Pete Buttigieg's bizarre invocation of race following the Ohio toxic chemical spill
It's about presidential politics
Are there more major transportation-related disasters and snafus these days because Pete Buttigieg is Secretary of Transportation or are we hearing more about them because we have a high visibility Transportation Secretary? Or are the disasters and snafus due simply to bad luck?
I don’t know. I do know that Buttigieg isn’t helping himself with his responses to the transportation problems that have arisen under his watch.
Buttigieg was at home on extended paternity leave during the worst days of the supply chain crisis. That might have been just as well for the country, but it presented a bad look.
In response to the wave of balloons over our airspace (at least one of which was on a Chinese spying mission), Buttigieg complained/joked that “we've faced issues from container shipping to airline cancellations… Now we got balloons.” In other words, it’s one damn thing after another. Imagine how put upon he’d feel if he were president, as he no doubt aspires to be.
Now Buttigieg has another damn thing on his hands — a mushroom cloud of noxious smoke from burning toxic chemicals due to a train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. David Marcus reports:
With hardly any warning, the town's working-class residents were roused from their homes and evacuated after tankers derailed on February 3rd, spilling carcinogens like vinyl chloride, phosgene, and hydrogen chloride. Now folks are fearful of long-term cancer risks and ecological devastation.
Buttigieg’s reaction the disaster? According to Marcus, at the same press conference in which the Secretary quipped about balloons, he hardly a word about the toxic chemicals. Instead, he complained that construction crews are too white.
We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color, that finally sees the project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats on that project, doing the good paying jobs, don't look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood.
Even some progressives were taken aback. Former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, a Bernie Sanders supporter, tweeted: “He jokes about balloons while ignoring East Palestine, OH. We deserve better than this.”
Ten days after the crash, Buttigieg finally had something to say to the victims. He wrote:
I continue to be concerned about the impacts of the Feb 3 train derailment near East Palestine, OH, and the effects on families in the ten days since their lives were upended through no fault of their own.
That’s nice. But it’s telling that his initial focus was on race discrimination in construction crews “from generations past.”
Why did Buttigieg react in this bizarre way? My theory is that his default mode is to pander to blacks because he views their resistance to him as the primary obstacle to a successful presidential bid.
In 2020, Mayor Pete was the darling of white liberals. They carried this obscure small city mayor to a stunningly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, in which he finished second, just two points behind Sanders and 16 points ahead of Joe Biden.
But as soon as states with large black populations started voting, Buttigieg’s campaign was doomed. The mayor barely registered in polls of black Democrats. Consequently, in the crucial South Carolina primary, he finished a distant fourth, 40 points behind Biden. Even Tom Steyer (remember him?) outpaced Buttigieg.
I have little doubt that Buttigieg intends to run for president again, either in 2024 or 2028. Without breaking through with black voters, at least to some degree, he has little chance of securing his party’s nomination.
Viewed against this reality, Buttigieg’s seemingly inexplicable focus on the racial composition of construction crews in past generations makes a strange kind of sense.
Unfortunately for Buttigieg, and for Republicans who relish the prospect of running against him, I don’t see black voters warming to the guy no matter how hard he bangs the racial drum.