Mailbag: The Buttigieg legacy

Plus: things I reluctantly believe, the generic ballot, and standardizing apartment designs

It lacks the zaniness of Signalgate and the eye-popping corruption of Trump accepting a 747 from the Emirate of Qatar, but I really do want to emphasize, again, what an awful piece of legislation House Republicans have cooked up.

If this thing passes, millions of people will lose health insurance. American energy innovation will be kneecapped. And after all that sacrifice, the budget deficit will soar. Not only is this bill awful, but the odds are very good that it or something very similar to it will pass and be signed into law. You should call, tweet, cajole, complain, or whatever you can to try to stop it from happening, but the fact is that House moderates have a marked tendency to fold and the GOP Senate majority is large enough that it’s really hard to block anything there.

I mention all this because it’s true and important, but also because it’s a reminder that all this endless yammering from me about pragmatism and moderates and winning tough races is actually about something.

If you replaced four Senate Republicans with Joe Manchin clones, this bill would not pass. If you replaced five House Republicans with Jared Golden clones, this bill would not pass. You could, in fact, be decidedly more conservative than either of those guys — as many Democratic members were 15-20 years ago — and still not vote for a bill that savages the poor while also exploding the deficit.

---

Julia: You struck me as, broadly speaking, a fan of Pete Buttigieg. Is that still true in light of the current problems plaguing the FAA? My sense is that he didn’t do a bang-up job as Transportation Secretary.

I don’t think you can reasonably blame Secretary Mayor Pete for problems at the FAA. The long-term situation was not great, but the system was operating under Biden. When Trump started doing these layoffs while promising he was saving air traffic control jobs, lots of people warned that firing the support staff would compromise operations.

In terms of Pete’s overall tenure, everything is relative. I think if you look at the consumer protection stuff he did on air travel, the success of New York City congestion pricing, getting the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act done, getting the Federal Railroad Administration’s corridor planning process launched in a sensible way, and defending the safety record and promise of self-driving cars, he did a pretty good job. Elaine Chao accomplished nothing in this role, her predecessor, Anthony Foxx, accomplished nothing, and his predecessor, Ray LaHood, did genuine harm by having DOT encourage cities to build mixed-traffic streetcars.

But I’m uncertain about his future.

On the one hand, he’s clearly one of the most talented and skilled communicators that the Democratic Party has. On the other hand, he was a cabinet officer in a failed administration. Not an administration that was bereft of good ideas or good policies, but an administration that was unpopular and rejected at the polls and that completely failed to achieve its stated core objective of rescuing American democracy from the threat of Donald Trump.

What’s he going to say about that? As Secretary of Transportation, he touched a lot of decisions that were ultimately made above his pay grade. Was it wise to be so loyal to union interests around Buy America, the Jones Act, and port automation? Should Biden have continued to push Obama-era air traffic control privatization ideas? We all understand that Buttigieg was not a subject matter expert on transportation policy when he got the job, and also that these big picture political strategy choices aren’t made at the discretion of the secretary. But what did he learn from doing the job? I’d love to hear his takes.

KateLE: What is something you have reluctantly come to believe is true, but still hate that it's true?

One is that the mass public’s commitment to things like democracy and the rule of law is a lot thinner than one would like, and the other (potentially related) thing is that voters are just way more stuck in a zero-sum worldview than would be ideal.

Michael Adelman: High-information college-educated libs are the most fundamental problem for Dems. We tarnish the Dem brand by association. The public's strong disagreement with our cultural values sustains a high floor of support for Trumpist politics and, by foreclosing a viable opposition, gives Trump vast latitude to abuse power. I'm extremely frustrated with a lot of libs failing to understand the assignment — which is to find Blue Dog-style candidates, let them throw us under the bus as much as they can, and shut up and support them anyway. Instead high-engagement libs seem to want performative validation. How do we convince people to cut this out and swallow this (admittedly bitter) pill? And I'm not sure 12 years of losing is the answer because by then competitive democracy could be gone!

I think this is fine as a high-level sociological summary of what’s going on, but in a lot of respects it overstates the difficulty.