Pete Buttigieg secretly role-playing as Mike Pence to help Kamala Harris embarrass the vice homophobe on live TV
Democratic presidential candidate former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, is role-playing as Mike Pence (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Pete Buttigieg is currently spending his days impersonating Mike Pence to help Kamala Harris with vice presidential debate prep.
In a strange twist of fate, Buttigieg is role-playing as Pence as the Democratic vice presidential nominee prepares for their one-on-one debate on October 7, according to a Bloomberg report.
In some ways it’s perfect casting for the mock debates, as the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana has a long history with Pence, who served as governor of Indiana before becoming vice president.
But the irony of the most homophobic vice president in decades potentially being defeated with the help of the first serious gay presidential hopeful in US history is simply too great for words.
One Twitter commenter wrote: “Pete Buttigieg playing the role of Mike Pence in Kamala Harris’ debate prep is a piece of poetry to rival the finest haikus.”
Another added: “This is perfect on so many levels.”
Former Mayor of South Bend Pete Buttigieg (David Cliff/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Buttigieg repeatedly crossed swords with Pence during his Democratic primary campaign — with the vice president posting a smiling selfie alongside a pastor who had called for Buttigieg to “repent” his sexuality.
The clash between Harris and Pence is much anticipated, with supporters hoping that the Democratic firebrand will live up to her record of forensic destruction by finally taking the vice president to task for his long and ugly record on LGBT+ issues.
Mike Pence has never been challenged over anti-LGBT+ views in a debate.
Pence has gone broadly unchallenged in public over his deeply homophobic past, with Hillary Clinton’s ineffective vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine facing criticism in 2016 for a blundering debate performance in which he failed to even once challenge Pence’s views, despite an open goal on the issue.
Kaine later said he did not raised the issue because “there was no question that was asked that dealt with Governor Pence or just the issue of LGBT equality,” leading many to scratch their heads at his apparent windsock strategy for the debate.
He added: “I viewed this as fundamentally a debate that was about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, not about Tim Kaine and Mike Pence. So I went in with the thought that, look, Hillary Clinton is the top of the ticket, and Donald Trump is the top of the ticket, and that’s where I’m going to focus. That was my goal and I think we succeeded at doing it.”
Needless to say, Tim Kaine did not ultimately “succeed” at becoming vice president.
