Here’s a line I didn’t think I’d wake up and write today: former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is exactly right. Vice President Kamala Harris should have given voters more credit and picked the best-qualified running mate, identity politics be damned.

In a passage from Harris’s forthcoming book 107 Days, published in the Atlantic this week, she reveals that Buttigieg topped her initial list of eight possible vice presidential nominees. But Harris went against her instincts, opting for Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), whose identity characteristics — straight, white, male — made him ostensibly less threatening to the general public.