Q Toon: Buttigieg Out

Pete Buttigieg's suspension of his presidential race caught me just as I was about to draw something else for Q Syndicate, and it was something of a scramble to come up with a cartoon marking his withdrawal. Given that the syndicate's market is the LGBTQ+ press, I figured it was what those editors would want.

Even though one or two of the other candidates in this cartoon were bound to drop out after Super Tuesday.

Originally, this cartoon had Amy Klobuchar in it, but then she pulled out of the race just a few hours after I sent my cartoon off to the syndicate. Fortunately, I had put her somewhere where she was easy to remove — although that bit of plaid betrays where she had been. (It's gone from the higher-resolution files I sent chasing after the first emails to Q Syndicate.)

Some of my newspapers won't be on the newsstands until Thursday or Friday, by which time the more difficult task of removing Bloomberg and/or Warren is likely to be warranted.

Well, that's the drawback to not having my cartoons printed within a day of being drawn. Events have a way of ganging agley of expectations. For all I know, Tulsi Gabbard could ride her second-place finish in American Samoa all the way to November. And then this cartoon would look pretty stupid.

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Buttigieg's campaign was remarkable in that a young, gay, married, small-city mayor was taken seriously at the presidential level; and that the small-city part, and perhaps the young part, probably ended up being larger obstacles than the gay thing.

What might the future hold for Mayor Pete? The political landscape in Indiana being what it is, he has little chance of being elected to higher office there. He might try taking on four-term Republican Congressman Jackie Walorski, but getting elected Governor or Senator there would be a steep uphill climb. 2020 seems an unlikely year for a Democratic white male presidential nominee to select another white male as his running mate, so perhaps a cabinet post would be a more realistic opportunity.

But the guy showed that he could be taken seriously; so even as he heads into the sunset for now, I hope we haven't heard the last of Pete Buttigieg.

Q Toon: LGBTQ Town Hall Highlights

 

CNN hosted a town hall event last week in which Democratic presidential candidates appeared on stage one by one to take questions from audience members and CNN news anchors.

Senator Elizabeth Warren had the viral moment of the evening, answering an audience member's question about how to respond to someone who believes in defining marriage as exclusively one man to one woman. "Well, I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that," she said. "And I'm going to say then just marry one woman, I'm cool with that — assuming you can find one."

Former Congressman Beto O'Rourke gave a firm answer to a question, sidestepped by Senator Cory Booker earlier in the event, about tax exempt status for religious institutions that oppose marriage equality:

"There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights or the full civil rights of every single one of us, and so as president, we are going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

It was one of many moments of the evening that have been held up as examples of thumbing the party's nose at Middle America and kowtowing to the Gay Mafia.

Senator Kamala Harris echoed the new practice of introducing onesself by adding "My pronouns are she, her and hers," and I really can't fault her for that. It was host Chris Cuomo who stuck his foot in his mouth by quipping "Mine, too." (He has since apologized.)

Former Vice President Joe Biden should hardly have to prove his bonas fides on the issue of marriage equality; most of us remember him getting out ahead of the rest of the Obama administration in advocating the cause. Uncle Joe made a point of demonstrating how comfortable he is palling with The Gays, complimenting a questioner about his outfit, and joking about "coming out" by putting his arm around host Anderson Cooper. In this #metoo era, he probably would have caught hell if those had been a female questioner or Dana Bash.

Frankly, and predictably, none of the candidates said anything that put any daylight between themselves and the mainstream LGBTQ community at large. O'Rourke and Mayor Pete Buttigieg handled protesters with seriousness and respect, as did hosts Cooper and Don Lemon. Warren thoroughly disavowed her 2012 statement opposing taxpayer funding of gender reassignment surgery for prison inmates.

I should note that the Saturday Night Live parody of the forum did a serious disservice to Senator Cory Booker. I've read the 1992 op-ed he wrote for the Stanford Daily, which the SNL sketch characterized as demeaning to gays. It most certainly is not; it is instead a full-throated apology for having ever had any antigay animus.

Finally, I must apologize for not including Julian Castro in this cartoon. Lin-Manuel Miranda's father, however, has assured me that his son is available next time I draw any cartoon about the Democratic candidates for president.

Elizabeth Warren, Nevertheless

Here's the third in a series of caricatures of 2020 Presidential candidates.

Warren rose to national prominence as an advocate for consumer protection in the financial markets, the need for which was demonstrated by the crash of 2008, brought on by careless lending practices and over-easy credit. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created largely due to her advocacy

President Barack Obama nominated her to head the CFPB in 2010; but Republicans — whose idea of consumer protection is to force consumers to agree to a 4,000-word release form forfeiting all expectation of product safety, the right to a fair and public hearing should any harm befall them, and if they don't like it, a gag order for themselves and all future generations — blocked Warren's nomination and have rendered the CFPB toothless under Corrupt President Donald Trump. Nevertheless, she persisted, and in 2012, she unseated GOP Senator Ted Brown to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.

She may be the third oldest candidate in the Democratic presidential race (after Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders), but she is arguably the feistiest. If living up to her slogan of "Warren's Got a Plan for That" makes her come across as wonkish and schoolmarmy, it keeps her from being compared to Hilary Clinton, whose campaign relied too lightly on a plan for the next four years and too heavily on a sense that it was Her Turn.

But she can be compared to Clinton in the sense that Republicans already loathe her. Sticking up for consumers is anathema to the Chamber of Commerce set, and the very idea that government should be useful is heresy to Tea Partisans. Republican stooges are sure to draw her as a wannabe Injun, based on her having accepted some overstated family lore of Native American ancestry. Warren Derangement Syndrome will plague her campaign, and her administration should she win the presidency.

Well, it's not as if the right-wing media machine would be any less harsh to any other Democratic president, or Mitch McConnell wouldn't devote every millisecond of the next four years to making a one-term president of whatever Democrat takes office. It takes a World War to get our political parties to put aside partisanship even for a moment, and I for one will take partisanship over World War III any day.

But I hope Warren's got a plan for dealing with Republicans in Congress dead set against all of her other plans. Obama thought he could work with them, and he was wrong.

QToon: Tommy v. Tammy

National media attention this week has been on tonight's debate between President Barack Obama and Bain Capitalist Mitt Romney. Less attention gets paid to the congressional and senatorial debates around the country, by and large, although the Elizabeth Warren v. Scott Brown debate over the weekend did get some tongues wagging.

(As an aside: I don't buy the media spin that it was a gaffe when Warren started to answer a question about which Republican now in the Senate she could work with on major issues by citing Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar is "now in the Senate," as David Gregory phrased the question, even if Lugar won't be there once the next Congress is sworn in. And while a Democrat might be able to work with, say, Marco Rubio on immigration reform, or Rand Paul on limiting government surveillance of private citizens, on "major issues," the Republicans who will be calling the shots if Scott Brown is reelected have no interest whatsoever in working with any Democrats.)

Last Friday in the race to succeed retiring Senator Herb Kohl, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and Madison area Congressman Tammy Baldwin met in what was billed as a debate. It was no such thing; the format consisted them taking turns answering questions from four TV/radio people. They each got to give one answer to each question, and there was no opportunity for rebuttal or response to each other. The one time a questioner asked what he called a follow-up question, he changed the subject from abortion to marriage equality. Well, that's not a follow-up question; that's a question asked out of turn.

Having breezed through several debates in his races for governor, Thompson was at ease with the format, repeating his favorite talking points frequently but as if they were fresh new thoughts each time -- so that any given one of those sound bites could be used in news reports or his own campaign commercials. Baldwin faltered a bit more at the outset, with enough umms and uhhs that I began to wonder if she had only crammed for the event on the drive to the studio. But she addressed the questions directly, with detailed facts, and without harping on a select few talking points all night; and she seemed more comfortable by the end of the hour.

And, unlike Thompson, Baldwin did not come off as downright scornful of her opponent. It rang strange when, after Baldwin had given her answer to a late-in-the-debate question asking what could be done to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, Thompson blurted out with mock astonishment, "I'm absolutely surprised! That's the first time I haven't been blamed for something or George W. Bush!"

Thompson brought up his wife three times during the debate, although, curiously, he never said her name. Now, admittedly, that's fewer times than he said that he'd cut taxes 91 times, but one wonders what kind of point he was trying to make. There was nothing all evening that he said that he hadn't planned beforehand to say. I have to suspect that this was a "dog whistle" to the people whom he wanted to remind that Ms. Baldwin is one of those scary lesbians.

What else went on during the evening?

We learned that somehow, when nobody was looking, Tommy Thompson built a hospital in Afghanistan. The morning-after research finds that not all is well with that particular project:

A contractor's assessment of the hospital found that Afghan physicians at the hospital often did not have basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology and lacked skills needed to resuscitate women and infants. In addition, the hospital routinely lacked basic supplies, including surgical gloves and antibiotics.

More impressively, he also built Wisconsin. He even claimed to have brought Wisconsin unemployment down below 2%. (Politifact disagreed with an earlier claim of 2.1%.) But don't blame him for any of today's problems. He's not in Congress, he's a private sector.