Pete Buttigieg Learns That Cabinet Posts Are Bad Places to Hide

There are no small jobs in the executive branch of the federal government. Oh, sure, there are plenty where there is little prospect of accomplishing anything, and where it could be quite a while before anybody notices if you don’t actually do very much. But in most any executive branch job, there are things that can go wrong, and the higher up the ladder you get, the more of those there are. Taking a second-tier cabinet job you don’t know how to do might look like a low-risk place to park yourself while waiting for a shot at higher office, but it can swiftly become a political graveyard.

 Pete Buttigieg is learning this the hard way. After the 2020 presidential election, he found himself in a promising but precarious position. As a 38-year-old dark horse candidate, he had impressed Democratic primary voters enough to run a close second to Bernie Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire (due to the rules of the Iowa caucus, he was declared the winner with fewer votes than Bernie) before getting trampled by Sanders in Nevada and Joe Biden in South Carolina. He then withdrew from the race at a critical juncture. When he and his arch-nemesis Amy Klobuchar both threw their support simultaneously to Biden, it allowed Biden to sweep most of the Super Tuesday races and walk off with the nomination. Not only was Buttigieg marked as a rising man in the party, but the new president owed him big time.

What Buttigieg didn’t have was a job or an obvious next move. He’d never won an office higher than mayor of South Bend, Ind., which he left after two terms in 2019. South Bend is the fourth-largest city in Indiana. Indianapolis is eight times its size, and Fort Wayne is two and a half times its size. No disrespect to Fort Wayne, but nobody thinks of it as a major American metropolis, yet it dwarfs South Bend. Buttigieg’s presence was not that essential: He spent seven months in Afghanistan in the Army Reserve in 2014, and the city’s heavily Democratic electorate still reelected him with over 80 percent of the vote the following year.

Pete Buttigieg Learns That Cabinet Posts Are Bad Places to Hide