Pete Buttigieg is fixing his racial record at the expense of US transportation

Some people are impossible to parody — not because they’re special or sacred, but because they are already so absurd that there’s nothing funnier that a parody could say about them.

One such person is Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. The former Mayor of South Bend, Ind., ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and won the Iowa caucuses — well, sort of. Although the results will remain forever muddled thanks to Iowa Democrats’ fuzzy math and poor record keeping, “Mayor Pete,” walked away with the most delegates after finishing second in the popular vote behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The subsequent result in New Hampshire — Bernie got the most votes, but Pete tied him in number of delegates — put a lot of wind into Buttigieg’s sails. Buttigieg met the end of his campaign but not of his career in South Carolina, where establishment Democrats and especially Black voters united behind Joe Biden.

Buttigieg dropped out, endorsed Biden and got a Cabinet appointment as his reward.

If we’re being honest, all Pete really had going for him is that he was young and gay. That’s enough in the modern Democratic Party, but his tenure does not indicate a correlation between those things and success.

His tenure as mayor was unimpressive and controversial enough that it arguably cost him any real shot at the nomination. And because he didn’t have the experience to handle any of the important Cabinet posts, they put him in at Transportation.

Then the supply chain collapsed. Cargo ships loaded with consumer goods stacked up off the coasts before the public heard anything from the guy nominally in charge of making sure the shipping lanes were clear. That’s because Secretary “Mayor Pete” had been on paternity leave, having just adopted twins. No one had even noticed until then, because the Secretary of Transportation doesn’t usually matter. That’s why the job was given to the guy who checked at least some of the right boxes on the left-wing victimhood flowchart in the first place. 

As American parents scrambled to find baby formula, Pete was touting the government’s decision to use the Air Force to fly in formula from around the world. Did his kids run out of formula? It’s doubtful.

The media have moved on, but the problem with supply chains still has not been resolved. Look up formula prices on Amazon, and you’ll see they are heavily inflated. Check your grocery store, and it is probably still placing limits on how much each person can purchase. (Mine does.)

Even as he neglects everything that matters in transportation, Buttigieg has not shied away from an even more Herculean task: overcoming his own record on how he has treated Black people in the past, so that maybe someday he can run for president and not get thumped quite so badly in South Carolina.

This is why, with serious transportation problems plaguing the administration and affecting people’s everyday lives — including soaring gasoline prices, extremely destructive derailments and flight cancellations — Buttigieg has spent those months when he has not been on paternity leave virtue-signaling about “racist roads” and diverting funds into projects that “are focused on equity and environmental justice.”

Buttigieg has also assembled an “Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity.” “Equity” is a newspeak word for what we used to call government-sanctioned discrimination against one group and in favor of another, which an entire civil rights movement was once created to abolish.

Among Mayor Pete’s appointees to this equity commission, as the Washington Free Beacon recently reported, is Andrea Marpillero-Colomina, “a ‘spatial policy scholar’ who says ‘ALL CARS ARE BAD’” (including electric vehicles) “given that they cause ‘a myriad of environmental issues and conditions.’” What the hell is a “spatial policy scholar?” I’m not sure, but Marpillero-Colomina’s website describes it as involving “advancing equity, supporting anti-racist practices.”

Basically, this is the kind of person who gets appointed by a transportation secretary who already has his mind on 2028.

If Buttigieg cared about the Department of Transportation even a little bit, he would resign and take one of those cable news contracts that you just know are out there waiting for him. But liberals fail upward,  and Buttigieg is counting on failing upward a lot faster than most.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).