The Poseur

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 08, 2025

 

Pete Buttigieg is a political entrepreneur, and a successful one at that. Whatever your politics, a figure who emerges from the obscurity typically reserved for the mayor of America’s 316th-largest city to run for president, earning a cabinet post as a consolation prize, commands a grudging admiration. Buttigieg owes his success to his skill as a communicator, but only in part. The other skill that has served him well is his reptilian ability to shed his political persona whenever it becomes inconvenient. He metamorphoses to suit his environment — an evolutionary adaptation that has helped him survive with the changing political conditions. And Buttigieg isn’t done yet.

 

Buttigieg announced last month that he would not run for the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, the former transportation secretary’s adopted home state, leaving the door open for another presidential bid in 2028. In the effort to lay the groundwork for that aspiration, Buttigieg has jumped on the “abundance” bandwagon.

 

In a conversation with Jen Psaki, the MSNBC host who was his colleague in the Biden administration, Buttigieg articulated the philosophy espoused by liberals who only just recently discovered that the red tape with which the Democratic Party hogtied the country has become a problem. “The fact that it is so hard to build and do things in this country, and I lived this when I was at the Department of Transportation, we got 20,000 infrastructure projects done, but we could have done more if it were easier to complete the things that we start in this country,” he confessed.

 

This is a little rich coming from a secretary of transportation who throttled his own department’s ability to “do things” by burdening contractors with compliance initiatives that seem designed to thwart productivity.

 

Take, for example, Joe Biden’s failed broadband expansion initiative. “Lawmakers and internet companies blame the slow rollout on burdensome requirements for obtaining the funds, including climate change mandates, preferences for hiring union workers, and the requirement that eligible companies prioritize the employment of ‘justice-impacted’ people with criminal records to install broadband equipment,” the Washington Times reported last year.

 

What about the last president’s plan to put an electric-vehicle charging station in every pot? “Buttigieg said that President Biden plans on building 500,000 chargers by the end of the decade, and — implying this is some sort of accomplishment — ‘the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built,’” our own Rich Lowry wrote in the summer of last year. “It’s true that eight is better than zero, and the administration is now only 499,992 chargers away from its goal rather than 500,000 away.”

 

And then, there was what NPR described as the Transportation Department’s plan to “help communities that feel racially harmed by highway expansions.” The Reconnecting Communities program was supposed to repair the damage done in the 20th century by technocratic urban planners, whose lack of racial consciousness led them to bifurcate minority neighborhoods with highways or disaggregate them through “slum clearance” programs.

 

The Biden administration expended all the funds allocated to that program, with only a handful of successes to show for it. “Oregon received the second highest share of funding at $494 million across the three grant rounds,” Streets Blog contributor Joe Harrington revealed, “but Oregon’s story shows how some states and cities prioritized expanding the same infrastructures whose impacts Reconnecting Communities grants sought to mitigate.”

 

The nonprofit Transportation for America pronounced its verdict on the Biden era early this year: “Overall, the status quo on transportation that was in place when the Biden administration arrived is largely unchanged,” they observed, “though it is far better funded.” It was “largely unchanged” because the secretary, like the rest of the administration in which he served, was beholden to a variety of shibboleths that made a virtue of inefficiency. Buttigieg was required to endorse those superstitions at the time, so that was what he did. Now, repudiating the Biden-era Democrats’ paradigmatic blinders is what the times call for, so Buttigieg pivots. The man is the master of disguise.

 

This was how Buttigieg ran for president in advance of the 2020 cycle, when he retailed himself as a new sort of Democrat — an independently minded, libertarian-leaning Democrat. “We’ve allowed our conservative friends to get a monopoly on the idea of freedom,” he said in 2019. It was a clever attempt to wrest liberty from the hands of those who define it as freedom from governmental interference and oppression, restyling freedom — à la FDR — as freedom from want:

 

You’re not free if you’re afraid to start a small business because leaving your job would mean losing your health care. You’re not free if there is a veil of mistrust between you as a person of color and the officers who are sworn to keep you safe. You’re not free if your reproductive choices are being dictated by male politicians in Washington.

 

“We know that your neighbor can make you unfree,” Buttigieg observed. But, beyond that, “your cable company can make you unfree,” too. And yet, neither your cable company nor your neighbor can form a cartel to abuse you, nor do they benefit from a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. Those are the provinces of government.

 

Then, as now, Mayor Pete was attempting to corner the market within the Democratic Party for reform-minded centrism. In 2020, that was a lane his competitors left wide open, and exploiting it served his political fortunes well. He is revisiting the successful tactic now after having spent the past four years repudiating that philosophy when it seemed like that was what Democratic voters wanted.

 

Perhaps deep down, Buttigieg was always an “abundance Democrat.” We’ll never know for sure. His ambition and opportunism have rendered him an inconstant character. All we can say with certainty is that Buttigieg wants to be president, and he’ll say what it takes to get him into the White House.