WATCH: Mayor Pete DID Cite Barack Obama By Name While Discussing ‘Failures’ That Led to Trump
Despite recent confusion over whether 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg did blame former President Barack Obama for the rise of President Donald Trump in an interview with LA Times reporter Evan Halper, another video interview with NBC News’ John Heilemann shows that he did attribute at least some blame to the former president.
“To me, the biggest dividing line among the candidates is there’s the candidates who are like the Itchy and Scratchy candidates, like it’s all fight, fight, fight… Then there’s the unity candidates. They’re like the, ‘Let’s go back a little more Barack Obama, disagree without being disagreeable, we’ve got the bring the country together.’ So which side of the line are you on?” asked Heilemann.
“Well, I guess I would put a twist on it,” replied Buttigieg. “So we definitely have to get beyond fight, fight, fight. But, I also don’t believe that we can go back. I don’t think there’s going back to Obama, I don’t think there’s going back to Clinton. I think that the world we’ve been in, the American political world we’ve been in, from the day I was born, has been blown up.”
After being asked what blew it up, Buttigieg explained, “By its own failures which culminated in Trump.”
“Look, if the old way worked, something like Trump would never have been possible, and so I’m really pushing off two things. I’m pushing off the idea that infinite political warfare is going to be the way forward for this country, but I’m also pushing off the idea that there’s any such thing as back to normal. There’s just not. There can’t be,” he proclaimed. “Normal didn’t work. Normal didn’t work in the industrial mid-west, where I live. Normal hasn’t worked for my generation. And our job is to figure out the new normal, and it’s going to take fighting, it’s going to take building.”
On Monday, after an alleged controversial quote from Buttigieg that read, “The failures of the Obama era help explain how we got Trump,” went viral, Halper was forced to correct his interview article and claim that Buttigieg had actually said, “failures of the old normal.”
Despite this, there has been skepticism over what Buttigieg actually said.
Watch above via Showtime.
