Ready, Amy, Fire… Miss!

All election season, we’ve heard the same names over and over and over: Buttigieg, Biden, Bernie, and Warren. Though one of them is the likely Democratic nominee for president according to the most recent polls , it’s important to evaluate what the other candidates have done, what they believe, and for someone like me, how they’ve performed at the increasingly hostile debates. And during the debate Wednesday, Mayor Pete fared well, but he had a target on his back, and Senator Amy Klobuchar wasn’t afraid to take aim.

She took aim at Mayor Pete’s lack of experience and at the same time highlighting what she called was a “double standard” that she believes there is for women running for president.  “Of the women on the stage, do I think we would be standing on that stage if we had the experience he had? No, I don’t.” Mayor Pete is accomplished as a person, without a doubt. He’s a Rhodes Scholar, a former active member of the Navy, and even graduated from Harvard. But what Amy Klobuchar was referring to was that Mayor Pete has never held statewide office, never held a position in congress, or even been in an executive position outside of being mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana. Speaking of his mayorship, he won that with less than 11,000  votes.

But did the Senator’s attempt to nail the experience target on Mayor Pete’s back work?  Buttigieg fired right back saying that there were more than one hundred years of Washington experience on the stage and asked people to consider if it’s helped put us in a desirable position as a country. More to his point, if we look back just three years, America elected a man who had never held political office before. Sure, he ran a billion-dollar company, but that’s not the same as dealing with the ins and outs of a nation’s urgent issues. The person that he beat was, at least from a resumé perspective, one of the most experienced people to be nominated for the presidency. And she lost. Experience carries with it the heavy baggage of a record, and records are always dragged through the dirt. (See Joe Biden at every. single. debate.)

Klobuchar is trying to carve out her own lane in the crowded democrat race. But the truth is, there’s little room left for moderate candidates as Biden and Buttigieg are two of the top four nationally, with the latter being the first in recent Iowa polls. Her effort to attack Mayor Pete’s experience is going to be the first of many, not only from her but from the whole field. But they should be wary. Washington has not been a popular place for decades; Americans still like outsiders who can bring fresh ideas to the table. The Senator should probably take aim at something else.