Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is at number one with a bullet in polls this week, including the gold-standard poll of all-important Iowa, so everyone expected he would bear the brunt of attacks in Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, sponsored by MSNBC and The Washington Post.
Instead, the other candidates let Buttigieg off the hook over the nearly two-and-a-half hour debate.
California Sen. Kamala Harris, who had attacked former Vice President Joe Biden over race in an earlier debate, decided to give Buttigieg a pass over his campaign’s use of a stock image of a black woman (who turned out to be Kenyan) to illustrate his plan to help African Americans.
The moderators teed Harris up for an attack on Buttigieg’s core vulnerability — his weakness with black voters and racial tensions back home in South Bend — but she pivoted to a wider issue.
“I was asked a question that related to a stock photograph that his campaign published,” Harris said. “But listen, I think that it really speaks to a larger issue and I’ll speak to the larger issue. I believe that the mayor has made apologies for that.”
No one wants to be the first to attack Buttigieg, who is widely popular among Democratic voters. So, they’ll probably wait to see if Buttigieg still has momentum before deciding whether to unload on him at next month’s debate.
