Of all the Biden — and then Harris — surrogates who faced the media regularly, only two made a splash on Fox News where a splash, if Democrats were to make any headway, needed to be made.
California Governor Gavin Newsom had an Odd Couple-like buddy-movie on-camera relationship with Sean Hannity wherein, despite their polar political positions, Newsom was given respect and time to finish his sentences — and allowed to call out Hannity too, on some of the latter’s questionable premises.
But even more effective speaking on the conservative platforms was Democratic Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the military veteran and married gay former presidential candidate who appeared so often on Murdoch’s channel that he occasionally told people they “might recognize [him] from Fox News.”
According to former Republican and Trump resistor Ron Filipkowski, Buttigieg was the key to success for Biden and later for Harris, but it was a key neither turned — because Biden had put this powerful key in the wrong door.
Instead of Transportation Secretary, Buttigieg should have been running the Department of Homeland Security instead of Alejandro Mayorkas, who Filipkowski matter-of-factly calls the “weakest” link in the Biden cabinet, as he presided over the border crisis that was among the nails Trump hammered into Harris electoral coffin.
Mayorkas’s “congressional hearing testimony and TV appearances were a mess, where he allowed himself to be bullied and the Administration’s policy mischaracterized,” Filipkowski contends, saying the DHS Secretary “simply wasn’t up to the job.”
“When I think of how Buttigieg would have handled it differently from both a policy and communication perspective,” Filipkowski writes in his election postmortem, “I believe the difference would have been stark.”
The border was Trump’s number one issue — everything led back to the border and the “invasion” of “our country” in his campaign rhetoric. It was important enough to him that he influenced the blockage of a bipartisan bill to fix it. The border was Trump’s number one issue in 2016, too.
Unlike Mayorkas, Buttigieg would have brought two weapons to the the fight against Trump’s targeting: both execution and explication. He could work on solutions and also explain those efforts and challenges while across the aisle.
The Democrats, instead, let the issue fester until the GOP could drive a news cycle or two around impeaching Mayorkas. Meanwhile Buttigieg’s unique talents were wasted — or, at best, underutilized.