NEWS
Spin Cycle: Mayor Pete Twists Himself Into Pretzels To Defend Harris, Make Bid For Veep
By Virginia Kruta | -65min ago
For those who don’t spend their Sunday mornings glued to the television — and their Sunday afternoons attempting to dig through a week’s worth of network and cable news media spin — The Daily Wire has compiled a short summary of what you may have missed.
Just one week has passed since the Democratic Party ousted President Joe Biden from the 2024 ticket and essentially coronated Vice President Kamala Harris to be his successor — and while questions are still mounting about Biden’s true condition and why he ultimately agreed to step away from the campaign, there are bigger questions surrounding Harris and her qualifications and whether her own party believes she has the ability to win against former President Donald Trump.
While all of those questions are valid — and pressing, as the Democratic Party’s Chicago convention is fast-approaching — one other burning question has bubbled to the top:
. . . if Harris is at the top of the 2024 ticket, who will get second billing?
In an effort to field some of those questions — and perhaps posit himself as the answer to the last one — Transportation Secretary and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg sat down with “Fox News Sunday” anchor Shannon Bream for a truly dizzying twelve-minute interview.
WATCH:
Bream began the interview with a question about Harris’ rapid ascension to de facto nominee, noting that some people had voiced concern with the lack of democracy taking place in the Democratic Party of late.
“A week ago, we were doing this show and President Biden was still in the race, we now have a presumptive new nominee,” Bream noted before quoting a piece from Bret Stephens at The New York Times:
The one thing the Democratic Party is not supposed to be is anti-democratic — a party in which insiders select the nominee from the top down, not the bottom up, and which expects the rank and file to fall in line and clap enthusiastically. That’s the playbook of ruling parties in autocratic states.
“You know the optics of this,” Bream went on to prompt Buttigieg to explain how he addressed voters’ concerns that the party wasn’t listening to the people.
Buttigieg sidestepped the question entirely, instead delivering a short speech on how “remarkable” it was that “in a matter of days” — and after being told by the party that they would be offered no other choice — Democrats had rallied around Harris. He then claimed that despite the obviously top-down nature of her anointment, there was “extraordinary energy” brewing “from the ground up” around Harris’ week-old campaign.
“You actually have gotten more delegates, though, than she has,” Bream pointed out, referencing Buttigieg’s failed 2020 presidential bid and noting that Harris, who also ran, never won a single delegate on her own merits and even dropped out of the race before the end of December 2019. Bream also quoted a former Harris staffer who worried about the vice president’s “coronation” and said that she had not been “tested and tried” as a candidate on her own.
The Transportation Secretary vaulted over that question as well, claiming that her experience as the vice president was all the testing that was necessary. “She is in one of the most visible leadership roles in the country,” he said, leaving out recent Democrat and media efforts to put some serious distance between Harris and the disastrous outcome of her highly “visible leadership role” as Biden’s hand-selected border czar.
Buttigieg went on to claim that “most Americans already agree with” Harris — despite her well-documented history as the “most liberal Senator” and a voting record that skewed left of even Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.
Buttigieg then attempted to steer the interview away from Harris so that he could attack former President Trump, but Bream brought it back around to Harris and whether or not she should be held responsible either for her failure to see that Biden was flailing or for her apparent willingness to help hide it from the American people.
Once again, Buttigieg ignored the question and said, “Joe Biden is good at being President.” The results, he argued, spoke for themselves — although it’s likely that the poll numbers saying that the American people largely disapproved of his job performance and that they’d rather he be replaced on the ticket were not the “results” he meant.
Instead, Buttigieg relied on debunked claims that Biden had created more jobs than Trump or any other president when most of those jobs had not been new jobs but rather had been people returning to work in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. He wrapped up his point by claiming that Biden had made the “selfless” choice to take himself out of the 2024 race as if high-dollar donors and powerful party bosses hadn’t strong-armed that decision out of him.
He then chalked up Biden’s obvious and rapid decline to the fact that he was a little bit older before pivoting to suggest that Trump — who just two weeks earlier stood up and raised his fist, after taking a bullet, to tell the crowd he was all right — was in no better shape than Biden.
And that was just the first five minutes.
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