It's Hug-ly for Pete and Kam
DID you see that hug between Wonder Boy President in Waiting Pete Buttigieg and Back Off Little Man I’m Boss Lady of This House Kamala Harris? I’ve seen leprous porcupines get closer together for a hug. Harris and Buttigieg could have danced like that at a Catholic high school in 1957 and the chaperone would have said, “I’ll allow it. If anything, there’s room for two Holy Spirits in between.”
H and B managed to hug while looking like they wished they were in two different time zones, just as their political fortunes are going in completely different directions: Buttigieg is maybe even a little ahead of schedule in the ruthless mega-map to the presidency he probably devised when he was drinking chocolate milk in kindergarten eight or nine years ago, while Harris is looking like the first sitting vice president who will ever cackle her way to political oblivion.
What was the purpose of this little awkward-as-small-towncommunity-theater scene? Well, Madame Vice and the Transportation Kid were out to display to the public the fact that they totally aren’t fighting even though every other day a leak appears in the Swamptown Gazette about how Democrats are scrambling to offload her somewhere before she becomes their next presidential nominee. Don’t be surprised if she is sent on an urgent diplomatic fact-finding mission to, say, Jupiter.
Meanwhile, Team Buttigieg is playing him up as the logical heir to the Biden throne. What if, they ask, you had a presidential candidate who was actually a bright, smooth talker, with many coats of slick Harvard management consultant polish instead of a habit of breaking down into deranged laughter whenever he gets a tough question? Wouldn’t First Gay President be almost as exciting as having a woman in the top job? America may be ready for a woman president, but not this extremely odd woman in the dung-colored pantsuits.
The purpose of Harris and Buttigieg’s meet-up was to sell an infrastructure bill. Which, erm, has already passed. Several
weeks ago. Remember how President Biden actually managed to sign a spending plan without calling in a phalanx of home health aides? The administration was expecting an Infrastructure Bounce in the polls and didn’t get one, so now they’re trying again, by reminding people of their supposed legislative mega-victory from . . . early last month. It’s touching, really. These people are as hopeful as a failing comic who repeats the punchline nobody laughed at the first time.
As (even) The New York Times reported this week, the infrastructure bill is doomed to wet-firecracker status because the problem with our infrastructure is not a lack of spending. The problem lies with two core Democratic Party constituencies — crazy-eyed environmentalist jihadis and cementin-the-gears public-interest lawyers — who keep dragging out the approval process for anyone who wants to build any public project more ambitious than a dog run.
“And even with the new infusion of money,” reports the Times, “analysts say it will be tough to ramp up infrastructure progress as swiftly as envisioned in the current timetable.”
Now they tell us. A lousy 20mile rail transit line in Hawaii that was supposed to be finished 15 years ago and cost $4 billion is now scheduled to be finished 10 years from now and cost three times that, though the actual final price tag will, of course. be even more. You can make it rain money on every budding infrastructure proposal in the land, but if you actually cared about building stuff rather than signing bills in grandiose ceremonies, you’d be wiser to do something that doesn’t cost anything: rip up all of those environmental-impactreview regulations.
So Harris and Buttigieg are selling two things that aren’t happening: their fake allyship, and the phony American infrastructure revolution. As Biden noted, we may indeed be 13th best in the world in infrastructure. But, by golly, we’re certainly number one in obstructionist lawyers.