I think that anybody who acted, in their decision-making capacity, to support the Iraq War deserves to be banished from political life. The only way to have done that at the time was to be amoral or deeply, deeply stupid. And the only way to keep a viable political career since that horrifying and destructive crime is to minimize its impact and rely on our weird talent for insulating politicians from the effects of their decisions. That included Clinton in the last election and Biden in this one. Nobody who said "yes" to that at the time deserves to be taken seriously about anything important ever again.

But the rest of the field is off the hook on that, so if I were in a purple state or even a hard red one where voting for a centrist melt like Buttigieg would still feel like a "fuck you" to fascism, then I'd probably be open to voting for them. I lived in Tennessee from 2009 to summer 2012 and being a Democrat of any stripe felt pretty radical at the time.