Just how desperate are the Democrats in terms of their weak bench of candidates to replace Joe Biden? Well, they’re desperate enough to actually be talking about Pete Bugttigieg as a potential 2024 nominee and corporate media is fluffing up the theory. Politico featured a “West Wing playbook” article yesterday describing the Transportation Secretary’s “campaign in waiting.” In it, they describe how various dark money groups are keeping a stream of donations coming in with the theme, “Win the Era.” This funding infrastructure has allegedly allowed Mayor Pete to “maintain a political footprint” and keep his options open while not broadcasting his loftier ambitions.

Two years into the Biden administration, infrastructure for another potential PETE BUTTIGIEG bid for office lies in waiting.

Allies of the transportation secretary have built out a dark money group, Win the Era Action Fund, and a political action committee, Win the Era, which has endorsed a small cohort of candidates in the 2022 midterms and allowed Buttigieg to maintain a political footprint as he remains in the Biden Cabinet.

The new filings, first obtained by West Wing Playbook, paint a picture of a politician publicly downplaying future ambitions — while quietly having options open.

If you’re getting the feeling that you’ve seen this movie before, that’s because you have. It’s probably easy to forget that Buttigieg already ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 election and he basically went nowhere. He was getting blown out of the water by Bernie Sanders and faded into the background entirely when the DNC collectively threw up its hands and settled on Joe Biden to be their standard bearer.

Keep in mind that Buttigieg was always embraced by the Democratic Party for the optics he generates rather than for bringing any serious substance to the table. He was an equal opportunity candidate from the beginning and that’s how he wound up in the Cabinet. On paper, Mayor Pete had everything the progressive caucus could desire. He was a military veteran with some executive experience and a fairly high score on the TVQ scale. He was a married gay man who came across as a well-dressed, well-spoken policy hawk who looked and sounded totally “normal,” unlike some of Biden’s more exotic choices in federal appointments.

But what had he actually done over the course of his career and how has he built on that foundation since taking over at the DoT? His “executive experience” consisted of being the mayor of a relatively small (population a bit over 100,000) city in the midwest. And as we learned from opposition research during the 2020 primary, he wasn’t all that successful in that role. Since joining the Cabinet, Buttigieg has been largely missing in action. Back when the supply chain was falling apart earlier this year and ships were stacked up at our ports by the hundreds, Mayor Pete had no answers and did essentially nothing. Most recently, when the rail workers were threatening a strike that could have significantly impacted our production and transportation infrastructure, Buttigieg was literally “phoning it in” because he was on vacation in Portugal on another of his famous personal jet flights.

Can anyone name a single policy change or action of any positive significance that Pete Buttigieg has taken that had anything to do with, you know… transportation? And yet, here we are in the nascent days of the 2024 presidential race and people are seriously talking about Mayor Pete as a presidential candidate. I’m waiting for the Mad Hatter to come along with a giant watch any moment now because it really feels like we’ve collectively fallen down the rabbit hole. Of course, none of this may wind up mattering since Jill Biden has reportedly reversed her course and is now “all in” on her husband running for a second term.