Today Pete Buttigieg was forced to admit that when he worked for corporate consulting firm McKinsey, he worked to cut the "overhead" of up to 1,000 jobs at Michigan Blue Cross Blue Shield.
This follows Pete buckling yesterday to Elizabeth Warren's pressure to (finally) let reporters into his big-money fundraising events. And to reveal his big-money fundraising "bundlers" who have included lobbyists and corporate executives associated with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Merck, Verizon, and Facebook.
Reporters are asking us how the public is responding to this news. Can you tell us: Has your opinion of Pete Buttigieg changed this week?
It’s gotten much worse.
It’s gotten somewhat worse.
It’s stayed about the same.
It’s gotten better.
These revelations are clearly rattling Buttigieg, a 37-year old mayor who lost his last two campaigns and never faced real scrutiny before. A political reporter at The Atlantic wrote:
In three years of covering Buttigieg, I’ve never seen him stumble as much as he did in a brief press conference after an event last Friday night in Waterloo, Iowa, where Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, had confronted him, asking him why he didn’t just break the NDA [with McKinsey]. Battered by rapid-fire questions from reporters about both McKinsey and his fundraising, he was curt and unrepentant, coming across as squirmy if not downright suspicious. On The Daily Show a few days later, Trevor Noah compared him to a teenager pretending he’d done his homework and then getting mad while trying to hide the evidence he hadn’t.
The Atlantic also points out that Pete is changing his biography to duck scrutiny:
In 2010, when he was running for Indiana state treasurer, he made his time as a consultant central to his pitch. During his presidential run, as the optics of McKinsey have changed, he’s actively tried to push that experience to the margins.
Pete was caught deceiving voters about his work to kill 1,000 jobs to help profits at his Big Insurance client:
The Atlantic today: "The work he did was mainly about, in consultant-speak, reducing 'overhead expenditures'...but he said he doesn’t believe that any of the work he did led to job cuts."
Former insurance exec Wendell Potter said today: "As a former insurance exec I know what that work really entails, and it is devastating...I see Pete describes his work there as just math. In a way, this is true. Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan had a math problem: profits were down and needed to go up. That’s when firms...bring in 'whiz kids' like Pete to decide how high to raise rates and how many jobs to cut." (Share this on Twitter.)
Buttigieg was caught today in a 2011 video saying: "I remember one client organization that was a large insurance firm that had grown in such a way that there was a great deal of duplication. Some people didn’t even know what the people working for them were doing." (Share this on Twitter.)
Take our short survey. Has your opinion of Pete Buttigieg changed this week?
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