Pete Seriously Fucks Up

Once upon a time, candidates careers were destroyed over much less. Muskie’s wayward tear, Howard Dean’s scream, Biden’s plagiarized speech, Dukakis being photographed in a tank and looking like a total dork. But, now we are in the Trump era, so I don’t know.
Our current story takes place in South Carolina. It’s the first of the primary states with a large black population, and Buttigieg is not the most popular person in the world with black people. In fact, as mayor of South Bend, he’s been precisely on the wrong side of the whole Black Lives Matter movement.
So, I guess he felt he needed to do something, so he came up with “The Douglass Plan.” Now, I’ve only scanned the table of contents. It looks like he says some nice things about education and prison reform, but it seems a lot of the money is going into grants for black entrepreneurs. Not exactly horrible, but it seems very much like an Andrew Yang solution to a problem that’s more complicated than that. That said, my problem is not with the plan itself.
It’s not even with the fact that the illustration accompanying the plan is a stock photo – a bit tacky for a major campaign, but hardly criminal. The picture is of a black woman squatting down to talk at face level with a black child – a nice photo. Which was shot in Kenya. I don’t know why they couldn’t have taken a photo of some black people in South Carolina but, again, that is not the problem.
The problem is that Buttigieg reported that 400 prominent South Carolinians had endorsed the plan, which kind of implies that they endorse Buttigieg.
Of the three most prominent black people on the list, two politicians and a minister, one said that she thinks the issues in the plan need to be discussed but that doesn’t mean she’s voting for Buttigieg, and the other two said something more along the lines of “WTF? I didn’t put my name down for this shit.”
It gets worse. Half the names on the list were white people, some were not South Carolina residents, a few names appeared on the list twice, and several couldn’t be located at all so may just have been made up names.
Apparently, the campaign sent out an e-mail to a bunch of people and said “If you don’t want to endorse this plan, please let us know before 4 p.m.” So, people who didn’t read the plan at all, or just glanced and then ignored it, had their names on the list.
The main thing for me, the reason I think this should end his campaign, is not so much the cheating aspect of it. It’s the ‘how stupid does he have to be to think he could get away with this’ aspect of it. This was a public, online thing. Did he think people wouldn’t notice that their names were on his list? Does he understand how the internet works?