Last time I wrote about Mayor Pete Buttigieg here, I analyzed him as a phenomenon (as well as a phenom), a symptom of an upper-middle-class preoccupation with achievement and narrowly defined “smarts.” I went easy on his brief “career” and on his politics. Now that he’s a more of a significant player, it’s time to remedy that. Yes, Mayor Pete is an annoying, entitled nerd. He’s condescending to everyone to his left, from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to his black constituents in South Bend, no matter how much more knowledgeable they might be. He’s that guy who always thinks he knows better than you. But he’s also worse than that.

First, look at what he’s trying to communicate to his base: the finance industry and others in the top 0.1 percent. By choosing Lis Smith as his campaign spokeswoman, he’s letting them know that he’s friendly and comfortable with Democrats who might as well be Republicans. Smith was the spokeswoman for Jeff Klein, the leader of the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a group of Democrats in the New York state senate who chose to install a Republican leadership in the chamber in order to made progressive legislation almost impossible. The IDC was voted out of power a year ago, and as a direct result of their ouster — as well as, equally importantly, the election of some genuinely left and progressive representatives — New York has passed strong, historic legislation on a range of issues, including climate, abortion rights and housing, all of which would have been unheard of in the IDC era.

Lis Smith was the public face of political hopelessness in New York state. Her New York moment has passed, and she should never have been heard from again, but Buttigieg would like to bring that sense of doom back to the national stage. Mayor Pete chose the person who represented the bleak nihilistic cynicism of pre-2018 Albany to represent his own campaign.