The Pete Buttigieg 'Reclamation Project' is Off to a Rocky Start

Is Pete Buttigieg salvageable?

More than any other cabinet member in recent memory, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary has been outed as someone out of his depth and entirely clueless when it comes to the weighty responsibilities of his office.

“He’s not ready for the responsibility he has. He was a fine mayor, from what I understand, but the position he’s got really would be better served by a person who’s managed a large enterprise, a state, or something of the scale he’s now dealing with,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

How has Pete Buttigieg fulfilled Romney’s characterization of him? Let us count the ways:

1. A major-league clusterfark of the supply chain during the pandemic. While some disruptions were inevitable, many industry experts fault Buttigieg for not doing more to get workers back to the docks and back behind the wheel of trucks.
2. In the midst of the supply chain crisis, Buttigieg took paternity leave. Since he and his partner/husband Chasten chose the time of their twin babies’ birth. Buttigieg proved to possess the worst sense of timing in government.
3. A disastrous holiday travel season that resulted in thousands of people being stranded.
4. And that same month, he was criticized over problems with the FAA, which had to ground flights for two hours for the first time in more than 20 years.

Buttigieg could continue to screw up, and Biden would never fire him. Pete Buttigieg is one of the most important icons in American history — if you believe it’s important that a gay man serves in the cabinet. The more accurate characterization is that Buttigieg is the first openly gay man to serve in the cabinet. It’s a good bet that there were closeted gays who served in the cabinet previously.

But Biden takes these kinds of things seriously, so Buttigieg has to stay. This calls for a salvage operation more daunting than the attempt to raise the Titanic.

So Mayor Pete paid a visit to the local Democratic Party media center: CNN’s Washington bureau. There, the party mouthpiece, Edward-Isaac Dovere, guided Buttigieg through a question and answer session that was as much mea culpa as it was “the boy is alright.”

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Buttigieg acknowledged mistakes. He said he should have gone to East Palestine, Ohio, earlier. He said he failed to anticipate the political fallout from the toxic train derailment, despite months of transportation problems like mass flight cancellations and an air traffic control system shutdown that left many Americans frustrated.

Buttigieg “didn’t realize just how much focus there would be on a Cabinet role that was once seen as mostly apolitical in past administrations,” writes Dovere. So, of course, Buttigieg didn’t have to take the job as seriously as if he were, let’s say, defense secretary or secretary of state, right?

Sheesh.

It’s the train derailment in East Palestine that exposed Buttigieg as not only incompetent but useless.

Buttigieg contends it wouldn’t have made any substantive difference in the Department of Transportation response if he had gone earlier, since there’s very little of the immediate accident response that has anything to do with the agency he controls. Yet he acknowledged it probably would have helped the residents in East Palestine to see one of the better-known political figures in the country there to show them that they were being heard, even if no previous transportation secretaries toured derailment sites.

He previously underestimated how much of his job would be wrapped up in consumer affairs and customer service, he said.

“Sometimes people need policy work, and sometimes people need performative work,” he told CNN. “And to get to this level, you’ve got to be ready to serve up both.”

So why weren’t you “ready,” Mr. Secretary? Buttigieg has been on the job for two years — not two months or weeks — and he’s just now figuring this out? Lordamercy.

There will be other softball interviews with friendly reporters in the coming weeks as the president tries to make Buttieig into something he isn’t: a passable government servant. It’s not going to work. So Joe Biden is going to keep Pete Buttigieg in a White House closet — sorta like the drunk uncle you don’t want spoiling Thanksgiving.

Hopefully, all talk of Buttigieg running for high office when his stint as chief of transportation screwups is over.