Late last week, former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd ruffled some feathers by declaring that the fallout from the revelations about Biden’s condition while president could, or perhaps should, derail the presidential ambitions of anyone who served in his cabinet:
“In many ways, I think this Biden book is only going to, not just undermine Biden, but I think make it toxic for anybody that worked for Biden. Because then it becomes, ‘Where were you? How did you participate in the cover-up?’” began Todd. “Pete Buttigieg, this may mean something for you. You know, you were a Cabinet secretary. Are you gonna now tell us, ‘Yeah, I didn’t have much interaction with him’? Well, then why didn’t you say something? . . .”
I had a Cabinet Secretary tell me that they had no interaction with him and wondered about that. I had that off the record. After Biden quit, I’ve since shared it with people. I’m still not going to share who the Cabinet secretary was because that’s not my-, I’m trying, you know, I believe in keeping your word as a journalist and it was an off the record as far as being told to me, and I think it’s up to that person to decide whether to speak out or not. But I think it’s a question anybody who worked directly for Biden. So Gina Raimondo if she thinks about running for president, Pete Buttigieg, all of these Cabinet secretaries are now going to have to answer for all of this. And I do wonder if it’s gonna make anybody that touches Biden persona non grata, not just anybody directly in the Biden world.
Over at the Washington Monthly, Bill Scher rushes to defend the good name of Buttigieg and former Vice President Kamala Harris:
We have zero evidence of a scandal, only people caught in an awkward situation. While it’s a situation that had grave consequences, no public trust has been broken by anyone aspiring to be president.
That includes 2028 potential candidates from the Biden administration: Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. I have not had an opportunity to read Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, out today, about Biden’s aging. But I assume that if they had bombshells about Harris or Buttigieg concealing bona fide dementia, we would have seen some screaming headlines by now.
“Bona fide dementia,” which I suppose is distinct from mere behavior that suggests dementia, such as memory lapses, an inability to recognize friends he’s known for more than a decade, muttering and mumbling, frequently losing a train of thought, sudden angry outbursts, no cabinet meetings for nearly a year, a confident insistence that if Biden had remained in the race, he would have won, and so on.
If I were a Democrat, I would want my 2028 nominee to be as far away from the Biden administration as possible, and preferably far from Washington.
That usually means governors, and admittedly, it’s not a great crop. Gavin Newsom’s reputation went up in smoke when large chunks of Los Angeles burned to the ground. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has his own problems, which you can read about in the current issue of NR. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said in a recent interview that he’s considering a presidential bid. Maryland’s Wes Moore insists he isn’t interested in running in 2028, even though he’s headlining the South Carolina Democratic Party’s Blue Palmetto Dinner.
The guy who is currently standing out is former representative and new senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona. You’ll notice that he’s one of the few Democrats who A) won in a state that Donald Trump won, in a year Trump was on the ballot and B) appealed to demographics that Democrats had trouble with in 2024. (Gallego nearly split men, 48 percent to Kari Lake’s 49 percent, and was barely behind among voters without a college degree, 47 percent to 50 percent. He even won 15 percent of voters who disapproved of the job Joe Biden was doing.)
In a February interview with the New York Times, Gallego sounded distinctly different from most of his fellow Democrats, and he isn’t just lamenting that demographics like Latino men were growing more supportive of Republicans, he’s attempting to do something about it:
A lot of times we forget that we still need men to vote for us. That’s how we still win elections. But we don’t really talk about making the lives of men better, working to make sure that they have wages so they can support their families. I also think some of this is purely psychological — like we just can’t put our finger on it. During my campaign, I noticed when I was talking to men, especially Latino men, about the feeling of pride, bringing money home, being able to support your family, the feeling of bringing security — they wanted to hear that someone understood that need. And a lot of times we are so afraid of communicating that to men, because we think somehow we’re going to also diminish the status of women. That’s going to end up being a problem. The fact that we don’t talk this way to them makes them think we don’t really care about them, when in fact the Democrats on par are actually very good about the status of working-class men.
It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream.
A campaign slogan of “a big truck in every garage” would definitely stand out in a Democratic presidential primary. Of course, the environmentalists would insist those trucks be electric, and no Democrat would ever get caught driving a Tesla Cybertruck.