Wired magazine has faced criticism by conservatives for a recent interview of the current transportation secretary: “Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang.” The title, the questions asked, and the preamble, by contributor Virginia Heffernan, have drawn mockery.
“I know, I know, there’s absolutely zero bias in media, but I sure don’t recall endless hagiographic profiles of, say, [former Republican Transportation Secretaries] Mary Peters or Elaine Chao,” tweeted GOP consultant Doug Heye, who has held top communications roles in the House Republican leadership and Republican National Committee.
The sentence Heye singled out for criticism, from the preamble to the Q&A, was this: “Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes — neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity — intelligible to me.”
Other sentences along those lines could have been chosen and done the job just as well. For instance, Heffernan wrote that Buttigieg “comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.” She posed one of her questions like so: “Running DOT seems to suit you. Are there more ways the challenges of transportation speak to your spiritual side?”
Republican consultant Luke Thompson took the tack of damning the piece with enthusiastic, mocking praise.
“This is one of the most brutal takedowns of a public figure I’ve ever read,” he wrote. “It portrays Buttigieg as a negligent and narcissistic dilettante in love with his own mediocre intelligence and superciliousness. And all in the guise of hagiography.”
Heffernan’s case for Buttigieg may have been more fawningly put than some of his press clips, but the transportation secretary has received plenty of positive press coverage for things that have nothing to do with his current job performance. Buttigieg’s gay marriage, the couple’s adoption of two infants, and speculation about his future political prospects have all led to stories that have helped to bolster his image.
Some critics have charged that image obscures real problems with how Buttigieg is overseeing the Cabinet department that he runs. For instance, he quietly took family leave and disappeared from the public eye for months in 2021 to facilitate the adoption of fraternal twins while the public faced an unprecedented shipping backup and supply chain crunch.
Then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson remarked that Buttigieg had “been on leave from his job since August after adopting a child” and included an obvious joke about breastfeeding in his criticism of the secretary for being essentially AWOL at a critical time. Rather than address the issue of his absence, Buttigieg and his defenders attacked the joke.
“Tucker Carlson’s crushing indifference to the realities of child-rearing is one of the more recent and extreme reminders of exactly why America needs paid paternity leave,” wrote Holly Thomas, an editor of Katie Couric Media, for CNN. “Attacks on Pete Buttigieg for paternity leave are homophobic, misogynist, and bad for business,” read a headline on an NBC News Think op-ed. “I’m not going to apologize to Tucker Carlson or anyone else for taking care of my premature newborn twins,” Buttigieg said.
Yet no one was calling for Buttigieg to apologize for taking care of his adopted children. What Carlson and company were criticizing him for was not going to the ports where the shipping bottleneck was taking place and trying to work out a solution to the problem, or temporarily handing off power to someone who could work to make that happen.
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The “not showing up” criticism is one that appears to have gotten under Buttigieg’s skin. He faced conservative calls to show up in East Palestine, Ohio, after the February derailment disaster there and eventually visited the site.
A bill to address the fallout from East Palestine, the Railway Safety Act, appears stalled in the Senate. One of the sticking points is the considerable additional powers it would give to Buttigieg. A transportation secretary with a reputation for problem-solving competence, rather than a gift for gab with the press, might have an easier time clearing that legislative hurdle.
