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I’m surprised at the controversy.
It seems like this was a tactical choice. I think this also reflects exactly in how I see Buttigieg, as the absolute stereotype of the political striver.
It’s clearly not a good choice to run a gay man in 2024, especially when the effective ad from Trump they keep talking about is “I’m with you, she’s with they/them”. Pete does not deserve the presidency for running through the gauntlet correctly. It’s not a crown. People actually have to vote for him.
Yeah. He comes across as having been grown in a CIA laboratory tank. He's a striver with insufficient charisma for a big-time role. And it's unclear if he and his husband got their kid via adoption or surrogacy; if the latter, that's probably not helpful in a presidential campaign.
Plus, the Kamala campaign couldn't have run their brilliant "weird" attack on Vance if the Dem VP candidate ate cinnamon rolls like chicken wings.
I really want Pete to run, because he's clearly a smart guy - so I'm curious if we can finally prove that voters actually don't want someone too smart in the role (or plain don't like smart people). Cases like Al Gore and, hell, you know, even: Dukakis, Kerry, maybe Hillary, Gingrich, Romney, etc. Although Pete seems like he is slightly better at being relatable, he also has a kind of too-clean vibe that might make people unsettled. Voters actually do want a human-feeling flaw or two. The anti-intellectualism is a strong thesis but if Pete ran and lost I think I might finally be able to conclude that it's a rule, not just a trend.
In that sense, Vance vs Buttigieg would be extra fantastic TV. Would love to see that debate, actually.
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Being fair to Pete, there's a long tradition of mocking photos of politicians trying to eat in public. And, not to be too crude about it, if you're a gay guy who is known for being gay, then putting a phallic-shaped object near your mouth while there are photographers about is risky business. Better to apply it horizontally than vertically, just to be on the safe side.
I have to quote the Miliband story, it's too good not to share:
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I think it would make sense for Buttigieg to respond that she's right, the handicap was for anyone running with her. And let the implication be "not because she's a black woman, because she's Kamala Harris and couldn't govern her way out of a wet paper bag".
I don't think Mayor Pete is a possible president, but if we have to pick a gay guy, he's about as inoffensive as you can get (remember the criticism for him being the wrong kind of gay? not gay enough in the queerest possible sense for representation? too white picket fence?). So Kamala is definitely slipping the knife in, and I do have to wonder just what exactly went on that he offended her in some way.
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Pete Buttigieg could have done Joe Rogan and come out looking good. He has real charisma and he is good at communicating his values.
People fixate on the they/them part of the ad, but the important pronoun is you. You don't get people to support you by convincing them that you deserve their vote, you get people to support you by convincing them that you support them. The message of the ad is this: 'Kamala Harris isn't for you, she's for minorities and Groups and special interests and the sacred cows of her weird San Francisco Progressive ideology. If you're just a regular person she doesn't give a crap about you.'
It landed because Kamala Harris is bad at acting like she cares about regular people. That's something Pete Buttigieg excels at. Obama had the same talent.
Before Obama won, lots of people said a black man couldn't be President. Now a bunch of people are saying a black woman can only be present if her running mate isn't gay. It feels like a god of the gaps fallacy to me. The better explanation is that charisma is real and more important than identity checkboxes.
Seriously and unironically, how often do you talk about culture war topics with blue collar black people who don't have any particular reason to worry about your judgement? Because in my experience they're at least as anti-gay as blue collar white Trumpers but way more vocal about it. There's just zero chance him being gay doesn't cost his ticket more black votes in key places than he's worth.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but then this is the world where the Dems had a drag party on the White House lawn for Easter and then stood around eight months later going "duh what happened to our Hispanic votes?" so I don't even know.
There's a difference when you say the quiet part out loud, though. And Kamala pulled all this down on top of her head by putting it in the book that she'd considered Pete but then dropped it because too risky. Nobody needed that level of kiss'n'tell, except for publicity purposes ("buy the book for more spicy revelations about insider goings-on!")
She seems to have no idea that this would ever come back to be something she would need to deal with, and even someone as sympathetic to her as Rachel Maddow had to ask it, and she fumbled the answer ("it wasn't because he was gay, it was because he was gay").
This seems to be all too common with her: says/does something, has no idea that it won't fade with the moment but will be brought up again later (see the "yes for transgender surgery for illegal immigrants in prison" bit of an interview which was just lagniappe for the Trump campaign - i.e. 'spend taxpayer dollars coddling criminals, and not even our own native criminals'). She seems to have no forward planning skills, which is something you would like to have in a president.
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I don't think I get that from either of them. Pete's always struck me as a soulless striver lizardman type. Like Beto, he can ape the motions, but he lacks the Trump/Bill Clinton knack for leaving the people he talks to with the impression that he's personally invested in them.
And Obama's utterly unique trait was the way people would project onto him whatever they wanted him to be. Even the man himself seemed bemused by the phenomenon. But even then, the projection wasn't "Obama cares about me personally", it was as a totem for All Good Progressive Things, but especially technocratic expertise elevated to a messianic level.
Pete did pretty decent at Surrounded even though that's not perfectly representative. The funny thing is, though, that his worst answers were always about something specific to Harris: 14:14, an undecided voter said that her debate performance was shit, and asked Pete about if her character is so good, why didn't it come through? 31:22ish, another one asked why Harris said something about censoring social media if it contained misinformation as an attack on free speech (although very, very interesting: Pete called the Trump TV license campaign trail threat out as not just a free speech threat but a real threat, not just a Trumpian bluff. This was 10 months ago; he was 100% correct). Still, Harris feels like a millstone around the campaign's neck in most of these questions, and that's not good considering she was the campaign.
And most painful, 37:17, a voter outright says it.
Damning. Pete responds with some (true) stuff about how, ok she's a sitting VP, she's paranoid about the media jumping on a gotcha line. Then he says, well, people have their strengths and weaknesses, and she'd be a good president - which is straight up conceding the point about her bad communication, if you look past the tact. But people can tell. That voter sure did. People just say these things, it's not like they hide it, the Harris campaign really should have known this was an issue. Anyways, I think Pete would do just fine on campaign if he's the one driving the bus, I think you're a little too down on the communication, even if it's not, admittedly, an effusive personal charm kind of thing. If there's one thing holding Pete back, it's probably that he feels the need to try and appease the Democrat sacred cow talking points at times, which would be less the case if you're behind the wheel.
So I shared many of your feelings about Buttigeig, and felt that he would have done well at the top of the Democrat ticket, and then I had to deal with his office and him professionally as the secretary of transportation, and now I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. While he has charm and charisma, as a professional executive head of a functional body, dude is fucking incompetent. In my experience he was totally unable to make an independent decision without 17 layers of ass-covering consultation, totally unable to tell when brown-nosing subordinates might be completely full of shit, and worst from a political perspective, totally unaware of when optics might demand his presence or at least general visibilty, such as when a major transportation disaster has occured, and the Secretary of Transportation might plausibly be expected to have input.
If the DNC wants to lose badly in 2028, I can think of few better ways that having Buttigeig be the nominee.
If you don’t mind my asking, how/why did these interactions happen? How high up in the office were you dealing with, or did you literally deal with him personally? Had you dealt with other secretaries of transportation?
Well, without doxing myself too much, its mostly aerospace related matters, specifically involving certification of new aircraft, new rules for airports and air traffic controllers, and how the US would harmonize its regulations with other national and supranational regulators (like EASA... okay mostly EASA). The list of sins is long- it was never clear who was actually making a formal decision (lots of 'here's what i think, but xyz all need input'), despite a formal decision being requested. Some paperwork remained outstanding for 4 years. Certain statutory limits on how long the government has to respond to requests and filings were routinely ignored without apology or explanation, to the point we seriously considered suing the FAA and DoT. It also became obvious that several key administrators were completely AWOL and had delegated their entire function to assistants, and when this was brought up directly to him, we got an out of office (I believe it was his paternity leave stint, which is charming, but as a cabinet secretary the buck stops with you, respectfully you dont get to take months of paternity leave), our concerns about serious government malfeasance were never addressed in even a perfunctory manner.
My experience with the previous two secretaries of transportation, as well as the current one, are nothing at all like that. Night and day difference, and I know there are many other people in similar positions who have similar feelings.
I never met with him personally, but the issues i was involved with were the kind of things that would require his approval, or st least input, and that really never happened. In contrast, i have emailed Secretary Chao before and recieved a personal response about three hours later. Secretary Duffy appears to be much the same.
Completely forgot to respond to this— thanks for the informative reply. Sounds like you have an interesting job! The substantial difference with previous secretaries is definitely concerning, as is the general sense of dysfunction you’re describing. Maybe he was a good politician but a not-so-good administrator, appointed above his level of competence? I’ll certainly keep this in mind about him.
I think that would be a fair assessment. There is certainly a wide gap between being a fairly local politician and trying to run a campaign on a bigger stage, and then actually delivering once you've won the race. In many ways, the skills don't translate, and cabinet secretaries are one of the posts where it can be most obvious (not guaranteed though- regardless of how you feel about the moral and philosophical implications of her actions, it's hard to deny the Clinton got shit done as Sec State, Cruz seems to be doing similarly).
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Most of the better-publicized examples tend to be culture-warry and tied to emergency response stuff that's hard to measure directly, but there's a lot of stuff in this class, too. For a well-documented-if-poorly-known one, I'd point to checkrides.
Pilots are required to pass a checkride for their pilot's certificate and for a variety of add-ons after that point. These exams are lengthy processes that can only be provided by FAA examiners directly, or by FAA-approved examiners called Designated Pilot Examiners (DPEs). FAA Examiners offer the service for free*, but have become increasingly unavailable over the last twenty years; in the modern era, >95% of exams are operated by DPEs, amounting to tens of thousands of exams per year. Because of the exam's complexity, it's very rare for a DPE to do more than one exam per day, there are a wide variety of practical constraints due to weather and other environmental conditions, and there are less than a thousand DPEs in the entire US. That was in an awkward but plausible equilibrium for most of the 2010s, but post-COVID, there was both a glut of new pilots and a lot of DPEs who had drastically reduced availability (it's very difficult to make a full-time job, so you get a mix of retirees and weekend warriors), along with other constraints getting baked into the system that made it hard for remaining DPEs to maintain the same velocity as before.
As a result, if your flight school did not have a staff DPE (technically against the rules, but largely tolerated), it could take months and cost over a thousand dollars to run the test for your initial pilot certificate, and if you failed -- or even if you had to cancel because of weather! -- you'd have to pay it a second time later. Most students also had a maximum time between graduation from their flight school's internal tests and when they even attempt a checkride, so other delays could lead to even more costs. This was a very well-known problem in pilot communities to the point I'd heard about it by March 2022. By 2024, a law passed with a specific requirement to start an office specifically monitoring the problem and by 2024 Congress had sent the FAA a further letter asking what the fuck was going on. Complete mess, entirely an infrastructure and coordination problem, zero culture war politics...
And a lot of internal political problems. Flight Standards District Offices (FSDOs) manage DPEs in their geographic area, and while there's been a long waiting list for DPE applicants, FSDOs don't like actually certifying them or managing a large number, both because of the recurrent inspection overhead and for more interpersonal reasons. (I dunno if the DAR/DER stuff is any less bad, but I've heard stories.) And once you became a DPE, the gig was extremely renumerative while their shortage existed, and coincidentally the people who did get to become DPEs inevitably were or became well-known by the FSDO. Fixing this was, inevitably, going to ruffle feathers.
But allowing a snowjob of a biannual report to float through with a general Solving Inefficiencies was easy. Guess what we got? The first biannual report revealed that the FAA, six months in, still wasn't trying to collect data on how much DPEs were charging. Almost zero information about why FSDOs had so low a pass rate for DPE applicants, or why wait lists to apply as a DPE were so long. They did switch around a lot of individual DPE in and out in the local area (sometimes without even telling ex-DPEs why!), as if they only problem was the physical offices of those DPEs, and for a good year it actually got worse in our area. Modernized the search tool, and it's almost impressive how bad it is. Absolute epitome of following the streetlamp effect off a cliff.
Tbf, it's still early game for the current admin; I don't have great hopes.
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To be fair, that sounds more like his presidency would be a disaster, rather than him having poor chances of winning.
Maybe, but he burned a lot of bridges with people who would make very good attack ads. Like 40 year career, apolitical professionals ended up hating his guts and can make a very good case for why he made Americans less safe, and would happily do so on national media outlets. Perhaps I'm underestimating the capabilities of the DNC propaganda arm, but especially with his, erm, demographic disadvantages with certain key voter segments, I dont think he would stand a chance.
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