Sec. Pete Buttigieg speaks during the third day of the Democratic National Convention
Pete Buttigieg, the outgoing Secretary of Transportation and the first out Cabinet secretary in U.S. history, had some advice, self-criticism, and a couple of mild rebukes for his political opponents in an interview with Rolling Stone published Monday.
Buttigieg is a great admirer of incoming Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), he said, and the way she handled the overt transphobia from soon-to-be Republican congressional colleagues, including Reps. Nancy Mace (R- SC) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), as well as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
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“There’s a lot to be learned from Sarah McBride’s masterful handling of this on her way into Congress,” Buttigieg offered. “Because what she said was: What the speaker’s doing is wrong. But I didn’t come here to fight over that. I came here to make life easier for people in Delaware who elected me.”
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“It immediately demonstrated,” he said, that Republicans “should be dealing with issues of utmost world-historical importance” but are instead consumed with regulating where “colleagues get to go to the bathroom.”
Buttigieg acknowledged McBride “took some heat” from activists for not taking a stand on the issue, but called it “instructive,” “not so much because of the position she struck, but because of the importance of reminding everybody what it means when people in power, or people seeking power, try to get there by stepping on the faces of some disfavored group. This is not some modern phenomenon of the 2020s, but one of the oldest and ugliest tricks in the book.”
McBride’s strategy, Buttigieg said, let the ugly fact of her future colleagues’ intolerance speak for itself.
“I think the reality is, almost everything that we have talked about or campaigned on commands about 60-plus-percent support,” Buttigieg said of Democrats. “And when you do see people getting political traction by going after some group, that’s telling you a lot more than anything about one group.”
Buttigieg also looked to history for answers when it comes to Elon Musk’s influence in the upcoming administration.
“It’s not unusual for the richest person in a country to be very powerful in that country,” the onetime candidate for president said. “It’s a little more unusual for them to have a government or quasi-government role.”
“What I think hasn’t happened in a while is the concentration of so much wealth and so much power in the hands of so few people,” Buttigieg said. “And we’ve talked about that generically as a problem in our politics and economy for the last 20, 30, 40 years.”
“But in the last three, four, five years, we’ve seen whole new forms of it that I think will require us to change and think differently about how we manage the access that some people, who haven’t been elected to anything, get to power over everybody’s life,” he added. “Those are the questions that are at stake when you have very powerful, wealthy people given sweeping, undefined roles in or around government.”
As he steps off the national stage with a planned return home to his adopted state of Michigan, with his two 3-year-olds and husband Chasten, it’s the demands of everyday life that keep him grounded, Buttigieg told an audience at one of his last public functions in a speech to the City Club in Cleveland, Ohio.
“Nothing has helped me maintain my humanity more than having kids,” Buttigieg said. “I’ve been at the house and I get off the phone, and the phone conversation ends with something along the lines of ‘Let us know any more data you need, sir, before you go to the White House tomorrow.’ This is immediately followed by ‘Papa, come wipe my butt.’ And you know what? That’s what I’m going to do. Because that can’t wait. The memo can wait. The White House will still be exactly where it is the next day.”
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