her plans for paying for “Medicare for all,” kicking off a monthslong clash between the Harvard graduate and the former Harvard Law professor.

For Buttigieg, the strategy of going on the attack has largely worked. He didn’t cement his place in the top tier of the Democratic primary until he became more aggressive.

His aides say they have been successful in drawing Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont into advantageous policy fights on free college and eliminating private health insurance, which Buttigieg opposes. And in Iowa, where Democrats famously say they don’t like negative campaigning, Buttigieg has not been punished for going on the attack — in fact, he has been rewarded.

But on Thursday, Buttigieg may be in for some payback. As the polling leader in Iowa, the first caucus state, he is likely to draw substantial fire from most of the six other Democrats debating onstage at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

If so, it would be Buttigieg’s first experience as the primary punching bag, an honor that has gone to Biden and Warren in previous debates.

During the November debate, Buttigieg largely got a pass from his rivals in a sleepy affair in Atlanta. But since then he has been the subject of attacks from Warren on his fundraising practices, from Sanders on health care policy and from other Democrats skeptical of his postcollege work for the McKinsey consulting firm and his ability to appeal to African American voters.

Since September Buttigieg has mounted a sustained onslaught — most of it aimed at Warren, but also against Sanders and Biden, with occasional shots at other candidates now far beneath him in the polls.

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“His pressures on Warren and some of the farther left policies is expanding the Democratic base, allowing some more moderate people to feel like they have a voice in this race,” said Bryce Smith, the Democratic Party chairman in Dallas County, Iowa.

Buttigieg’s attacks coincided with his shift to the political center away from the more progressive proposals that powered the earlier days of his campaign.

But they have also dovetailed with a growing resentment from rival candidates as they have seen him surpass them in the polls.

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Like Barack Obama in 2008, Buttigieg aims to emit a spirit of optimism enmeshed in a negative campaign. ( Obama’s “change” applied equally to George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton.)

Meanwhile, his record appealing to African American voters has come under increasing scrutiny, testing his electability in a contest in which beating President Donald Trump is of utmost importance to Democratic voters.

Here’s a look at how Buttigieg has gone after his leading rivals, and what they have said in response.

Buttigieg vs. Warren

Buttigieg has leaned into his attacks against Warren with more enthusiasm than any other rival. In Iowa, the two are fighting for a similar bloc of voters — college-educated whites who are paying close attention to the campaign. As a result, the contrasts he has crafted with her have been more charged and personal than any other conflict in the campaign.

Back in September, Buttigieg began attacking Warren as “evasive” because she hadn’t yet released details of her health care plans.

Within a span of three days in October he got under the skin of the Warren campaign with two distinct attacks. On the eve of the CNN/New York Times debate, he belittled Warren’s policy of not holding closed-door high-dollar fundraisers by saying Democrats won’t defeat Trump with “pocket change.” Then after the debate he told CNN that “last night she was more specific and forthcoming about the number of selfies she’s taken than about how this plan is going to be funded.”

By November, after Warren had released the health care details Buttigieg had called for, he said “the math is certainly controversial” in one interview and in another called her plan “divisive.”

After refraining for months from by-name counterattacks — without naming Buttigieg, she had argued in early November that “consultant-driven campaigns” were sure losers — and watching Buttigieg surpass her in Iowa polls, Warren had finally had enough. This month, at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, she demanded that Buttigieg allow reporters into his closed-door fundraisers.

“Mayor Pete should open up the doors so that anyone can come in and report on what’s being said,” Warren told reporters in Boston. “No one should be left to wonder what kind of promises are being made to the people that then pony up big bucks to be in the room.”

Four days later, the Buttigieg campaign announced he would allow reporters into his fundraising events and release a list of campaign bundlers.

She has since moved on to attacking Buttigieg’s “Medicare for all who want it” health care proposal, which would keep in place the existing health insurance industry Warren and Sanders have pledged to dismantle.

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“His plan is not offering full health care coverage to anyone,” she told reporters in Iowa on Monday. “His plan is still about high deductibles, about fees, about copays and about uncovered expenses. What I’m offering is full health care coverage.”

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Buttigieg vs. Sanders

When he was 18, Buttigieg wrote an award-winning essay lauding Sanders. When he joined the presidential race, Sanders was among the first rivals he attacked, saying in an April interview that Sanders couldn’t win a general election.

By September, Buttigieg was denouncing the “Sanders-Warren vision” of health care in TV interviews, then promoting that contrast in digital ads on his Twitter feed.

His Iowa TV ads in September for the first time mentioned Sanders and Warren by name. More recently, he suggested in a CBS News interview that his past praise for Sanders was merely a product of his youth.

“You know, the Sanders campaign definitely has more young voters,” he told CBS. “I was a big fan of Bernie Sanders when I was 18 years old.”

And last week Buttigieg repeated a suggestion he first made during the summer that the Medicare for all proposal that Sanders has championed for years would put millions of insurance industry employees out of work. He made the accusation during an interview with Rachel Maddow in which he defended his time working as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co.

“There are some voices in the Democratic primary right now who are calling for a policy that would eliminate the job of every single American working at every single insurance company in the country,” Buttigieg said.

Like Warren, Sanders had avoided firing back at Buttigieg until recently, preferring to let online allies like Jacobin magazine do that work for him. But last weekend in Iowa, Sanders fired a shot of his own, saying Buttigieg wishes to preserve an unfair health care system.

“If you maintain a system where millions of people continue to get their private, their insurance from their employers, the average worker in America making about $60,000 a year is paying $12,000 for their health care,” Sanders told a crowd in Burlington, Iowa. “That’s 20% of somebody’s income. If Buttigieg or anyone else wants to maintain that system, I think that is really unfair to the working families of this country.”

Buttigieg vs. Biden

Buttigieg has made fewer direct attacks on Biden than on his more progressive rivals. The two share a base of older voters, and each has sought to chart a more moderate path to the Democratic presidential nomination.

Instead, Buttigieg, 37, has drawn an implicit contrast with the 77-year-old former vice president. He speaks about forging a new political era and dismisses long-tenured Washington politicians as part of the nation’s problems he aims to solve.

At the same time Buttigieg, who has demonstrated scant support among black voters for his campaign, has dismissed Biden’s long connections with the African American community.

In November, he told donors at a California fundraiser that black voters were sticking with Biden because of “familiarity” and not because he is “the candidate with the best answers on the subject of race,” according to a report in The Intercept. Weeks later, speaking to Fox News, he said Biden’s edge with black voters was not “permanent.”

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Biden, who has a tendency to be condescending to younger people who question his record, has refrained from calling Buttigieg a young whippersnapper.

But on his campaign bus in Iowa this month, Biden told reporters that Buttigieg “stole” his health care plans and suggested that reporters had gone soft on the South Bend mayor.

“What would you have done to me?” Biden asked. “You’d have torn my ears off.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .