Among the kingmakers, queenmakers, and they/themmakers of the far left is a stubborn contingent that clings to the belief that the cure for what ails the nation’s self-styled “progressives” has been right there among them for several years now, and that his name is Pete Buttigieg.
The failed transportation secretary has the gift of being acceptable to both the Democrat Party’s leftist establishment and power-to-the-people-right-on-let’s-burn-the-house-down wing, and while there really isn’t a dime’s worth of difference ideologically between the two factions, that’s still an unusual accomplishment.
Yet Pete is not polling all that well, coming in a weak second in a recent poll. It’s a crowded field with no clear frontrunner: Buttigieg’s 16% was better than Kamala Harris’ 13%, but Gavin Newsom led the pack with 20%. And he has a big weakness, one that Kamala Harris herself identified in September 2025, as she surveyed the smoking ruins of her 2024 presidential campaign and tried to figure out whom to blame.
One of the groups she hit upon was the same American people she had just been trying to convince to vote for her. Kamala’s post mortem of the 2024 election was that Americans were just too racist to vote for her, and too besotted with traditional morality to embrace a homosexual who was “married” to a man, such as Pete.
“As Kamala Harris rushed to pick a running mate last year,” The Atlantic reported last September, “her ‘first choice’ was her close friend Pete Buttigieg, but she decided that it would be ‘too big of a risk’ for a Black woman to run with a gay man.” In her excuse-making volume 107 Days, Harris explains that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.” She adds tellingly: “And I think Pete also knew that—to our mutual sadness.”
Pete has to have noticed an Aug. 2025 poll that showed him with exactly zero support among black voters. Leftist sports analyst and possible future presidential candidate himself Stephen A. Smith told Bill Maher: “He doesn’t move us.” He said he would leave Maher and his audience to speculate as to why that was, but it was clear: Smith was suggesting that black voters didn’t want to vote for a gay man — the same reason why Harris left him off the 2024 ticket.
And so one of the left’s flagship propaganda organs, The Atlantic, has now decided to try to give Pete a little boost, and what a boost it is. From the photo that accompanies the article, it’s clear what’s going on here: Buttigieg is sitting alone at a booth in a diner, nursing, as it were, a cup of coffee. He has a mustache and a tightly trimmed beard just barely covering his chin. He’s looking off frankly and forthrightly into the distance, a man with nothing to hide and nothing to fear.
The title is “Pete Buttigieg in the Wilderness,” an attempt at a double entendre encompassing both Pete’s also-ran status among the 2028 presidential hopefuls and his new attempt to project a rugged masculinity, as the subtitle makes clear: “He has a beard, a splitting maul, and a house in Michigan. Is that enough to convince America that he’s a man of the people?”
Wait a minute. He has a beard and a splitting maul? I’ve heard this tune before: long, long ago, when America was a very different place, we had a presidential candidate who had famously been a rail-splitter in his youth, and who grew a beard right around the time he became president. Is Pete Buttigieg trying to make us think he is the new Lincoln, ready to do the hard work to unify our tragically fractured nation?
Related: Newsom Responds to the Blowback Over His Racist Remarks, and Boy, Is He Mad
It won’t work. It can’t work. Abe Lincoln never posed grinning in a hospital bed with his “husband” and the two infants they had just bought, er, that is, adopted. Abe Lincoln never had to project the image of being a man; he simply was one.
The left has now become so deeply encased in its arrogance that it thinks that a couple of props and a soulful expression are enough to rescue Pete Buttigieg from the weakness and incompetence he has displayed for years, as well from the increasing unpopularity of the woke delusions he so energetically embraces.
If The Atlantic’s puff piece is remembered at all by the time the 2028 campaign begins in earnest, it will be as an embarrassing attempt to make a deeply unpalatable candidate attractive. The Democrats may indeed nominate Pete in 2028, but if they do, they’ll soon find that his candidacy is still suffering from the same epic deficiencies that The Atlantic is so pathetically trying to cover for now.
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