I think the reason why nobody's trying to take the air out of John Delaney's campaign is obvious to both of us, since we're all three equally likely to be president in 2021.

Buttigieg called his work for McKinsey an "intellectually forming experience" in his biography, and has characterized the actual tasks he did for his clients as "nothing inconsistent with my values." Since McKinsey is notable for having fostered some genuine evil in the world, and not abstract stuff but things that harm actual, living human beings, it seems like an important part of Buttigieg's record to interrogate. That's how this stuff is supposed to work - candidates put their track records out there as evidence of their positive vision for the world and we judge:

a)if that's the sort of vision we want
b)if their experience demonstrates that they can get it done

Nobody is singling out Pete so much as treating him like what he's become: a frontrunner. Nobody is asking for anything more than transparency, and if you like him at all, you should be pleased that he's being pushed on this now instead of having it hung around his neck like Bain Capital on Romney or closed Wall Street fundraisers with Hillary.

And now that he's been given permission to disclose client names, we all know what's going to happen. Some of the work will be banal. Some of it will be grotesque. Everybody will make of it what they were already going to make of it, except now we'll be a few steps closer to actually knowing what' true, an objective that feels weirdly distant for a presidential candidate. I mean, he's running for *president*. You don't get to have a three or four year work experience in your adult life that goes unexamined if you're applying to be a temp, let alone president. Was your position really that he didn't need to disclose this stuff any further? In a presidential campaign? Because that seems kind of bonkers to me the more I type it out.