by Scott McKay
It started on Thursday. Ever so softly the chorus seemed to build:
The odds on Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg being the Democratic Party‘s 2024 vice presidential candidate have improved with one leading bookmaker over the past 24 hours, following media reports that the campaign team of Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is considering him for the role.
On Wednesday, William Hill offered odds of 14/1 (6.7 percent) on Buttigieg running as the Democrats‘ vice presidential pick, but this improved to 4/1 (20 percent) as of 5 a.m. ET on Thursday.
Everywhere you looked on X, there was some Democrat pundit out there touting Mayor Pete as a “groundbreaking” or “unbeatable” running mate for Kamala Harris.
This replaced similar speculation earlier in the week about Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania who would make the most sense for a Harris running mate. But all of a sudden, Shapiro’s stock seemed to drop through the floor.
Why?
Josh Shapiro Is Not Today’s Democrat Party:
Shapiro is cast as a “moderate” Democrat, which means he’s a garden-variety elite leftist with the strange quirk of not hating the idea of school choice.
Which is not to say he’s an ally of the school choice people in Pennsylvania — he just doesn’t hate them the way, say, Pol Pot hated the polished classes. For this, he’s seen as something of an odd bird.
But he’s also Jewish, and this was actually reported by CNN’s John King as a negative within today’s Democrat Party. King was slammed for saying that, but seeing as though he married Jewish co-worker Dana Bash a few years ago and reportedly was considering converting to Judaism, it’s not like this was some brazenly anti-Semitic statement. King got that from somewhere — almost certainly one of his Democrat Party sources.
Because anti-Semitism is a growing sacrament within that party. It was clearly obvious when 100 of their House members and two dozen of their senators failed to show up to Bibi Netanyahu’s congressional address on Wednesday, and it was also obvious when several thousand of their voters decided to riot on the streets of Washington, D.C., complete with beatings of police officers, the desecration of American flags, and flying of Palestinian flags at Union Station and a general trashing of the place.
Of course, general trashings of places is not a particularly anti-Semitic activity. It’s just a Democrat thing.
In the aftermath of that riot, Harris put out a note that came off as the classic strongly worded letter admonishing those crazy kids for their hijinks without promising or demanding any concrete action be taken against the rioters or the organizers who brought them in on buses.
Because of course she didn’t. She’s proven that she’s cool with rioting, and she’s also cool with Hamas, er, Palestinians.
And when all of that was over by Thursday, it was Buttigieg’s name being thrown around for VP and not Shapiro.
So did Harris sour on Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, or did Shapiro sour on Harris?
Who can say?
One thing to note is that if you’re Josh Shapiro and you’re feeling your political oats a little for having your name thrown around this early in your governorship in Harrisburg, you might consider that in 2028 the White House will be open to all comers and a good, hard primary run might just make him the favorite to win it.
Whereas riding in the passenger seat with Harris’ tipsy-turvy driving might just crash your career.
Does he want to be Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Geraldine Ferraro, Lloyd Bentsen, Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, or Tim Kaine, none of whom were very relevant after serving as second fiddle on a losing ticket? Maybe not, especially when it’s clear that a giant chunk of the current Democrat base looks at him the way the Hutus looked at the Tutsis.
…But Pete Buttigieg Is.
And besides, Pete Buttigieg — I affectionately refer to him as Gay Mayor Pete, because you simply cannot be more obnoxiously gay than Pete Buttigieg is in his nonstop flaunting of his sexuality in front of the public (which, frankly, grosses out practically every gay person I know) — is the most on-brand choice Harris can make.
He’d get that nomination for the same reason Richard, er, Rachel Levine got the No. 2 job at DHHS or that Sam Brinton, the maniacal transvestite repeatedly guilty of pilfering ladies’ valises at airport carousels, was put in charge of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
Namely, the outrage.
You show the American people someone who belongs to one of your captive identity groups and flaunts that membership in impolite ways, like for example when Buttigieg spent a chunk of his truncated 2020 presidential campaign lecturing Christians that he was holier than they despite the conflict his lifestyle might generate with the scriptural word, or when Buttigieg took two months off work for “paternity leave” after adopting a pair of toddlers with his husband in the middle of the supply-chain crisis.
People dislike Buttigieg not because he’s gay but because he’s annoying, incompetent, and utterly radical.
But you aren’t allowed to dislike him. To do so makes you a homophobe.
Just like to dislike Harris, who is also annoying, incompetent, and utterly radical, makes you a racist and a misogynist.
The DEI Factor(y)
The controversy that has brewed up this week over whether conservatives are allowed to criticize Harris as a DEI hire is a good example of this dynamic at work.
As I wrote at RVIVR on Wednesday:
The suggestion is that to refer to DEI where Harris is concerned is “overtly racist and sexist.”
But why is that?
None of the Republicans in that room made Harris a DEI hire.
That was Joe Biden’s doing.
Let’s remember that in June of 2020 when Biden was picking his running mate he explicitly restricted his choices to black women. The three names which were tossed out as finalists were Susan Rice, the Obama underling who ultimately was put in charge of DEI in the Biden administration, Karen Bass, who at that point was a congresswoman from Los Angeles and is now mayor of Los Angeles, and Harris.
…
DEI is the most fundamental manifestation of the anti-American agenda being foisted on us by the elite Left in this country, and Harris is representative of both. She’s the political equivalent of Claudine Gay, the plagiarist with a razor-thin academic record who ended up as the president of Harvard University solely on the basis of DEI, and what Harvard got for their trouble was Gay embracing Hamas on that campus and chasing off tens of millions of dollars from donors. That university’s reputation has taken a massive hit as a result of her mismanagement.
And we now see what DEI almost cost us as a country in the person of Kimberly Cheatle, the just-resigned director of the Secret Service who, through incompetence or treachery, very nearly got Donald Trump killed with security that was so awful in Butler, Pennsylvania as to raise suspicion.
America absolutely should be given an opportunity to accept or reject DEI, and this presidential campaign is as good a format as any for that choice.
I’m apparently in the minority, because we’re being admonished to “talk about her record instead of her race.”
But the point is that DEI isn’t about race. It’s about this obnoxious in-your-face assault on meritocracy the elite Left is forcing on the American people, using the Harrises and Buttigiegs as its vanguard. Find radical incompetents who rank higher than straight white men on the intersectional totem pole, and then protect them with the armor of “Racism!” “Sexism!” “Homophobia!” accusations when attempts at vetting come, and two things happen — the more polite vetters will slink away, and the DEI beneficiaries will be very grateful for the free ride and pay you back with unending loyalty.
If not exceptional diligence, work ethic or judgment.
That you end up with the performance levels of a Gay or a Cheatle is an unfortunate, but tolerable, byproduct. Our elites stopped caring that the institutions they control are well-run right about the time their infiltration of them blossomed into power in the big chair.
They don’t mind ruling over a ruin.
And Gay Mayor Pete is proof of that, as your most recent air travel experience can likely attest.
As an aside, isn’t it peculiar that DEI is a good and worthy thing, and yet it’s now considered a “slur” and an “insult” to associate someone with DEI? Where is your pride, people?
This Is What They Have, So It’s What You’ll Get
You remember this old lawyers’ adage, right? “If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If neither are on your side, pound on the table.” Well, DEI is the pounding on that table. And it’s all Harris has to go on, because the facts aren’t good for her as the No. 2 in the Biden administration, which has performed so horribly. And the law isn’t good for her given that she was in charge of the border the last three years and turned it into a superhighway for sex trafficking and fentanyl poisoning. Not to mention that practically every public utterance of hers since becoming a national figure marks her as an unabashed enemy of the Constitution.
But she’ll pound on the table by calling you a racist and a sexist and a homophobe for not buying the campaign pitch she and Gay Mayor Pete have on offer.
Will this work? It really isn’t very likely, no. But there’s a certain misanthropic joy in that, too. Which is that if the American voter rejects such a pure woke identity politics ticket, it’s proof we’re the bad guys, the backwards bigots whose “hatred” and “fear” of our inevitable future make us guilty — and worthy of the riots, civil unrest, and lawlessness the Antifa/BLM Left will surely unleash in a second Trump term.
I’m not saying Harris–Buttigieg is inevitable. I am saying it’s a pretty good guess. And if it happens, you’re going to have an election inevitably all about DEI — whether you want it or not.
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
Photo “Pete Buttigieg” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
