Frankie makes birdie first, puts pressure on Tiger, who promptly drains it too and he walks it in. Frankie is 13 under and Tiger is 12 under. This is getting good.
Tiger Tracker @GCTigerTracker
We have a developing situation. Frankie just made bogey on the seventh hole, and Tiger made birdie. Tiger Woods is one shot off the lead on Sunday at the Masters.
A big part of Peak Tiger Woods was his ability to scramble and save par when things weren’t going well. Ironically, that’s what Molinari is doing now – not as spectacularly as Tiger used to, but just as effectively.
The lead extends to two strokes for @F_Molinari following a fourth birdie in a row. He has three holes left to play today at #themasters https://t.co/ux7bmEzahH
“Tomorrow’s going to be an early wake-up call, get the body going and get the mind ready.”
Tiger Woods discusses how he will approach contending on Sunday at the Masters with our @Amanda_Balionis. https://t.co/PsuTFwSbAS
Golf Digest @GolfDigest
Bob Harig @BobHarig
Masters’ Last-Rd Start Moved Up
GOLFonCBS @GOLFonCBS
Given the possibility of severe weather Sunday afternoon, Masters final-round tee times and CBS Programming have been adjusted. https://t.co/5izAFsRdXg
Molinari Is on Fire
Masters Tournament @TheMasters
Three birdies in a row gives @F_Molinari a one-stroke lead going to the par 5 No. 15. https://t.co/jULkWfVXnt
Well, yes and no. In 1977, “Gay Bob,” marketed as the world’s first gay doll, was sold through mail-order ads in gay magazines. And I’m sure that Mattel still thinks about the “Earring Magic Ken” fiasco of 1993, and his “necklace.”
But there’s nothing inherently gay about dolls themselves – they’re toys, pieces of plastic after all. In the same vein, there’s nothing inherently gay about doll collecting as a hobby, as a passion, as an art form.
Dolls are cultural reflections of the times, for better or worse. But doll brands like Barbie that are symbols of hyper-heteronormative, old-school femininity are being reclaimed and reinterpreted by adult LGBTQ collectors in a new way. And don’t think the toy companies are unaware — they’re not, and they are absolutely involved.
More recently the main way collectors are expressing this kind of love and solidarity, and where community can be found, is through the internet and social media. This is a space where the toys’ brand narrative has usually been out of corporate hands. But companies like Mattel are in it now, noticing these LGBTQ fan communities, and vying for their digital eyes.
Now THIS is what the Dreamhouse should look like.
Image: THE SIMPSONS/ Fox
Coming out of the (doll) closet
Many adult collectors choose dolls because of the nostalgia associated with collecting toys from their childhood. Younger LGBTQ collectors aren’t connecting as much over the nostalgic dolls themselves, as much as they are using social media to connect with other gay fans.
Tumblr user @dolljunk, who used to collect Barbies as a young boy, got into it again as a young adult through online fandoms. “Internet groups were a great way of connecting to other collectors. I had never even heard of [doll-related social media], let alone other collectors and when I went to my local library, I found a multitude of forums and fan sites that detailed how people collected dolls such as customizing, photography, and numerous guides for doll releases. It really opened my eyes to another side of playing with and seeing dolls.”
LGBTQ collectors are also identifying with the messages of newer doll franchises, and the potential for what the dolls can represent. Monster High collectors in particular are mostly Millennials who never grew up playing with the dolls themselves, but with whom the brand’s identity has resonated.
Dott, a doll collector active on social media, introduced her collection, saying “I mostly collect Monster High, but there’s some Barbies, Ever After Highs, and Descendants strewn in there.” For reference, all of these brands were created after 2009. “Monster High’s my main focus because…well, I think I connect with the lore the most. Unlike a lot of doll collectors, I love the lore aspect as much as, if not more, than the actual dolls. And there’s something about the MH media that I just adored.”
In an article from the University of Connecticut titled “Valuing queer identity in Monster High doll fandom,” author Sara Mariel Austin wrote that “Monster High’s recent ad campaign claims, ‘We are monsters. We are proud.’ Race, ethnicity, and disability are coded into the dolls as selling points. The allure of Monster High is, in part, that political identity and the celebration of difference…”
If the messages intrinsic to these brand identities are like this, it’s no wonder that LGBTQ doll collectors connect with these dolls on an emotional level. Social media doll communities like “Dollblr” and “Dollstagram” have also inspired other ways for a group that’s traditionally marginalized to express themselves.
A passion for fashion: doll artistry and expression
Doll collecting is, inherently, at least somewhat escapist. There’s something that feels revolutionary about being constantly bombarded with the idolized bodies and lives of cisgender heterosexuals on social media, and then going “screw that! I’m gonna take this toy, make it a representation of me, and imagine a new world with it.”
Utilizing dolls as an art form – through mediums like photography, clothes-making, customization/modification, and fanart – allow for LGBTQ collectors to envision a world free of toxic masculinity. Creating doll art in and for an online world allows a safe space for folks to literally “play” with their own femininity and subvert gender roles as they see fit.
“It’s something that’s a nice escape from real life? We aren’t worrying about gay stuff if we’re rerooting a doll head, cause we keep pricking our fingers on accident, and our wrists and palms are sore from using pliers. In all seriousness, I think it’s a form of self-expression,” Dott told Mashable about the physical art of doll modification and customization.
The way that @dolljunk connects to his collection emotionally through art is similar. “Dolls and toy collecting [are] a great creative outlet…and can encompass fashion design, hair styling and face painting/makeup while also offering a way of creating new items,” he said.
“It resulted in me becoming more secure in my identity and interests because Barbie, for better or for worse, is a symbol of hyper femininity that doesn’t allow any room for toxic masculinity in her world. Being able to get in touch with my feminine side and interests was a big contributor to accepting my sexuality as being an intrinsic aspect of myself that didn’t need to be changed,” @dolljunk said.
And for many LGBTQ folks, especially gay boys and trans girls, that’s incredibly important. Even Carlyle Nuera, who is now the lead designer for Barbie Signature at Mattel, sees the growth in these social media communities as being rooted in collective childhood experiences.
‘They kinda create this fantasy world, this beauty that they never really had access to as a kid.’
“I think for a lot of us, in different ways, for different reasons, we feel repressed growing up,” Nuera said. “Depending on our homes, our family situation, we might not feel safe expressing ourselves. I think a lot of people when they start to have expendable income, they kinda create this fantasy world, this beauty that they never really had access to as a kid. They can see it — and I think they can sort of create it with their own dolls, by customizing their own dolls, or with photography. And then also to share with other people, cause you can connect with other people [on social media].”
Dolls are humanoid, so it’s easy to project our wants, desires, and dreams onto them. And if we alter their resemblance enough, they can mirror us back in ways we hope society will someday.
Does life in the Dreamhouse have to be so straight?
Toy companies, though, are already creating their own miniature worlds with their own identities for the dolls through tie-in media. With various outlets and extensions of their brand, they impose their own meanings onto the products. Mattel and Hasbro, for example, have their own TV shows and movies. Barbie has the Netflix series Life in the Dreamhouse; Monster High and Ever After High had their own movies and webisodes, and Hasbro has the massively successful My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series.
They also have flashy social media accounts with good fashion photography and witty interactions. Barbie is now an Instagram influencer, as well as a vlogger with her own popular YouTube series. Mattel once ran an entire in-universe Monster High school newspaper through their Tumblr account.
The presence of toy companies on social media is intriguing though, given that the minimum age for Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook is 13. So who really is the audience for these branded doll accounts?
While these companies likely don’t want to risk alienating the parents who buy dolls as toys for their kids, it’s also seems fair to say they want to capture this LGBTQ adult interest in their products. There have been brand partnerships like with Crayola, meant to solely market towards kids. But when you have Mattel partnering with Lady Gaga’s Born this Way Foundation for Monster High, it’s obvious that they spend at least some time thinking about their messaging that can be subtly aimed at the LGBTQ community.
Especially since in a lot of their media franchises, there’s a heavy focus on messages about being yourself, accepting others, and celebrating our differences — great lessons for kids of course, but all of which resonate deeply with LGBTQ doll fans.
Milissa C. is a big fan of the Monster High and Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse series, alongside collecting the dolls themselves. She believes that the connection between the brands and the fans is deliberate. “[We] members of the LGBT+ community are oftentimes made to feel like we are not normal because of our feelings and our identities. Monster High encourages people to celebrate what makes them unique, ‘freaky flaws’ [as the main character Frankie Stein says] and all. LGBT+ doll collecting communities will certainly imagine more of their dolls to represent themselves. Every time I see a post from the official Barbie Instagram accounts where Barbie is obviously having a date night with a lady friend, I think — bi queen!”
Connecting to the storylines as much or more than to the dolls themselves is a celebration of LGBTQ identity, in Dott’s case. “Mostly because Monster High’s entire concept is centered around embracing who you are. Plus, it was my special interest when I realized I was a lesbian. Mattel never gave us any canon gay characters in that franchise, but I find it profoundly moving that lots of lesbians/bi girls see themselves in characters like Clawdeen [daughter of the Wolf Man] and Twyla [daughter of the Boogyman].”
Yet, she’s right — the representation so far hasn’t been that explicit. There’s a line between using broad metaphors to illustrate big concepts (mainly for kids), and allowing the diversity of the real world to exist and be seen on the small screen.
Despite knowing that he is far outside the target demographic, @dolljunksays that toy brand media “influences or recontextualizes the designs of the dolls I collect. A good piece of toy tie in media often encourages its audience to invest in the universe they have created, and I’ve seen it result from kids to adult collectors to go on to create their own fanart or fan characters. That being said, in the future I really do hope they are able to innovate and modernize for an ever changing audience in a world with changing attitudes and values.”
From the Ever After High episode, “Dragon Games.” This was supposed to be “CPR”. Yeah, right.
Image: NETFLIX / MATTEL
Dott says she always hopes for more explicit inclusivity. “Put some canon LGBT characters in your doll and toy franchises. Show kids that it’s okay to be gay or bi or trans! It hasn’t got to be something big; maybe a boy character has a schoolyard crush on another boy, you know? Just something small like that to get the ball rolling. Companies still have to do better.”
Not having canon LGBTQ representation is not unique to doll media, but because the companies have opened the door by putting these messages front and center, doll collectors engage with the media as a way of reclaiming identity, and then push the representation further than canon allows for. Toy companies arguably owe it to both children and adults, LGBTQ and not, to step up with better depictions of diversity because they’re already toeing the line.
Progress is being made, slowly but surely. There are new dolls and action figures coming out of prominent IRL figures and fictional characters who are LGBTQ. Last year on Instagram, Barbie wore a shirt that said “Love Wins.” Even in doll-related media, companies are beginning to test to waters — in 2016, Mattel’s movie series based on the doll line for Ever After High featured an on-screen kiss between two princesses.
For many collectors, it’s not enough anymore to simply admire and collect these fashion figures. They want to see themselves in the dolls that they’ve been projecting onto for decades.
So while we wait for the brands’ next move, gay culture will keep claiming dolls because we know in our hearts that they’re ours as much as anyone’s. Barbie? More like Bar-bi.
Facebook went down Sunday morning, in an outage that has affected all of the company’s social media platforms. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are all experiencing similar outage issues.
Users across the globe have reported difficulties using Facebook and Instagram. Issues on the social media sites range from users’ inability to log in to newsfeeds being unable to refresh. The outages are also preventing WhatsApp and Messenger messages from being sent.
DownDetector.com, a website which tracks online service outages, lists tens of thousands of reports from users confirming the sites are down in their area. (Disclosure: DownDetector shares a parent company with Mashable.)
The issues seem to have started around 6:30 a.m. ET and have persisted for hours. On Twitter, where most users often go when there’s outages on Facebook’s social networking sites, #FacebookDown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown have been trending worldwide all morning.
This latest instance of Facebook’s services going down comes just one month after the company’s biggest outage in its history.
In March, it took Facebook 24 hours to announce that the issue which took its social media services offline had finally been resolved. The company blamed a “server configuration change” for the outage.
Mashable has reached out to Facebook for information on what’s causing Sunday’s outages.
Sunday nights are an exciting time on HBO, and not only because Game of Thrones is returning.
Barry, HBO’s Emmy-winning comedy and one of Mashable’s top new shows of 2018, may be only a few episodes into its second season — but fans already have burning questions about the future of Gene Cousineau’s acting class, the murder of Detective Janice Moss, and the inner workings of the Los Angeles mob scene.
Anthony Carrigan, the actor behind series favorite NoHo Hank, spoke with Mashable about what viewers can expect from Barry Season 2, how he pictures an average day in the life of his character, and when, if ever, Hank will become Barry‘s main villain.
Oh, he also filled us in on where Hank got that fox mug and who Hank sees taking the Iron Throne at the end of Game of Thrones: Season 8 — occasionally slipping into his fake Chechen accent for added Hank-ness. Enjoy!
Tell me about the process of auditioning for Barry and how you went about finding the heart of such a unique character.
First of all, the script was so, so good. All of these characters were fleshed out and so interesting, really. Already on the page, there was so much to work with. And as soon as I read that this gangster was nice? I was like, “Okay, I know exactly what I want to do with him.”
From that point on — once I got the role — I got to do all the stuff that I studied in acting school. You know, give this character much more physicality, assign like an animal to him, and all this fun stuff of creating a very fleshed out, manifested character.
Barry creator and star Bill Hader said in a recent interview with Uproxx that NoHo Hank was supposed to die in the pilot, but that fellow Barry creator Alec Berg insisted that Hank survive because you were so hilarious as him. Any reaction to that?
[Laughter] Yeah! Thank you, guys. I’m really happy that Hank did not die. I read that in the script and I was like, “Wow. This is intense. So he just gets shot.”
But then Bill pulled me aside and was like, “Dude, don’t worry about it — you’re fine. We love you and you’re not going anywhere.” So I’m literally taking him for his word on that.
Hank is kind of a mysterious character in a lot of ways. What does an average day look like for him?
“Honestly, I think Hank is better suited to being like a hotel concierge than a mob boss.”
Average day for Hank? I feel like he probably pops up at like 5:30am, probably hits the elliptical for like an hour and a half, while reading tabloids or something. And then probably goes shopping in like Glendale? [Laughter]
And then maybe like mid-day before lunch, orders a few hits on people. Negotiates a massive drug deal. Then, orders lunch. Tries to keep it low-carb.
Post lunch? Probably like a group therapy session with him and all of his guys. Just to touch base and make sure that their emotional well-being is being seen to. And then, like a movie night. Something fun, like Turner and Hooch.
Sounds pretty great.
Oh, for sure.
Hank’s fox mug has become pretty popular among Barry fans. Any idea where he got it? Was it a gift? Did he get it for himself?
I think that was one thing that he probably saw at Marshalls maybe and was like, “Hey, I love that.” He probably got it on sale.
Outside of running the Chechen mob, what do you think Hank’s dream is? Does he always want to work in organized crime? What’s his long-term plan?
He certainly loves being of service to people. Honestly, I think Hank is better suited to being like a hotel concierge than a mob boss. Probably at somewhere like Disneyland.
Outside of work, do you think Hank has a girlfriend? A boyfriend? Is he on Tinder or OkCupid? Is he “seeking” right now?
[Laughter] You know, that’s something that I’m sort of keeping under wraps. It’s a good thing to have a little bit of mystery in there.
But the best dating app for Hank? Maybe he’s still waiting to hear back on Raya, but hasn’t gotten the confirmation yet. So he’s kind of anxious about it, and nervous.
On Hank’s relationship with Barry — which has obviously become such a big part of the show and a pretty critical component of the plot — when do you think Hank decided Barry was his best friend?
Well, Hank is such an optimist that I think as soon as he brought Barry into the fold, as soon as he called him to take care of this whole Ryan Madison issue, I think he was like, “Yes. This guy? This Jason Bourne from Cleveland and I? We’re gonna be best friends.”
“Anyone who is under a lot of pressure and a lot of stress is liable to lash out.”
Of course, that relationship has certainly been put to the test.
Plenty of fans have been fixated on that moment in Season 2, Episode 2 when Hank sort of turns on Barry, and for the first time becomes a real threat to him. Do you think we’ll ever see Hank become a full-fledged villain in the show?
I don’t want to give away too much. But I will say, Hank is obviously in a position of a lot more power and responsibility, and because of that there’s a lot more pressure. And anyone who is under pressure and a lot of stress is liable to lash out and feel like they’re under the gun — quite literally.
As an actor, how do you wrap your mind around what that would be like? That pressure?
It’s not part of my skill set to do all of these kind of gruesome things.
One would hope not.
Honestly, if I were a mob boss, I would probably lead things in a similar way to Hank, making sure that everyone is eating well and looking after themselves and making sure that they had a spa day every once in a while. [Laughter]
But that whole other aspect of killing people and murdering people, that requires a lot of deep-seated trauma. It’s part of a really difficult business. I’m glad I’m not in it.
Do you think there is a dark core to Hank? That he has some horribly tragic backstory? As viewers, we don’t know much about him outside of the events that have taken place in Los Angeles. It’s hard to imagine where came from.
“If I were a mob boss, I would probably lead things in a similar way to Hank.”
Yeah. It’s so funny when you’re talking about a television character because a lot of these things can get fleshed out in later seasons — so you only kind of have a vague guess of what it is.
My sense is that Hank grew up in a really tough place, that he had a tough upbringing. He experienced a lot of loss that shaped him into the person he had to be to survive where has was. But a lot of what this season talks about is that people’s true natures can be diametrically opposed to who they’re trying to be.
The many sides of Hank make up a lot of what fans love about him, and how he reacts differently to varying situations is so fascinating. Are you eager to see Hank cross over more into the personal side of Barry’s life and possibly interact with some of the other characters we’ve come to know and love?
I don’t even like to tease myself with that thought, honestly. It would be so cool to see what Hank would be like in the acting class. For the most part though, I can’t tease myself with that.
To work with that side of things would be almost too good. I love all of those actors. I love Henry Winkler. The only times I really get to see them are when I sneak on set.
And finally, in the spirit of celebrating HBO’s Sunday night lineup in general, can you tell me who NoHo Hank thinks is going to win on Game of Thrones? Who is his bet for the Iron Throne?
“Let’s say Jon Snow, because he’s in such good shape.”
Oh! Let me think. Uhm … I’ve never thought about that. Let’s say Jon Snow, because he’s in such good shape. [Laughter]
So that’s his justification? Just because Jon’s so fit?
Hank’s like, “Yeah. You can tell when he takes his shirt off that, wow, that guy — he keeps his cardio up and it shows. If he needs to outrun the White Walkers? It’s done!”
That and also, I mean like, “Wow. What a specimen.” [Laughter]
Thanks so much for solving that one for us. Anything you’d like to add about what Barry fans can expect from the rest of the season?
This season takes some really interesting twists and it gets really dark, but it also stays incredibly funny. So, I’m really excited for fans to check it out.
The preceding interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Barry airs Sunday nights on HBO, following Game of Thrones.
On the latest Saturday Night Live, BTS brought something that few other performers on the show can manage: intense fandom.
The K-pop boy band superstars showed American audiences just how powerful the ARMY — that’s what their fanbase is called — really is. The energy in the live studio audience is palpable in both YouTube clips of their performances — of “Mic Drop” and the new song, “Boy With Luv” — with the usual polite clapping replaced by shrieking cheers.
Watching them perform (if you haven’t before), it’s easy to see what’s so appealing. They’re completely in sync (no boy band pun intended), trading off vocal lines while executing perfectly choreographed dance moves.
See for yourself, here’s “Mic Drop.”
They also performed “Boy With Luv,” which premiered just days ago and immediately took over on Twitter’s worldwide trending list. The song dropped with the rest of their new album, Map of Your Soul: Persona, on Friday.
For all the excitement evident in the audience, the loudest cheers reverberated across social media as the BTS ARMY noted all the enthusiasm and welcomed the legion of newly converted SNL-watching fans.
To put the impact debate to rest once and for all, here’s Google trends for the US in the last 7 days. You can see that SNL exposure is MASSIVE. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise or being insecure of others’ opportunities. Trust.#BTSxSNL@BTS_twtpic.twitter.com/HdkApnnjJk
What if Julian Assange, Lori Loughlin, and Michael Avenatti — all of whom are currently in a wee bit of legal jeopardy at the moment — ended up sharing a prison cell? What would they talk about? Would they compete for who did crimes the best?
That’s the scenario the Saturday Night Live writers dreamed up for the latest episode’s cold open sketch. There’s even a special appearance by Michael Keaton, playing Assange, and a gleeful recreation of his “Let’s get nuts!” line from Tim Burton’s 1989 take on Batman.
It’s not particularly funny or anything. But it’s a refreshing move away from SNL‘s relentless commitment to telling bad political jokes during the cold open.
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With Game of Thrones being the cultural juggernaut that it is, it’s hard for #brands to not want to join the party. Thrones‘ nine years on the air have yielded all kinds of weird partnerships, so here are some of our favorites, new and old. Some are good and some are useless, but such is the game of brands.
Given the success of theirstunning Harry Potter line, Alex and Ani’s Thrones products aren’t that surprising or bizarre. The Lannister and Targaryen pieces are particularly striking, but something tells us that if Arya Stark knew you were wearing a tribute necklace for her, she might strangle you with it.
Price: $39+
9. Dragon egg candles
Hot Topic can’t not jump on the nerdy merch train (shoutout to every piece of Harry Potter gear I owned in high school), but the fire/dragon/Targaryen link here seems tenuous. Are we burning the dragon eggs themselves, thereby incubating them? Or are we the Unburnt, harboring eggs and fire at home?
Price: $26.32
8. Whiskey
Image: mashable composite/johnny walker
Johnny Walker White Walker is an all-time great brand partnership. There’s plenty of drinking in the Thrones universe, but the Johnny Walker team found the perfect way in and timed the release to fill the sizable hype gap before Season 8. The walker’s eyes turn icy blue when it’s sufficiently chilled, and you can find specific cocktail recipes by Gabe Orta on the website.
Price: $65
7. Monopoly
Image: hasbro/hbo
The game of Monopoly can have many of us at our loved ones’ throats much like the siblings of Westeros’ most powerful families, so Thrones-ifying this treacherous board game is actually pretty clever on Hasbro’s part. It even comes with a card that plays the theme song on a loop, because that won’t set you on edge at all!
Price: $44.95+
6. Makeup
Urban Decay’s For the Throne collection launches right along with the Season 8 premiere and has us planning our whole summer look around winter. The collection promises looks inspired by the major houses of Westeros (and the White Walkers) and products including an eyeshadow palette, highlighter, Dracarys Lip & Cheek Stain, and brushes modeled after famous swords Longclaw and Needle.
Price: $19+
5. Mountain Dew
Image: mashable/proma khosla
We’re not sure what prompted Mountain Dew to board the Thrones bandwagon, or what stopped them from naming this drink “The Mountain dew,” but here we are with a soda can starring Arya’s kill list that shows the names clearly when chilled. Sure!
4. Oreos
Why though? Do you think we’re not already stress-eating every kind of Oreo from the sleeve while watching this terrifying show? WE ARE. And now they’re branded.
3. Sneakers
Don’t get us wrong, these sneakers are fresh as hell, but how on Earth did this idea come about? Sneakers don’t exist in the Thrones universe (jewelry and liquor at least do), but if you love them you won’t be able to resist the subtle Thrones nods in the details.
2. MLB bobbleheads
Image: foco
File under “why does this exist” but also “I don’t hate it” – there is literally no reason in seven hells to make a bobblehead of the Night King holding a baseball bat, yet the end product elicits feelings of pleasant surprise and even contentment.
Price: $45.00
1. The official mixtapes
Image: hbo
“Catch The Throne” released in 2014 and included music by Snoop Dogg, Common, Daddy Yankee, and more. It was a weird enough flex then, but HBO recently announced a followup: For the Throne, featuring music from artists as varied as Mumford & Sons and Ty Dolla $ign.
Hassan Abdal, Pakistan – Hundreds of Indian Sikhs have celebrated the religious festival of Baisakhi at one of their religion’s holiest shrines in the northern Pakistani city of Hassan Abdal, even as tensions between the South Asian neighbours remain at fever pitch.
More than 1,890 Indian Sikh pilgrims, mainly from the states of Punjab and Haryana, were among thousands who participated in the festival at the Panja Sahib shrine in Hassan Abdal, about 35km west of the capital Islamabad, on Sunday.
Hundreds of men and women dressed in colourful clothes lined up at the gurdwara, or shrine, to witness the reading of the final passages of the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism’s holy book, which is considered by Sikhs to be a living saint.
Over the last 48 hours, the book had been recited from start to finish by devotees, and at its end all of the thousands of pilgrims present offered a collective prayer.
Baisakhi is a celebration of the anniversary of the tenth Sikh saint, Guru Gobind Singh’s decision to formalise the identity of the Sikh community.
The Indian pilgrims arrived in the country by foot at the Wagah-Attari border between India and Pakistan on April 12, senior civil official Imran Gondal told Al Jazeera, and will stay in the country until April 21, completing pilgrimages to a number of other holy sites.
Sikhism, founded in the 16th century by Guru Nanak, has roughly 25 million followers around the globe, with most resident in India’s western Punjab and Haryana states.
Pakistan, the site of the religion’s founding and home to some of its holiest sites, also has a small population of tens of thousands of Sikhs.
‘Felt my faith renewed’
In February, tensions between nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan spiked after a suicide attack in the disputed region of Kashmir killed at least 40 Indian security forces personnel.
India blamed the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad armed group and the Pakistani government for carrying out the attack, conducting retaliatory airstrikes on Pakistani soil on February 26. A day later, Pakistan conducted strikes of its own, with both country’s fighter jets also engaging in an aerial dogfight.
At the height of hostilities, some of the pilgrims thought they would have to forego their trip this year.
“I had initially thought that whatever happens, even if there is war, it will happen both here and there so I’ll go regardless,” said Ravinder Singh, 48, who runs a footwear store in the Indian city of Simla and was visiting Pakistan for the first time.
Ravinder Singh, 48, runs a footwear store in the Indian city of Simla and was visiting Pakistan for the first time. [Asad Hashim/Al Jazeera]
Singh said it was important for him to perform the pilgrimage this year because he felt the compulsion of his faith.
Sikh’s believe that the Panja Sahib shrine is particularly sacred because it contains a large boulder that bears a handprint that they believe belongs to Guru Nanak, the founder of their religion.
It is said that, after a dispute with a local Muslim saint over providing drinking water, Guru Nanak placed his hand upon the earth and a spring of water appeared. At this, the enraged Muslim saint threw a boulder from his hilltop shrine, which the Sikh saint stopped with his hand.
The stream, to this day, runs through the centre of the gurdwara, and it forms a pool around a small alcove where the rock is visited by pilgrims.
“When I saw and touched the stone, I felt like my faith had been renewed,” said Dilbagh Singh, 52, a farmer from the village of Sant Nagar, in India’s Haryana state.
Inside the inner gurdwara, a woman in a teal shalwar kameez recites from the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism’s holy book, as devotees prostrate themselves before it. She sits within an ornate white shrine made of plaster and colourful glass set in intricate geometric designs.
A woman reads from the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism’s holy book, as devotees pray around her [Asad Hashim/Al Jazeera]
A crystal and glass chandelier hangs from the roof, also tiled with glass in symmetrical patterns.
Inside the room, there is a hushed silence, as pilgrims read from holy texts or listen to the recitation. A few weary travelers get a few minutes of sleep, tired from multiple rail journeys and having to sleep on floors through much of the trip.
Soon, a young man in a blue shalwar kurta and pink turban takes the dais, relieving the previous reader.
Outside, the sound of devotional songs fills the air, as a group of singers and musicians plays tablas, harmoniums and sings. They sit in a separate hall, but their intricate harmonies cascade across the rest of the gurdwara, bathing it in sound.
‘We are one people’
“It will be best if there is peace here, between the two countries,” says Jagah Singh, 70, who retired from the Indian army after 30 years of service and was on his first pilgrimage to Pakistan.
“If there is war, all will suffer, on both sides,” said Jagah Singh. “We are one people.”
It was not quite Jagah Singh’s first trip to Pakistan. During the war between India and Pakistan in 1971, he says he recalls eating lunch at a railway station in the Pakistani town of Shakargarh, after a major battle between the warring nations.
Now, however, he says he believes that peace is the way forward for both countries.
“When I saw Guru Ji’s handprint for the first time, I felt happiness at seeing how he created a spring of water in this place from nothing,” he says. “And this water, it is for everyone.”
When he returns, he says he will tell his countrymen that Pakistan “is a great place, and we are all brothers”.
Siv Singh, 52, a fellow resident from Jagah Singh’s town of Nangal, echoes that sentiment, saying he looks forward to returning to the country soon through a visa-free corridor being established for Sikh pilgrims.
View of the crowd gathered for the Nagar Kirtan ritual of the Baisakhi festival [Asad Hashim/Al Jazeera]
In November, Pakistan and India agreed to create a visa-free corridor between the Sri Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara in Pakistan and the Indian town of Dera Baba Nanak, about six kilometres away.
The shrine in Kartarpur is of particular importance in Sikhism, as within it is the grave of Guru Nanak, and it is where he spent the final years of his life, farming the fields and formalising what would become the Sikh religion.
Technical talks on the Kartarpur corridor are currently the only platform at which Pakistan and India are engaging bilaterally. The latest technical talks on the issue are to be held on Tuesday at the Wagah/Attari border, according to Pakistan’s foreign office.
“Kartarpur is very important for us,” said Siv Singh. “Our Guru spent so many years there, farming and praying.”
Baisakhi is a celebration of the anniversary of the tenth Sikh saint, Guru Gobind Singh’s decision to formalise the identity of the Sikh community [Asad Hashim/Al Jazeera]
The talks remain a point of contention in the current atmosphere, however, with India postponing the last round, drawing accusations from Pakistan of attempting to delay construction before the November deadline, which would be Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary.
Earlier this month, Pakistan’s foreign minister accused India of preparing to launch a military attack against Pakistan in April.
“Pakistan has reliable intelligence that India is hatching a new plan for aggression against Pakistan,” Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters in Multan. “This can happen in between April 16th and 20th.”
India’s foreign ministry dismissed the accusations as “irresponsible and preposterous”.
Still, fears remain high in the region of any return to an escalation of hostilities between two countries that have fought three all out wars and several limited military engagements since gaining independence from the British in 1947.
Asked if possible hostilities would have any impact on future plans to visit shrines in Pakistan, Ravinder Singh paused before answering.
“We try to stay out of questions of war,” he says, as he gazes out at the rock with Guru Nanak’s hand imprinted on it. “We need to earn a living, and we need to do our religious duties. We’ll do that, and the rulers, they can do whatever they want.”
A man serves chapattis (flat bread) at the langar [Asad Hashim/Al Jazeera]
London, United Kingdom – A British citizen with Asperger’s syndrome who was accused of hacking into US government agencies and had faced extradition said Julian Assange has been put on the “sacrificial alter”, as he warned that the WikiLeaks founder’s arrest could have a damaging effect on press freedom.
Lauri Love, 34, was accused by the US of belonging to the international Anonymous collective and involvement in hacks in 2012 and 2013 targeting the FBI, NASA, US Army, Missile Defense Agency and the Federal Reserve. He faced 99 years in prison in the US, but last year won his appeal against extradition in a landmark case.
“The extradition of Julian Assange is crucial to the US because he’s been a thorn in the side of the US power-base, particularly regarding secrets exposed with the assistance of Chelsea Manning and other leaks about US military activities and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Love told Al Jazeera by phone on Saturday.
“WikiLeaks embarrassed the US government by shedding light on powerful people who do horrific things with public money and as a result, Julian has been put on the sacrificial alter.”
Almost 10 years ago, WikiLeaks released classified documents on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which exposed US war crimes.
British police arrested Assange on Thursday from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after the South American country revoked his asylum status. Assange had been holed up there since 2012.
In a British court later on Thursday, the WikiLeaks founder, an Australian national, was found guilty of breaching bail conditions. His extradition hearing is expected to take place in London on May 2.
Love said Assange has been vilified in an attempt to turn his political asylum into a soap opera.
“Someone who speaks truth to power in the public interest and allows us to understand how the world works should not find themselves facing prison,” he said.
“It has a chilling affect on press freedoms everywhere. And I think everyone in journalism should be very careful before they try to imagine they are somehow different, that something like this couldn’t happen to them.”
Love won his appeal in February 2018 as court judges ruled extradition would be “oppressive by reason of his physical and mental condition”.
The case was significant because it was the first successful use of the “forum bar” – a legal provision which UK judges can use to stop extradition.
The forum bar was introduced in 2013 by Theresa May, then-home secretary, after she had successfully blocked the extradition of Gary McKinnon. Eleven days before it was introduced, however, Talha Hassan was extradited and went on to spend eight years in US prisons, including two in solitary confinement.
Love also won on the grounds that prosecution should take place in the country where the alleged offences took place.
Grietje Baars, lecturer at London’s The City Law School, told Al Jazeera: “This [argument] would be challenging for Assange to argue as he is accused of conspiring with US citizen, Chelsea Manning.
“Love also had complex mental health conditions, which weighed on the decision.
“If the courts grant the extradition, I would expect Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson to appeal on the basis that he’s unlikely to face a fair trial, because this is arguably, a political trial, or that he shouldn’t be extradited on the basis of his health.”
Assange faces a five-year prison sentence for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and data theft.”
Love alleged that most US cases are resolved by “coercing people into plea bargaining” as he praised Chelsea Manning for refusing to testify against WikiLeaks at a grand jury – which saw her jailed last month.
“As far as we know, or as anybody knows, nobody has come to any harm as a consequence of WikiLeaks disclosures. If anybody can find incontrovertible objective evidence to the contrary, I would be happy to hear it. In the absence of that evidence, it is clear to me these disclosures have been a force for good in the world.”
MANCHESTER, N.H.—It was getting dark outside the Currier Museum of Art and the hundreds of people who had come to see Pete Buttigieg were growing restless, maybe even a little testy. They had lined up two hours early, on a Friday night no less, but still they were outside while several hundred luckier fans were inside swilling craft beer and noshing on cheese and crackers. Nearly a dozen volunteers circulated clipboards with sign-up sheets to join the campaign while conveying the fire marshal’s edict that the museum was past its capacity of 300. “They’re hot,” I overheard one volunteer warn another. No campaign wants to book a space so large their nascent candidate can’t fill it, but no one wants to tick off potential voters before the candidate has even officially declared.
Into this potentially fraught moment strode the compact, running-fit young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a couple of minutes after the event’s 7:30 p.m. start. Instead of rushing into the museum, Buttigieg did the opposite. He bypassed the insiders to speak to the people in the parking lot. “I heard the way you ingratiate yourself to voters is to stand on things—so I found this park bench here,” he told the overflow crowd, flashing a wry grin. The crowd laughed. It was a subtle, Midwestern-nice jab at Beto O’Rourke’s penchant for climbing on tables and countertops, with an extra touch of ‘the last shall come first’ Christian ethos. And it neatly encapsulated a talent for throwing shade without sounding like a jerk that has turned the 37-year-old into the early surprise of the still-growing field of Democratic presidential hopefuls.
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Just a couple of months ago, when he announced his exploratory committee, Buttigieg was a virtual unknown with a puzzling last name and a lane to the presidency that most pundits considered notional at best. His husband Chasten, not yet a social media phenom, was sometimes mistaken as a staffer on the Iowa hustings. In his first visits to New Hampshire he could reliably fill somebody’s living room. Today he’s getting stopped by fans in airports—though they sometimes mistake him for a reporter, he jokes, since he’s on cable news so frequently—and he has a dedicated pack of national and international reporters following him, a byproduct of those well-received TV interviews. He passed the 65,000 individual donors threshold required to make the first Democratic debate in June. This week, two polls in New Hampshire and Iowa placed him in third behind Bernie Sanders and still-undeclared Joe Biden. Unique among the 2020 field ofmore than a dozenzero and one-percenter candidates, Buttigieg has vaulted into the pack’s top 10 alongside Cory Booker, O’Rourke, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Not only is he outpolling some of them, in the first quarter of 2019 he raised more money than many of them.
And his rocketing profile seems to be coming at an especially helpful moment: On Sunday afternoon, Buttigieg is expected to announce his official candidacy for a campaign that is already historic on several fronts. Already, he has positioned himself as both a ground-breaker and traditionalist, a norm-breaker and rule-follower: He’s an openly gay candidate who proclaims the virtues of marriage; the mayor of a midsized Midwestern town and an Afghanistan combat veteran and practicing Episcopalian who is observant enough that he gave up alcohol for Lent.
So how did Buttigieg pull this off?
The answer comes with clues into the nature of the 2020 electorate that might not fit neatly into the progressives-versus-moderates narrative now preoccupying the media.
“He broke into the top tier because his generation is used to giving money on the internet to advance social causes and candidates they believe in,” Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chair who endorsed Buttigieg’s own bid for that position in 2017, told me. “He thinks clearly, is not particularly ideological, open to new ideas. The fact that he is gay and married and running for President is a huge signal to his generation and below, that he gets it.”
But he’s also proving adept at picking his targets. In addition to exceeding basement-level expectations for his candidacy,Buttigieg has fashioned a headline-grabbing foil out of his fellow mild-mannered Hoosier Vice President Mike Pence, the former Indiana governor with whom Buttigieg has had a long and not always contentious relationship. Though his critiques aren’t new, he gave me the same critique of Pence nearly two years ago. He has shrewdly challenged Pence by proclaiming his own faith in contrast to the antagonism of evangelical Christians toward homosexuality. “If you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator,” Buttigieg said recently.
He’s beginning to get attention from the GOP machine, a sure signal that he is no longer considered an absurd longshot. After not mounting any kind of rapid response operation during the CNN town hall, the Indiana GOP churned out emails and tweets this week attacking Buttigieg, calling him “unhinged” (a phrase they began using last August when Buttigieg, pinch hitting for Biden at an Illinois Democratic event, called Trump “a disgraced gameshow host”) and sending an email with the subject line “Your Vice President is under ATTACK.” Last year, the RNC gave him a Trump-style nickname: “Part-Time Peter,” which may or may not work given that part of his time off from his job was spent serving with the Naval Reserve in in Afghanistan. Some conservatives have even noted how effectively he is separating himself from the Democratic pack. “He worries me from a Republican standpoint,” conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt said on “Meet the Press” last Sunday.
Now, the question facing Buttigieg as his campaign enters a new phase: Can the runner go the distance?
***
“The season for patience has passed,” Buttigieg told those gathered in the room. “At this hour, impatience just might be a virtue.” It was 2010, and Buttigieg—his face a little gaunter back then, his suits a little more ill-fitting—was in the middle of his first campaign for political office: state treasurer. He lost by a 62.4 to 37.5 percent margin. To a former geologist who would himself later lose a U.S. Senate race after saying that a woman impregnated during rape is “something God intended.”
Buttigieg, though, never lost that impatience. Friends and critics agree, he has always been a man in a hurry.
He’s a decent runner who posted a 1:42 half marathon time when he was stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. But it’s the speed with which he hopes to leap from mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city to the White House that made people look askance when he held his press conference in January. Too soon, people said. Give it another two cycles, they said. After all, he could wait until 2032 to run and he still wouldn’t be 50 years old.
He chose not to operate on someone else’s timetable. He did what he had to do to distinguish himself from the crowd of aspiring Trump-slayers. He created an exploratory committee because he actually needed one. And he announced his exploratory committee by video, and later that morning delivering a press conference in Washington, D.C., because he knew that few—if any— national reporters would’ve made the trek to northern Indiana to cover him.
The first question out of everyone’s mouth, of course, was about his experience. Buttigieg came prepared.
“Look, I’ve got more experience in government than the president of the United States,” he said in a January 31 interview on CBS This Morning. “I’ve got more years of executive experience than the vice president. And I have more military experience than anybody behind that desk since George H.W. Bush. It’s not a conventional background, but I don’t think it’s time for a conventional background.”
In Manchester, questions about Buttigieg’s experience became declarations about his future. Buttigieg delivered a five-minute version of his freedom-security-democracy stump speech. He called for “a new vocabulary,” telling supporters that “freedom does not belong to one political party,” that “security is not left or right,” that “we will not be the democracy we claim to be if we tolerate districts where politicians choose their voters and not the other way around.” When he finished, the crowd whooped and hollered: Pete! Pete! Pete! Someone shouted: President Pete!
A tonal moderate who espouses a progressive program of democratic reforms, the cerebral Buttigieg balances high rhetoric and policy specifics. He talks about cyber security, but also drops in meta-critiques of Trump’s signature campaign slogan: “There is no such thing as an honest politics that revolves around the word ‘again,’” a line he is almost certain to use Sunday when—standing in the Old Studebaker Building 84, once one of the largest car factories in the world and now transformed into a technology center—he’ll make his 2020 bid official. “The way he talks about issues is refreshing to a lot of people,” his campaign manager, Mike Schmuhl told me. “It’s not just litmus tests, and platitudes, and what do you want to hear. It’s values, and then he goes to ideas, and then he goes to policies.”
There are 11 months until the first primary votes are cast, but last Friday’s event had more of the feel of a general election campaign stop. People had chosen and they weren’t shy about saying so.
Erin Tatum, a 27-year-old, wheelchair-bound writer from Philadelphia, knew who she was voting for before she got in the car for the seven-hour ride north. Tatum talked her mom into making the road trip because she likes Buttigieg’s generational message and his military service. After the event, she and Buttigieg spoke. He stood close to her motorized wheelchair and locked eyes with her. “He’s a respectful man who has lived a principled life,” Tatum, who is bisexual, told me after meeting Buttigieg. “I really felt acknowledged—which as a person with a disability you often don’t—so that was a moment that stood out to me.”
The next day in Concord, I spoke with Mark and Laurie Brown, both 52, a white married couple from Salem, New Hampshire, who typically vote democratic and own a screen-printing business. Buttigieg had caught Laurie’s attention when she overheard him on television call for abolishing the electoral college—one of his signature proposals (“That was a bold step to take,” she says). When it comes to experience, she told me, “He’ll talk about how senators don’t have any executive experience. He manages more people than most senate offices. He’s got to multitask and do lots of things. He’s still running South Bend currently while he’s doing this. I don’t think the age is an issue. He’s sort of checked a lot of boxes and he’s appealing to a lot of people. He’s incredibly well-spoken, and empathetic.”
“Hats off to anybody who has military experience,” Mark interjected. “It’s something I could never do.”
Laurie is more of the true believer of the two, Mark told me before Buttigieg arrived. Their son is gay and they appreciated the historic nature of Buttigieg’s candidacy. As Buttigieg delivered his speech, I watched Mark nod his head when Buttigieg talked about the freedom to be able to start a small business. “I would argue that you’re not free to leave your job and start a small business, if you’re afraid you won’t have health care,” Buttigiegsaid.
After the speech, Mark told me that line resonated with him. “You want to see people do well,” he told me. Did Buttigieg convert him? “Yeah. I’m more nervous—or my reservation is—we really want whoever advances to have the country behind them. And I’m just a little nervous about….” His voice trailed off. “Are people who aren’t in this room or who are down south or different places going to be able to look past his age and stuff like that?”
***
Buttigieg would not have any trouble filling in what “stuff like that” means. His openness about his sexuality has clearly been a boon to raising his profile in the early going, but just as clearly there are supporters who worry there might be segments of the electorate for whom it has the opposite effect and that it might ultimately put a ceiling on his appeal. How he addresses that prejudice, could have a huge impact on how far he can push this improbable campaign.
If there is one thing going in his favor, it’s that he seems to have avoided the trap of being pigeonholed. He is making a virtue of not forcing people to choose between progressive and moderate, between wanting to attack the global threat of climate change and wanting to preserve a strong national defense. And yet at some point, people will have to make choices. And so will the candidate: Buttigieg currently has not alienated Democratic voters by publishing a policy page on his website—a fact several voters at his events in New Hampshire pointed out to me.
In his appeal to New Hampshire voters, almost uniformly white, Buttigieg talked about running the kind of campaign that would unite the country. “Where is it written that a so-called red state, red county, has to be red forever?” Buttigieg asked his audience at the bookstore in Concord. “They didn’t start out Republican, they don’t have to be Republican in the future.”
I’ve talked to Buttigieg about the challenge of being an ambitious Democrat in a red state. I was shadowing him last fall in South Bend before the midterms, when we went for a run along the St. Joseph river, took a driving tour of the city and had beers at Fiddler’s Hearth, the downtown bar where he and Chasten had their first date back in September 2015. “I get the wisdom that says that if you do what you have to do to win Democratic primaries, it makes it more difficult to be a statewide candidate in a conservative state,” he told me then. “But I just think from year to year, things change so quickly. That you don’t want to overthink it. I also don’t think you should ever run for an office you don’t seek to win.” It was clear to me then that he was mulling the pros and cons of a presidential run given that his opportunities in his home state were so limited. After he spoke in New Hampshire, I asked him again during a press gaggle how he thought he could win in red counties and red states, especially given that he told me last year he had no path to win statewide in Indiana.
“This is not a race that you run by process of elimination,” he replied. “This is about the idea that what the moment calls for just might be somebody like me, and for the same reasons that the first time we got around the polling it [the mayor’s race], I was exactly as popular with Republicans as I was with Democrats back home in South Bend. And I think that it’s possible, even with an unapologetic progressive message, to speak to people on all sides of the aisle.”
He told me he was surprised that he was the first 2020 Democrat to appear on Fox News Sunday. “A lot of people respond powerfully to my message who are not, deep down, ideological. They’re just American. And if we’re not speaking to them, then then we’re guaranteed to lose.”
Points earned for entering the lion’s den, butcompared to someone like Amy Klobuchar, who won 43 Trump-leaning counties in her 2018 Senate re-election, Buttigieg doesn’t have much of an electoral record bearing out his purple talk. Minnesota has a different political dynamic than Indiana, but St. Joseph County, of which South Bend is the largest city, is a reliably blue island in red Indiana, though it’s becoming less so: In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by a mere 0.2 percentage points, winning 47.7 percent of voters to Trump’s 47.5. In a statement on the Saturday before he officially announced his bid, the Indiana GOP sent out a statement arguing that the most votes Buttigieg had ever received was 10,991 in the 2011 general election for mayor. “On game day, Notre Dame Stadium draws eight times more fans than votes Pete Buttigieg has ever received in a single successful race for office,” said Indiana GOP Chair Kyle Hupfer. And yet Buttigieg is betting his non-traditional profile has appeal in the Trump era: To be certain, that’s 10,991 voters more than the current president had ever received before 2016.
In an interview in South Bend a few days before Buttigieg’s New Hampshire swing, Schmuhl, the campaign manager, told me that Buttigieg flipped 3,000 Republican voters during the 2011 mayoral primary. “When Pete runs a race, he often changes frameworks when you think about other candidates or issues,” Schmuhl told me over coffee at Chicory Cafe, a place on the first floor of his Buttigieg’s new campaign headquarters. “The way he talks about issues is refreshing to a lot of people. It’s not just litmus tests, and platitudes, and what do you want to hear. It’s values, and then he goes to ideas, and then he goes to policies.”
Nothing changes the framework of a race like a big fundraising number. The morning before I interviewed Schmuhl, the not-yet-campaign announced that Buttigieg had pulled in an eyebrow-arching $7 million in the first quarter. Not even half of what the seasoned Sanders’ machine had raised, but better than Booker. Better than Warren. Better than Klobuchar.
Later that night, I went to dinner at Fiddler’s Hearth. They were there, sitting in the back corner, at table No. 2. As an eight-piece Irish band played, Buttigieg posed for photos with local well-wishers, celebrating his fundraising total with a few members of his campaign staff under a sign that read “South Bend Wall of Arms.” Hoping for an interview, I asked the bartender to send over a couple of pints of Guinness. Someone else in the restaurant had already tried to do that, she said, but Pete turned down the free beers; he was abstaining from alcohol for Lent. Scrambling, I remembered they had ordered scotch eggs (a heart-stopping pub staple) on their first date, so I sent over an order. I’m told the Buttigieg’s laughed heartily, and the party devoured them, but I didn’t get the interview. The days of nearly unfettered access are over.
The next morning, I toured Buttigieg’s new headquarters: One suite of offices has been named Truman and a second suite has been named Buddy—the names of the Buttigiegs’ Twitter-famous rescue dogs. Flush with cash, the campaign still plans to run lean. The shop has printer paper signs with Sharpie-scrawled department names such as Finance. “We’ve got the resources to grow, and now we got to make sure we continue to have quality people,” Buttigieg told reporters at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord last Saturday. “We’re always going to work to be a lean and scrappy operation. That’s just our style.”
This has been his style all along, even in that first failed campaign for state treasurer. “We were cheap. We didn’t do use yard signs. We were extremely frugal with what we spent using money on. Our whole goal was to get on TV,” his then-campaign manager, Jeff Harris, told me. “The more people I knew who would meet Pete, the better I knew he could do. There’s a lot of parallels [with his 2020 campaign]. They’re living off the land.” Indeed, Buttigieg has seemed to have said “yes” to nearly every media and podcast guest request, boosting his name identification in every venue he could get. No opportunity was too small: Once in February, I even sat in on an interview he did with Peter Dunn, a financial planner in Indianapolis who goes by the nickname “Pete the Planner,” in which Buttigieg spent 10 minutes talking about racking up credit card debt and paying off Chasten’s student loans.
I asked Howard Dean, who knows what it’s like to experience a rise in the polls similar to Buttigieg’s, what Buttigieg needs to do to keep up his momentum. “He has to go through a grueling process without letting the early success make him too dismissive of other candidates, past and present.”
And what if it all comes crashing down in the second quarter? What if he boots the debate in June, or finishes out of the top three in Iowa next year? Does that mean he should just go home and nurse his wounds over a scotch egg at the Fiddler’s Hearth? Probably not.
Should Buttigieg fall short of his party’s nomination, he has already positioned himself as an able interrogator of Pence if they should happen to meet in a vice-presidential debate next year. “It’s funny because I don’t think the vice president does have a problem with him, but I think it’s helping Pete to get some notoriety by saying that about the vice president,” Second Lady Karen Pence said on Brian Kilmeade’s Fox News radio show on Tuesday. Pence himself responded to Buttigieg’s remarks Friday, saying in an interview with CNN that the mayor “knows I don’t have a problem with him.” He may have a growing rift with Pence, but he doesn’t have a beef with the whole Republican party. Buttigieg displays photos of himself with former Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and Republican Senator and statesman Dick Lugar in his office—alongside those with Michelle and Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Standing on that park bench back in Manchester—in his campaign uniform of a blue tie, rolled up sleeves on his white dress shirt, beneath an overcoat—Buttigieg wasn’t thinking of the vice presidency. Instead, he began to offer at least the image of a potential commander-in-chief. “I’m probably not what you pictured when you pictured your next president,” Buttigieg said, self-aware and self-effacing in his Midwestern way.
inches. 
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