53percenter's Blog

Less than a week ago, President Trump issued a stern warning to the government of Mexico. They would need to step up their efforts to halt these caravans of migrants surging toward the United States or we would need to take steps that could impact both domestic policy on the southern border and endanger trade negotiations with that country. Do you think President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was paying attention?

The news from the southern portion of Mexico last night would indicate that he received the message loud and clear. A new migrant caravan had been making their way north, but instead of being welcomed with applications for asylum, hundreds were arrested by federal police and detained to await deportation. (Associated Press)

Central American migrants hoping to reach the U.S. now carry the added anxiety of the pursued after Mexican police and immigration agents detained hundreds in a surprise raid on a caravan in Mexico’s south.

While their compatriots were been taken into custody Monday, hundreds of other migrants scrambled away into the brush along the highway in Chiapas state to elude authorities.

Many had already learned they would not be received in towns with the same hospitality that greeted previous caravans, and now they know they won’t be safe walking along the rural highway either. Mexican authorities detained hundreds in the largest single raid on a migrant caravan since the groups started moving through the country last year.

AP journalists who have been traveling with the caravan estimate that as many as 500 arrests were made. The migrants were loaded into buses and taken to detention centers. Officials were going to interview them but expected the majority to be scheduled for deportation back to their home countries.

It’s true that the caravan had originally been estimated to contain up to 3,000 people, but this shrank the number considerably. A couple more raids like this could cut it in half. But this police action has the potential to move the needle in an important way. Up until now, these well-organized caravans have relied on two things. One is the strength that comes with numbers in terms of fending off the gangs that might otherwise prey on them. The other was the assumption that the Mexican authorities were going to mostly ignore them, if not assist them, and allow them to make their way to the U.S. border. If word gets around that this is no longer the case, the incentive to form up these caravans may begin to diminish.

AMLO is no dummy. He’s going to be dealing with Donald Trump for quite a while to come. There are trade negotiations to be worked out and questions of foreign aid. Much better to have a partner on the other side of the border than an opponent. And his own people, particularly near his northern border, have become increasingly distressed over the armies of migrants milling about. Mexico may have been reluctant to join us in these efforts at first, but it appears they now realize that it’s an investment for the future that they really needed to make.

He’s right, and the attention to which he refers isn’t the unflattering kind. He explicitly says that Buttigieg’s trailblazing status as an openly gay presidential candidate has been an asset to him (at least so far) — which feels vaguely scandalous coming from Frank. Normally among the left it’s acceptable to acknowledge progress in growing public acceptance of minority groups but to admit that minority status might be an advantage supposedly risks breeding complacency. The bottom line of every social-justice argument is “there’s much more work to be done.” Listening to Barney chatter about how being gay is momentarily helping someone in the race to become leader of the free world, that argument is a harder sell.

“If he were straight, I don’t think he’d be getting the attention that he’s getting,” Frank told host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Wednesday. But Frank added, that when Buttigieg “gets the attention, he is so talented and good at this and solid that he makes the most of it.”…

Frank called Buttigieg’s progress “both a sign that the prejudice is diminishing and it is an opportunity further to diminish the prejudice by giving him this platform.”…

“People don’t get heckled if nobody thinks they’re a threat,” Frank told Matthews about the protesters. “The fact that these bigoted lunatics start acting out in public, it’s a sign of their desperation.”

Democratic voters are still getting to know Buttigieg but his favorablility so far has been overwhelmingly positive, on the order of 50/5. If his orientation becomes a problem for him in the primary, it won’t be because voters sour on him or on the fact that he’s gay. It’ll come from their anxiety that an openly gay candidate just can’t prevail in a general election, especially against a candidate like Trump whose image relies so heavily on machismo. Remember this poll from deep-blue California last week?

Those numbers can change, of course. I’m sure there were polls in 2007 that showed Democrats highly skeptical that the country was ready for the first black president; a year later Obama won the most votes of any candidate in American history, a record that still stands. Buttigieg has something in common with Obama, namely, that his personal style contrasts sharply with the nastiest stereotypes thrown at people like him. Bigots will tell you that blacks are stupid, promiscuous, and aggressive; Obama was a Harvard-trained law professor, devoted family man, and so chill that people compared him to Mr. Spock. They’ll tell you that gays are effeminate, flamboyant, immoral, and extremely promiscuous; Buttigieg is a veteran, low-key in a classic midwestern way, a practicing Christian, and married to another man. Some progressives would claim that he’s not “gay enough” just as some of Obama’s “woker” critics on the left grumbled that his sense of black identity wasn’t as developed as it should be (he lost his first run for Congress in Chicago to former Black Panther Bobby Rush partly for that reason, in fact) but it’s their shared ability to turn stereotypes about the groups to which they belong on their heads that makes iffy voters more comfortable with them.

As for Frank’s point about gayness being an asset, I had the thought last night that we haven’t had a truly “traditional” presidential election in the United States in more than 20 years. The 1996 election, I’d say, was “traditional” notwithstanding Perot’s formidable third-party presence. We had a traditional campaign in 2000 but the results of the election itself were, er, untraditional. The 2004 election was untraditional because it was largely a referendum on Bush’s response to 9/11 and his decision to invade Iraq. 2008 and 2012 brought us the first black president and 2016 brought us the first woman nominee versus a celebrity real-estate developer turned game-show host. Whether there’s an actual “trend” in all that and/or whether it’s a byproduct of the country’s population becoming more diverse — of course we’ll have fewer white and male nominees over time — is a question left to smarter cultural critics than me. But it may be that some Democrats have effectively decided that their nominating process should itself be a vessel of social justice by elevating members of previously marginalized groups to fully mainstream status, in which case yeah, Buttigieg’s orientation would definitely be an asset next year. We’ve had a black nominee (and president), we’ve had a woman nominee, logically lefties would next want to signal that being gay also shouldn’t be seen as a political disability.

Here’s Frank. The clip is worth watching for two reasons, one Chris Matthews’s weird pronunciation of Buttigieg’s last name (he says Boo-DED-itch instead of BOOT-edge-edge) and the other Frank’s story of Joe Biden getting nuzzle-y in classic Biden fashion with … Frank’s husband.