Isn’t the looming freight-rail crisis the sort of thing a secretary of transportation should be worried about?
I had my doubts that having Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in the office back in October 2021 would have made much of a difference in the supply-chain crisis that bedeviled the country in the fall and winter. I contended that the more uncomfortable fact for the administration was that Buttigieg was out on paternity leave for two months and no one noticed.
But U.S. secretaries of transportation are a bit like brake lines, offensive lines, and power lines — you only pay much attention to them when they don’t work. And a year after massive backlogs at U.S. ports, the U.S. is now facing a potentially disastrous disruption of freight rail — in fact, the disruption has already started in anticipation of a strike.
And it’s not just conservatives who are noticing that Buttigeig is two for two in transportation and supply-chain disasters in two years.
Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of the Intercept, is underwhelmed.
It’s really surprising that throwing the mayor of South Bend into the Transportation Department where he spends his time preparing another presidential run hasn’t worked out so well for the nation’s transportation!
Who could have imagined.
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 14, 2022
David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, piles on.
What will be even more pathetic is that when he runs for president, liberals almost certainly won’t care at all about how horrendously he performed in the one big job he’s ever had. It probably won’t even be a topic of discussion or a metric of evaluation. It’ll be memory-holed. https://t.co/M4KK9abHre
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 14, 2022
Relax, America, Pete Buttigieg is at the Detroit Auto Show today. The Hill helpfully informs us that “less than two months from the midterms, some Democrats are speculating about what a second Buttigieg run could look like.” Considering how little Buttigieg seems to think about trains, I think we can rule out a whistle-stop tour.
Buttigieg’s defenders can argue that labor secretary Marty Walsh is the administration’s point man on the labor-management negotiations. But Americans will notice that the U.S. keeps having problems involving ports, ships, and trains — and let’s not forget what a chaotic, oft-delayed disaster domestic air travel was this summer, and the lingering shortage of truck drivers and regulatory challenges in that industry. Planes, trains, ships, trucks — these are the sorts of things that elementary school students can recognize as forms of transportation.
Hey, say this for Buttigieg: He’s a uniter, not a divider. Everyone is wondering what he’s doing in that job.