Pete Buttigieg’s impossible job – The Economist
THIS WEEK’S signing of a trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill brought a glimpse of the politics Joe Biden promised to restore. Leaders from both parties gathered on the White House’s south lawn to praise the bulging spending package for roads and bridges. “I ran for president because the only way to move this country forward, in my view, was through compromise and consensus,” said Mr Biden. Conservative talking-heads were meanwhile rowing with his secretary of transportation over whether the concrete structures earmarked for attention were racist.
Pete Buttigieg suggested last week that some were. “If a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighbourhood, or if an underpass was constructed [too low to allow a] bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach…that obviously reflects racism.” Tucker Carlson—who claimed the infrastructure bill was not about infrastructure but is a “weird climate scheme/power grab/race-based redistribution plan”—called Mr Buttigieg one of “the dumbest people in the world”.
The 39-year-old, who used the mayoralty of Indiana’s fourth-biggest city to launch an improbable and impressive presidential run, is cerebral. An alumnus of Harvard and Oxford, he was interviewed on the trail in half a dozen languages (including Norwegian, which he learned to read a favourite novelist in the original). He is also right about infrastructural racism. Non-white communities were often bulldozed to make way for the national highway system. It is one of the reasons a typical white family is eight times wealthier than a typical black one—a staggering disparity.
The disdain on the right reflected not only unconcern about racial injustice, but how much the Biden administration has riding on the spending bill. Even if the Democrats pass a $1.85trn companion bill, covering social and climate policy, the infrastructure package will represent much of the legislative record Mr Biden will take into the mid-terms. Mr Buttigieg’s appointment to the Department of Transportation, whose budget has just been increased by over half, was made with that prospect in mind. A large but unglamorous agency, known inside the beltway for geekish efficiency and outside it hardly at all, the department has never before been run by such a rising star. And the similarly geekish Indianan’s task of selling the infrastructure splurge as a presidency-defining triumph has become even more important as Mr Biden’s ratings have slumped. Rarely has the workaday business of fixing bridges and potholes been invested with such desperate hopes.
Alas for the Democrats, even the sexiest lawmaking does not predict mid-term success. Voters responded to the arrival of Medicare in 1965, the Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and Obamacare in 2010 by punishing the president’s party. And they will feel the benefit of better roads far more slowly than they enjoyed those measures. Yet it should be acknowledged that generating wild enthusiasm for humdrum ideas and governing is Mr Buttigieg’s speciality.
A new film about his campaign, “Mayor Pete”, highlights the incongruity between his ordinariness and the passions he stirred. It shows his supporters joyously celebrating as he appeared—dressed like a dapper science teacher, in crisp shirt and tie, no jacket—and thronging to him. He won Iowa, came second in New Hampshire and stirred more excitement than any other candidate except Bernie Sanders. Some of the enthusiasm concerned the historic nature of his candidacy, as an openly gay man. But it was also testament to his ability to spin his thin résumé, as South Bend’s chief rubbish-collector, and unremarkable centrism into a compelling message of moral force and generational change.
Mr Biden, whose own campaign was less memorable, has his best talker where he needs him most. Mr Buttigieg has already visited a dozen states to cheerlead for the impending spending. This has sparked gossip about his future. Vice-president Kamala Harris, whose presidential campaign was even less inspiring than Mr Biden’s, is looking like an increasingly outside bet to succeed him. Some Democrats want to sideline her, whenever Mr Biden bows out, for the more talented Mr Buttigieg. It is crushing for the Democrats that such talk is afoot. (Less than a year into Mr Biden’s first term, they seem less sure of the identity of their next presidential nominee than the Republicans are.) It is also premature; not least because Mr Buttigieg’s increased exposure carries risks.
One concerns the management of the impending splurge. He understands that policy and messaging are only loosely related (with characteristic precocity, he corresponded with the linguist George Lakoff on the subject while still at Harvard). But few messages can survive a failed policy, and his department’s limited control over its resources makes embarrassments inevitable when so much money is sloshing around. Its main responsibilities are to pass safety regulations and funnel cash—mostly under tight congressional guidelines—to state and city governments. How well they spend it will be largely out of Mr Buttigieg’s hands. At the same time, a massive increase in the amount of discretionary spending he will have at his disposal—it will amount to roughly $42bn next year—will both consume him and make him appear more responsible for the entire spending package than he is. Mr Buttigieg used to argue that managing South Bend’s little budget was ideal training for federal leadership. He’d better hope it was.
A bridge to nowhere
Another vulnerability is the administration’s determination to justify all it does in terms of racial justice—as Mr Buttigieg’s recent remarks illustrated. However well-intended, they raised a question of redress for racist planning that he has no answer to. The bulldozed communities cannot be reassembled. He is not planning to favour poor minorities in his spending. Righting historic wrongs does not seem to be part of his remit; so it would be better if he did not raise expectations on the left and blood pressure on the right by suggesting it is. He already has enough on his plate.■
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This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Pete Buttigieg’s impossible job”