It means little that he can half-heartedly break from aspects of the Democratic Party’s record that he now realizes are controversial.
It means little that he can half-heartedly break from aspects of the Democratic Party’s record that he now realizes are controversial.
D uring the 2016 Republican primary, there was a “baby Hitler” moment. The Huffington Post asked candidate Jeb Bush if, given the chance, he would go back in time and kill Germany’s genocidal dictator as an infant, before he became one of the 20th century’s iron-willed monsters, thereby erasing Hitler’s crimes.
Discounting any of the various potential paradoxes and possible multiversal implications of the deed, Jeb Bush leapt headlong into this hypothetical (take your pick) DeLorean, phone booth, Tardis, or Wellsian steampunk contraption with a knife in hand. “Hell yeah, I would!” he said.
Almost ten years after Jeb’s temporal shenanigans, Pete Buttigieg is attempting his own. Buttigieg, the former mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city, somehow used his 2020 run for president to elevate his national profile enough that Joe Biden (or someone around Biden) made him secretary of transportation. He remains ambitious. One must be suspicious that he has passed on opportunities to run for governor and senator in Michigan, the bluer state he has unpersuasively adopted as his new home. Indeed, it’s looking increasingly likely that another presidential run, in 2028, is in the offing for Buttigieg — and not just because he has grown a beard.
In his pseudo-campaign thus far, he has confronted a serious problem, over and above seeming, thanks to his McKinsey days, like a PowerPoint in human form: The Democratic Party is unpopular, a direct result of decisions some of its most powerful figures made during Biden’s presidency and before. So to show the public that he’s actually on their side in these debates, and at reporters’ prompting, Buttigieg has jumped into a time machine. It won’t work.
Buttigieg, who mocked diversity training earlier this year, isn’t only engaging in the kind of shameless tacking that his fellow likely 2028 aspirant Gavin Newsom has tried on (some) trans issues. Buttigieg’s reversals involve hypothetical revisionism. Last month, he was in Iowa, a place politicians who aren’t from there seldom go without some ulterior motive. There, reporters asked him whether it would have been better for his party if Biden hadn’t run for a second term. “Maybe, you know, right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that is the case,” he responded.
No way! How much credit should Buttigieg get for acknowledging this reality? Very little. Most voters had figured this out without the “benefit of hindsight” long before he admitted it. One poll found that about three-quarters of American adults, and about two-thirds of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to run for president. It was published in August 2023, nearly a year before the late June debate that supposedly exposed this to public view. Buttigieg could have found articles in National Review as far back as 2020 wondering whether Biden was up to being president. If he’s not a subscriber and has reached the paywall limit, he could have remembered the opprobrium heaped on his fellow 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro for daring to suggest the same in 2019. Joe Biden’s decline was obvious in the moment. No wisdom from hindsight was necessary.
More recently, Buttigieg has attempted to reckon with another mass delusion his fellow Democrats helped to sustain. Asked by an interviewer what he today would tell himself in 2020, he had a first answer ready to go: “One, for the love of God, figure out a way to get the schools open sooner.” The costs of prolonged school closures were “profound” for “a generation.” Great Scott! He could not make even this admission, however, without stressing that “anybody who was involved” was “obviously doing their best to deal with” the Covid crisis.
Were they? Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Randi Weingarten, still president of the American Federation of Teachers, were two of the leading figures pushing back against reopening schools. Most elected Democrats, such as Governor (and, for some reason, 2024 Democratic vice-presidential candidate) Tim Walz, followed suit. Public schooling in Chicago did not fully return until summer 2021; Chicago teachers staged a strike, ostensibly for Covid-related reasons, in January 2022. Meanwhile, red states were able to “figure out” a way to get schools to open sooner: open them sooner. Many returned to something like normal schooling by fall 2020. The example was there for them. Buttigieg and others ignored it — or even castigated it.
His other advice to his past self was similarly self-evident without hindsight. “Pay more attention to the border.” (Many did.) Don’t hand-wave away concerns about inflation. (Many did not.) “It’s easy to say now” what things he would have done differently, he claims. It ought to have been easy then, too.
Jeb Bush knew that he couldn’t kill baby Hitler. But Buttigieg apparently thinks that, by belatedly and half-heartedly breaking from aspects of the Democratic Party’s record that did not age well over time, he can recast his past positions — and set himself up well for the future. Like the rest of us, however, he is stuck in the normal stream of time, without an actual time machine. Where is the evidence that he is capable of independent thinking, of sound judgment, of bold dissent in the moment? His future conduct, not his attempted self-retcons of recent years, will be the proper way to judge whether he has genuinely learned from the past.