I’m like Shakespeare’s Marc Antony: I come to bury Buttigieg, not to praise him. I’m happy to be able to say that, because I really worried about Pete Buttigieg. I thought the Democrats might have found themselves a true rising star. But nyaa, he’s just another mediocrity… Beto without the teeth.
I remember the first time I saw Pete Buttigieg, as the 2020 Democratic primary debate season got underway. He fit right in, the former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana running for president. Of course. You laugh, but he had some New Age Unicorn Lady on one side of him and a high-tech entrepreneur on the other. I looked that guy up and he was all hat and no companies. To this day, nobody knows what he was doing there.
Basically, Buttigieg was one of the clowns at the clown show. I figured him for a guy who knew he was too young and inexperienced to have a prayer this time, but he was getting his name out there, laying the foundation for another run maybe a dozen years down the road. That’s a fairly common move among the clinically ambitious.
And then I heard him talk. “Oh my God,” I thought to myself, “this guy is the White Obama.” Let there be no doubt: Pete Buttigieg is a World Class PurtyTalker™ He is right up there with Barack the Magnificent. He can construct and navigate word salads that are too long for most people to follow. Which is good, because quite often they don’t go anywhere or make any sense. But does he ever sound sincere and sure of himself while he’s talking. If you were not able to follow his prattle to the end and you did not know he just delivered a quantum knot, you wouldn’t know what he said but you would be sure it was both brilliant and correct. This is undoubtedly how the guy got elected Mayor of South Bend.
Obviously, the Democrats’ talent scouts saw the great promise this fellow held and they marked him to be seasoned and groomed into a credible candidate for a House seat or maybe even a Governorship. After that, his talents would take him where they might.
And so Pete Buttigieg got a heck of a deal coming out of that debate. Only one of the brightest rising stars would get the gig as Secretary of Transportation, and Pete got it. That position should be, for somone of above-average talent, an escalator to the stars. It’s a highly-visible, cabinet-level position with a huge number of employees. The Department passes out the federal “infrastructure” spending. That’s a hundred billion dollars, year in and year out, so you swing a pretty big bat.
It should be hard to screw that up. Mostly what the Secretary of Transportation does is attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies for new bridges, new stretches of highway, all sorts of good and wonderful things. After four years of it, the clever up-and-comer ought to be on a first-name basis with dozens of Congressmen, Senators, Governors, maybe even a World Leader or two… all useful people to know as you advance in your career as a Party Apparatchik. This was to be Pete Buttigieg’s life.
Yes, Pete the PurtyTalker™ was destined for greatness. The Democrats had big plans for him. And then the fickle finger of fate squashed him like a bug. Pete was in the wrong place at the wrong time. All of a sudden, something called a Supply Chain crawled out of the muck and started attacking cities. I mean, who other than Tim Apple had ever even heard of a supply chain? The blue media thinks that everything is run by the government, so they started casting about for the government official to blame for all the shortages. And it couldn’t be Joe Biden because he’s the head of The Party. This is how Pete Buttigieg, a mere Secretary of Transportation, whose real job was the care and feeding of bureaucrats who pass out grant money to build roads and highways and airports, was suddenly deemed — by the blue media at least — to be in charge of the toilet paper and the baby formula and all the other things that people wanted and couldn’t have. It was all Pete’s fault.
That was totally unfair, but that’s the way things go sometimes. It’s too bad about Mr. Buttigieg — he has become Supply Chain Pete. And he will never get the stink off. He now joins Kathleen Sebelius — she of Obamacare Website fame — in the pantheon of Cabinet Officials whose grooming assignments did not go well. He won’t starve — the soft landing they arranged for Sebelius included a dozen board seats at various Democrat-friendly outfits — but his career in government is most likely over.
I think we dodged a bullet there.
