Should Rich People Be Allowed in the Democratic Party? – By Ben Mathis-Lilley (Slate) / Jan 2 2020
Sure, if they can get used to not always being the loudest voices in the room, and to the room not necessarily being a wine cave.
Pete Buttigieg raised $24 million for his presidential campaign in the fourth quarter of 2019, his campaign announced Wednesday. That’s an enormous sum for someone with Buttigieg’s résumé—far more than U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar have raised in any quarter of the campaign, and more than Joe Biden pulled in.
Buttigieg and his donors, though, have not been in a celebratory mood. The end of the quarter found them feeling aggrieved , misunderstood, and mistreated because of criticism they’ve been taking from others in the Democratic Party, which came to a head after the Dec. 15 fundraiser Buttigieg held in a windowless, stone-lined room at Napa Valley’s Hall Winery. That was the now-infamous event that moved Elizabeth Warren to declare, at the Dec. 19 primary debate, that “billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.”
Craig and Kathryn Hall, proprietors of the cave and hosts of the event, conveyed their feelings to the New York Times, which reported that they they were “frustrated” at having been “unfairly targeted.” Said Craig Hall, who attests to being one of the most liberal people in his professional and social circle: “These people don’t know who they’re talking about when they throw me in the class that they did.” A cave donor named Bill Wehrle wrote in the Washington Post that the event was a straightforward Q&A at which Buttigieg fielded earnest questions about a range of issues from people with normal-sounding professions (he cited a “former flight attendant” and the dean of a community college). “Surely,” concluded Wehrle about the fundraiser, “Democrats can find more important things to debate in the United States of America at this dark hour.”
As Hall and Wehrle asserted their right to give money to Buttigieg in a luxuriously appointed cave, so too did the candidate assert the necessity—nay, the urgency—of taking that money. “We need everybody’s help in this fight. I’m not going to turn away anyone who wants to help us defeat Donald Trump,” Buttigieg said at the debate, adding that “if I pledge never to be in the company of a progressive Democratic donor, I couldn’t be up here.” He pointed out that Warren herself is a millionaire and said that by criticizing him for listening to millionaires she is advocating a “purity test” that she herself can’t pass. Democratic heavyweight David Axelrod endorsed Buttigieg’s counterattack, tweeting that Warren had committed an “unforced error” by opening herself up to stories about having held private fundraisers during previous campaigns. (She announced in early 2019 that, like Bernie Sanders, she wouldn’t be holding them while running for president.)
Buttigieg and his defenders portray his willingness to engage with the rich as a manifestation of open-mindedness. They’re trying to recenter the wine cave controversy on the question of whether it’s fair to treat being wealthy as a fundamentally corrupting, illegitimate state that should preclude one from being allowed to have opinions and participate in democracy.
It’s a canny and perhaps even understandable approach. It treats Warren’s debate-night attack and other comments that she and Sanders have made about the donors who gain access to luxe events as appeals to envy. Warren made pointed references to symbols of wealth—“a wine cave full of crystals” and “$900-a-bottle wine”—as if to suggest she would prefer a more aesthetically flattened, drab society, its rough wooden tables topped only with plain bottles of Government Wine Product. (For what it’s worth, Hall said that while the winery does sell extra-large $900 bottles of wine, the most expensive standard bottle it has available costs $185.)
Continue to article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/pete-buttigieg-elizabeth-warren-wine-caves-and-the-future-of-the-democratic-party.html
