Biden, Buttigieg-mania, and the gift of gab | Will Bunch Newsletter

You thought it was only Joe Biden and the Flyers having a rough 2022? What are we to make of the American police officer? Like the porridge in Goldilocks, it seems today’s cops are either too hot (a mass shooting of five innocent people by Denver cops, over a man who may or may not have had a gun) or too cold (the epic police inaction during Uvalde’s mass murder). Can anyone with a badge get it just right?

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If you sleep late on Sundays, you can surely be excused if you missed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s recent verbal jousting on the Fox News Channel with host Mike Emanuel. The FNC journalist thought he could score some cheap political points over a tweet by Buttigieg’s husband Chasten that seemed to mock Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s encounter with protesters outside a D.C. restaurant.

Instead of hemming or apologizing, the 40-year-old former Indiana mayor shot back with a fiery answer that for Democrats who’d hoped — unsuccessfully — to go “back to brunch” and forget politics under President Biden must have tasted like a gourmet heaping of huevos rancheros. After arguing that public officials like Kavanaugh should “never be free of criticism or peaceful protest,” Buttigieg turned the question on its head to accuse the justice of lying in his confirmation hearings about his stance on the right to privacy, and then compared the non-violent restaurant vigil to the violence by Republicans backing Donald Trump on Jan 6, 2021.

As the clip of Buttigieg went viral, a flood of Democratic voters praised the former 2020 presidential candidate for taking the fight to the enemy, for his combativeness, and for a message that was so articulate.

“No one come close to Pete Buttigieg in his ability to articulate issues in clear and vivid language, including on Fox News,” the liberal writer Steven Beschloss opined on Twitter, typical of the praise for Biden’s DOT chief.

With the midway point of Biden’s term approaching, Buttigieg finds himself in a highly unusual position. A growing number of Democrats would like to see him run as the party’s nominee for president in 2024 instead of his boss, even though Biden has strongly suggested he wants to run for a second term in two years. Buttigieg would also have to leapfrog the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, to pull this off.

This past weekend, the Washington Post published its highly subjective ranking of the Democratic presidential field (if there is one) for 2024, and Buttigieg was all the way up at number two, just behind the incumbent president and one notch ahead of the woman who was selected as veep with Biden’s age — currently 79, the oldest POTUS ever — on everyone’s mind. The newspaper wrote that “if Democrats are putting a premium on the ability to drive a message against Republicans — a not-insignificant consideration in modern politics — Buttigieg makes a lot of sense.”

Does he, though? After reading that piece, I went on Twitter with a post about Buttigieg’s somewhat light resume (seriously, can anyone name either the current mayor of South Bend or the second-to-last head of DOT?) and wondered if there’d be much reaction. There was — 190 responses and counting so far, with most of the comments along the lines of, “He’s adept at thinking on his feet and expressing in language that is inoffensive and understandable to all,” or, “Superb grasp of issues, intellectually curious, able to communicate well to many different constituencies, fast on his feet.”

Few if any mentioned the flaws that kept him from winning the nomination when he actually ran for president in 2020, including his failure to garner much support from the left wing of the party, which found suspect both Buttigieg’s origin story with the truly diabolical consultancy McKinsey (seriously, check their record from China to opioids) and his centrist policy stances. More importantly, Buttigieg has shown zero ability to garner support from the most critical Democratic voting bloc, African Americans.

Still, I think Buttigieg’s current high ranking both with the Beltway pundits and with Democrats on Twitter reflects something highly important that’s happening right now. When voters see the young and energetic Transportation Secretary, they see something they crave that they just aren’t getting from Joe Biden: the confidence that comes with the ability to articulate well.

I honestly think Biden’s struggle to deliver a powerful verbal message is the main reason for his low approval ratings. He has a stutter, which he’s largely — and remarkably — overcome; the public shouldn’t hold that against him, but some probably (if not subconsciously) do. But the real problem isn’t how he talks, it’s what he says. At times, he says the wrong thing — usually trivially, but occasionally important enough that his staff walks back what he just said. Look, maybe Biden is a pit bull behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, but the public won’t see that. We see him at the podium, where it’s a slog.

In reality, his 18 months in the White House have been a mixed bag: bad on inflation but great on jobs, flubbing Build Back Better but signing more important bills — COVID relief, infrastructure, gun safety — than his predecessors. The Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. has an excellent new piece arguing the media is the No. 1 culprit for Biden’s low numbers, but while that matters, I think Biden’s bigger problem is when he stands at a lectern.

Ronald Reagan, the actor who became president, had a remarkable ability to project leadership when he opened his mouth, and he largely set the template for any successful POTUS that followed. It’s no accident that Barack Obama skyrocketed toward the White House not for getting stuff done as an Illinois lawmaker, but for a killer speech.

Starting to show the strain of nearly a half-century in office, Biden is not giving off that confident vibe — that ability to convince folks that everything is going to be alright — that most of the electorate desires. Compared to other recent presidents, Biden’s interviews and news conferences are less frequent or shorter.

This, I believe, is the real source of Buttigieg-mania. Not only would a “Mayor Pete” boomlet in 2024 involve passing the torch to a new generation, finally, but he is coming across as a fighter who understands the anti-democratic threat from today’s GOP and takes this brawl to the venues where folks are watching. That doesn’t erase Buttigieg’s above-mentioned flaws, or make it wise to push aside a sitting president who’s shown he can win the big one. But it’s why we’re even having this conversation. Things are going to get very interesting.

Question: Do you think a 3rd party candidate could come in the 2024 Prez election and make some noise like Ross Perot in ‘92? He got almost 19% of the vote and may have given us The Clintons as Bill benefited from having him in the race. — Via @KentCalhoun14 on Twitter

Answer: Interesting timing for your question: The current status quo of Biden and Trump as the seeming frontrunners for their party’s respective nominations in 2024, even though both are generally unpopular with a majority of the electorate right now, is sparking more speculation than usual about an independent candidate for the White House. Andrew Yang, who made a name for himself as a Democratic candidate in 2020 with outside-the-box proposals like universal basic income (UBI) and is now launching something called the Forward Party, said last week he’d strongly consider running if the other choices are Biden and Trump. But we know that third-party candidates help Trump by splitting up the majority vote against him. Fairly high-profile third-party bids in 2016 by Gary Johnson and Jill Stein is how Trump was able to become president with just 46% of the popular vote. Let’s pray this doesn’t happen again in 2024.

The last time this newsletter checked in on Mike Roman, the “blue-collar kid from Kensington” who steadily rose in the shadowy world of GOP voter-fraud allegations to become Donald Trump’s Election Day poll-watching guru — and arguably the most Philly guy in Trumpworld — was during the angst-ridden days of October 2020. At that time, Roman — who’d fought Philly Democrats over absentee ballots in the 1990s and made notorious allegations against the New Black Panthers in the 2000s — was reportedly organizing an “Army for Trump” of poll watchers who would presumably go into heavily Democratic election precincts on Nov. 3, 2020, raising fears of Election Day clashes. But the big day came and went with little incident. It would turn out the only “Army for Trump” was the violent mob that descended on the Capitol on Jan 6, and there was little word about what, if anything, Mike Roman had been up to while his boss was plotting a coup.

Until now.

Back in mid-February, it was reported that Roman was one of a half-dozen Trump insiders — including Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor — who was subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 Committee that is currently holding high-profile public hearings on Capitol Hill. The request was tied to the so-called “fake electors” scheme of electoral votes cast for Trump in states won by President Biden — but it wasn’t clear why Roman had been included. Last week, Politico and other D.C. news outlets reported it was Roman who delivered at least two of these “fake elector” documents, from Wisconsin and Michigan, to the chief of staff for Pennsylvania GOP Rep Mike Kelly, who then disseminated the papers — supposed to be the basis for then-Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory — to heavy hitters like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson on Jan. 6. Roman had no immediate comment on the reports. Stay tuned.