Choice of Buttigieg a win for progressive elites
At the Joe Biden presser announcing his pick as Transportation Secretary yesterday, Mayor Pete claimed he’s had “a personal love of transportation since childhood.”
Seriously. He said that. Out loud.
Of course he did. Buttigieg is the LGBT doppleganger of Tracy Flick — the grasping, ambitious, straight-A student portrayed by Kirsten Dunst in the hilarious movie “Election.” (Pro tip: the book was even better.)
If Buttigieg had been tapped for Secretary of Energy, he would have confessed he’s “always had a thing for kilowatts.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Buttigieg basher by nature. I like smart people, and his “wine cave progressivism” never buggged me the way it did “millionaire man of the people” Bernie Sanders or his fellow populist Liz Warren.
But don’t get Biden wrong, either. Picking Buttigieg was pure identity politics, an act of tokenism based on Mayor Pete’s membership in a favored group.
“Openly gay?” No. “Credentialed elite.”
Pete Buttigieg was mayor of a city the size of Framingham, and Biden wants him to oversee trillions in infrastructure spending, based solely on Pete’s standing as a member of America’s elite class.
Ironically, Mayor Pete actually has a track record on infrastructure in South Bend: His progressive “Smart Streets” initiative that involved planting trees, lowering speed limits and shutting down lanes of traffic. The result was rush hour back ups and clogged streets, which Buttiegieg referred to as “pain points” from his progressive agenda.
In fact, during Mayor Pete’s tenure, downtown hassles like crime and panhandling became so bad the local branch of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles fled to a suburban strip mall after the situation became “untenable,” the BMV commissioner complained.
But Buttigieg wasn’t picked for his competence. It was for his credentials. He’s got the degrees from Harvard and Oxford and the connections at McKinsey Consulting and therefore he’s part of the progressive ruling class. And now, the Biden White House.
He’s hardly alone. Susan Rice is a foreign policy “expert” who made her career supporting idiotic policies like the Iran deal, and lying on national television about how a YouTube video caused the deadly terror assault on our consulate in Benghazi. Now she’s going to head Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, where she’ll be just as dumb and just as wrong — but a lot closer to home.
She’s an Obama insider with a degree from Stanford and PhD. from Oxford (That’s right — she’s a “doctor” just like Jill Biden!) and so she’s going to do something she’s never done before and has evidenced no ability to handle.
And then there’s Denis McDonough, the Georgetown grad nominated to be our Secretary of Veterans Affairs — despite the fact that the closest he’s ever gotten to military service was ordering General Tso’s chicken. In fact, his big moment came when then-Senator Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor, a Navy reservist, got called into active duty in 2007. McDonough got the gig to fill in for him and never looked back.
Does this mean Mayor Pete will do a lousy job? Not necessarily. First, he’s a smart guy and second, it’s the federal government. How badly do you have to stink before anyone notices?
What it does mean is that when Biden talks about a return to normalcy, he means more than not having an OCD-afflicted reality star tweeting conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines. He means the “normalcy” of our elite, DC “betters” governing us peons once again.
It’s going to be government by the governing class, the professionals who told us “we just need to lockdown for 15 days” to beat the coronavirus, and who said there could be no peace for Israel until they appeased the Palestinians. The super-geniuses who created the government policies that led to the crash of 2008, and then the ensuing economic expertise that gave us the weakest recovery since World War II.
Pete Buttigieg is the poster child for the problem that truly plagues America under the rule of progressive elitism: We need a better class of “elites.”