Joe Biden is continuing to hand out spoils based upon his claimed election victory.  Some positions are going to the technocrats who ran cover for him when his massive family corruption came to light.  Other positions are going to leftist activists.  Biden has selected Pete Buttigieg as his pet gay activist.  After mulling making Buttigieg the ambassador to China, Biden opted, instead, to hand him the Department of Transportation.  That's quite a plum assignment for a guy with a pathetic administrative record.

One of the things that was cleverly downplayed during Buttigieg's candidacy is that he was running for president on little more than his sexual orientation.  Wikipedia tells the tale of a small-town boy who merely made good enough.

While in high school, Buttigieg wrote an essay praising Bernie Sanders, the man who refuses to abandon communism despite more than 100 million communism-caused deaths in the 21st century.  Buttigieg then went to Harvard, as all bright high school leftists do.

Buttigieg's bachelor's thesis was based upon Graham Greene's The Quiet American, an anti-American novel about the earliest years of the Vietnam War.  Greene disliked Americans, whom he saw as running the gamut from stupidly naïve to criminally greedy.  The essay was also based upon the work of Perry Miller, one of the first revisionists of American history.

Again, like a good leftist, Buttigieg received a Rhodes Scholarship in 2004.  As we've noted here, the Rhodes Scholarship is increasingly focused on rewarding reliable leftists.

At Oxford, Buttigieg received a B.A. with first-class honors in philosophy, politics, and economics.  He is, clearly, a good student.  Of course, being good at school does not necessarily translate into being effective outside school.

After leaving Oxford, Buttigieg worked for three years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in the areas of energy, retail, economic development, and logistics.  Confidentiality agreements mean we know little about his work there.

In 2007, Buttigieg enlisted in the Naval Reserve, where he trained to become an intelligence officer.  He spent seven months in Afghanistan in 2014, assigned to a unit identifying and disrupting terrorist financial networks.  Buttigieg also was an armed driver on more than 100 trips to Kabul.  Given his leftism, I always suspect (though I cannot prove) that Buttigieg was one of those who enlisted not out of patriotism, but because he saw military service as an asset for future political office.  I'm sorry to be so cynical, but I just am.

In 2011, Buttigieg successfully ran for mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a city of slightly over 102,000 people.  Out of the 14,883 people who voted, Buttigieg got 10,991 votes.  He was re-elected in 2015, receiving 8,515 votes from the few South Bend residents who bothered to cast their ballots.

South Bend, incidentally, while it's the 306th largest city in America, is 69th in a list of America's most dangerous cities.  Another site explains that its violent crime and property crime rates are almost twice the U.S. average.

Our potential future Transportation secretary had the following accomplishments:

• He demoted the city's first black police chief for illegal conduct and then groveled apologetically when BLM became a thing.
• He presided over the gentrification of black neighborhoods.
• He helped create a nightly laser light show, paid for with privately raised funds.
• He made a budget proposal that would have combined three separate departments into one to save costs and improve efficiency...but his proposal failed.
• He opposed Indiana's Senate Bill 101 (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act), which allows individuals and companies to assert as a defense in legal proceedings that charges against them or demands on them violate their religious freedom. That's when he came out of the closet and found his political identity: The Gay Mayor.
• He invested in city parks and leveraged federal funds to help prevent sewage overflow.
• He launched a "home repair" initiative, making funds available to residents wanting to do home repairs, especially green repairs.

There's more at the Wikipedia link, but, generally speaking, color me underwhelmed.

And what about Buttigieg's Transportation chops?  Well, there's this:

Pete Buttigieg was so bad at transportation issues as mayor that a pizza company had to fix the city's potholes for him.https://t.co/MvbYGmvxXW

— Chris Martin (@chrisjdmartin) December 15, 2020

It's always possible that Buttigieg would grow on the job.  He's clearly a bright guy, after all.  However, I can't help thinking that people should already know what they're doing by the time they get a Cabinet position.

Buttigieg's tentative appointment is another reminder that Biden does not view his administration as a vehicle for serving the American people.  It is, instead, a sinecure system that allows Biden to reward various political constituencies at taxpayer expense, with no commensurate benefit flowing to the taxpayers.  In this regard, Buttigieg is the perfect Biden apparatchik: a slick, glib ideologue with no real accomplishments.

Image: Pete Buttigieg by DonkeyHotey.  CC BY 2.0.