Pete Buttigieg must be surging, Wonkette exposes dirty twitter troll tricks against him

[Celerity]

9. he was talking about the buttons, shirts, etc etc that were ubiquitous and using it as a partially

comparative metaphor to fully answer the question.


here is the complete exchange

Esquire:

One of the hallmarks of the campaign so far has been a really rich and detailed debate about policy within the Democratic Party. Is that what's important right now? Or should the Democratic Party simply be organized around the simple premise that Donald Trump is a national emergency and must be defeated above all else and that the policy particulars should take a back seat to that?

Buttigieg:

So actually I don't agree with either of those approaches. The problem with making it all about him is that's what we did in 2016, and when we make it all about him, then there's a lot of voters in places like the industrial midwest, where I live, who say, "Okay, but who's talking about me?" Part of how we lost our way in 2016 was, first of all, it was all about our own nominee. "I'm with her," was literally the button.

Then when we realized who the Republican nominee was going to be, the message became, "Don't vote for him." And we just left a lot of people out because it didn't seem like we were talking about the lived experience of Americans.

For the same reason I don't think that we should do the usual Democratic thing, which is experiencing your competition through competing policy proposals. I think that policy matters, I'm a policy guy. But I think that you need our altitude to be both higher and lower. Higher in the sense that I think we need to talk about values and principles, that's why I'm out there talking about what freedom and democracy and security mean before we get into the depth of any policy idea. And at the same time also be talking in terms that are nearer to the ground, really explaining what we believe in in terms of everyday lived experience and how different under us it will be than under them. And that's how good political narrative works.

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Wonkette's take

So the context is not "Why do you hate Hillary Clinton and all the women who supported her," but rather "should Democrats focus on the threat of Donald Trump to the exclusion of all else?" AND ALSO "what should the role of policy arguments be in this election?" It's rather a lot. Notice that, in the discussion of how much to focus on Trump, most of his answer is about why making that the sole focus would be a bad idea. The bit about "I'm with her" is hardly the main point, but there it is, highlighted BY ESQUIRE in both the pull-quote (worse, in the middle of an unrelated question) and the freaking subhed, as if slagging Hillary had been Buttigieg's whole reason for doing the interview.

Watson and others then disingenuously used the out-of-context, chopped 'quote' to falsely slag off Buttigeig via a false meme.




also I’m With Her was from the campaign itself


The Story Behind “I’m With Her”
And three other iconic campaign designs from the Hillary Clinton campaign.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90109190/the-story-behind-im-with-her


At an event in March put on by the New York chapter of the professional design association AIGA and the design team for the Hillary Clinton Campaign, graphic designer Ida Woldemichael opened her speech with a bang. “So you’ve all heard the phrase, ‘I’m With Her,’ yes?” she asked, and then paused. The crowd’s strong applause seemed to suggest the answer was yes. “I wrote that,” she responded simply.

It wasn’t a humble brag—the story that proceeded that statement, about how Woldemichael came up with “I’m With Her,” illustrated the way that setting up a branding system for the campaign allowed for deliberate design decisions to be made even in the most harried of scenarios. “I’m With Her” went from Woldemichael’s sketchbook to a bumper sticker in a matter of days.


[Image: courtesy Hillary for America]

Yes, the phrase “I’m With Her” was invented by a designer one random morning in the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. It has since come out of so many mouths, been used in so many articles and hashtags, and been scrawled on so many signs–and is generally so entrenched in our rhetoric about Hillary Clinton now–it was almost a surprise that it had any origin story at all.

Of course it does—all things do. And while the team of designers on the campaign couldn’t have predicted it would take off to quite the degree it did, that lack of clear origin, or campaign ownership, was in some ways deliberate. Woldemichael described the team’s strategy for “un-designing” certain campaign graphics so that supporters could fill them with their own meaning, in turn making them more likely to go viral. “Our goal was not to be cool,” she said at the event. “It was to be accessible and even own-able.”

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