Joe Biden may have promised to pick a woman for a running mate, but it seems like he always saw that the future of his party was Pete Buttigieg.
Soon after Buttigieg dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary, Joe Biden offered him a job in his administration. “I did speak to Pete Buttigieg a couple of days ago to encourage him to stay engaged because he has enormous talent and I indicated to him that if I became the nominee, I’d be coming to ask him to be a part of an administration to be engaged in moving things forward,” Biden said at the time.
Biden clearly saw something in Buttigieg — so it’s hardly surprising that the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has been reportedly groomed by Biden’s team to be his successor instead of Kamala Harris. “His name is sometimes discussed by aides as a natural Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 — or 2024 if the president opts not to run,” Politico reported back in 2021.
But Pete’s tenure as Joe Biden’s transportation secretary has been such a disaster that it’s hard to imagine him ever being a viable candidate for president of the United States. He tends to make headlines for bad reasons, such as taking paternity leave amid the supply chain crisis, calling bridges and highways racist, and frequently taking personal trips, not to mention the Southwest airlines fiasco, the FAA outage, and the Chinese spy balloon, among other things. His job performance has been panned by Republicans and Democrats alike, along with his recent actions in the wake of the environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, following the derailment of train cars carrying toxic chemicals.
The derailment occurred on Feb. 3 and started a fire that burned for many days, prompting an evacuation of the area and a controlled burn of the chemicals, which sent huge plumes of toxic black smoke into the air that could be seen for miles. According to reports, the local water supply has been contaminated, killing fish and wildlife in the area.
But during his most recent public appearance at the National Association of Counties Conference on Monday, the incident never came up. Instead, he accused racial disparities in the construction industry.
“We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color, that finally sees the project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats on that project, doing the good paying jobs, don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood,” Buttigieg said.
Imagine thinking this is actually important.
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“Pete Buttigieg has finally emerged today. Not a single comment about the train crash in Ohio,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tweeted on Monday. “Instead, he bemoaned the whiteness of the construction industry. It’s a miracle that this country is able to function at all under this regime.”
“The recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio is nothing short of a tragedy,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) tweeted. “This is another transportation failure under Mayor Pete’s leadership. Where is he?”
It’s hard to imagine Buttigieg being able to salvage his presidential ambitions. He just keeps piling up failure after failure and never manages to redeem himself.
