In a year of woe and confusion for President Biden, Pete Buttigieg has been out front and unruffled. RossBarkan reports on how billions of dollars in infrastructure funds turned the Transportation secretary into a D.C. power broker
Photo: Victor Llorente These days, Pete Buttigieg is concerned about the future of democracy. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the last time fascism was fashionable in certain corners of this country’s political class, one of the things they said for Mussolini is he made the trains run on time — it was a transportation example,” he tells me in his spacious office overlooking the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.
That has begun to change for the newly minted 40-year-old and father of twins, who is not only hobnobbing more in Washington but recently visited South by Southwest and packs a busy schedule of out-of-town events. His office, in the chic D.C. Navy Yard neighborhood, has few personal touches. A Notre Dame coaster, sitting next to a newsletter provided by a longshoreman union, is a small reminder of where he came from.
If the Biden campaign seemed, at times, to subsist on whatever terror and rage Democratic voters could marshal against Trump, Buttigieg’s bid was a small taste of what Biden’s old boss had once offered curious Iowans. An openly gay military veteran making his own soaring case for aspirational liberalism, Buttigieg could captivate a packed gymnasium like Barack Obama and soon became a favorite of White House alums like David Axelrod.
That idea is infrastructure, a bipartisan staple of Washington that, in its nuts-and-bolts nerdiness, seems ideally suited to a politician who has always embodied the straight-A student hungry to answer the next question. Transportation policy genuinely excites Buttigieg, who gained a small degree of fame among wonks for his successful pedestrianization of South Bend. He has rolled out an ambitious plan to drastically slash traffic fatalities nationwide.
Infrastructure money will endear Buttigieg not only to powerful Democrats across the country but to voters. For example, it will go a long way toward building a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, a project Chris Christie scuttled and Trump failed to revive. For Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Buttigieg was a revelation because he was willing to listen to her pleas to incorporate funding for disability access to mass-transit systems. “He was as good as his word,” she says.
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