Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

As Pete Stumps for Bob “Crooksy” Brooks, I Wonder if Crooksy Even Likes Buttigieg, or Anyone in the Biden Administration?

/ Rich Wilkins / 2 Comments

Pete Buttigieg did a tour through Eastern Pennsylvania today. He stopped in Philadelphia today with Malcolm Kenyatta, he hung out with Frank Pintabone and Larry Holmes Jr. in Easton, and of course he did an event here with Crooksy. If you’re wondering why Pete Buttigieg endorsed a guy he didn’t know before he got a call from him, Pete’s Iowa State Director was a Fetterman senior staffer with Crooksy’s TV consultants- you know, establishment Democratic politics at play. An endorsement as worthless as the promissory note Crooksy signed to pay back his ex-mother-in-law, according to the judges who rejected his appeal over a decade later.

Since Bob “Crooksy” Brooks brought Secretary Buttigieg to town to stump for him though, I guess it’s worth asking, what does Crooksy actually think of “Mayor Pete?” Look, you might say that’s ridiculous, but I never would have thought a statewide union President would think President Obama “sucked” when his own international union supported him. Then again, Crooksy does have some opinions on outspoken Black men. You see though, Pete Buttigieg was the Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration, and we don’t know what Crooksy thought of Biden (yet). We do know, at least if you do a simple google search, that the Pennsylvania Association of Professional Fire Fighters declined to endorse Vice-President Kamala Harris in 2024, with Brooks himself deferring to the IAFF for an endorsement, who also didn’t endorse Harris (simply google “did the Pennsylvania professional fire fighters association endorse Kamala Harris?”). Boy, I wonder what Crooksy didn’t like about her? Oh right, she didn’t know how to speak to the middle class like he does.

Anyway though, enough with “Crooksy Brooksy’s” feelings about Black people and the Biden Administration, and on to some real substance here. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg really knew the guy he was endorsing all that well, and I am not so sure that Crooksy actually likes Secretary Buttigieg. Or at least, if Crooksy does like him, I think he keeps it quiet so he doesn’t upset his “rain maker” in Harrisburg, the Governor. You see, Secretary Buttigieg was the main point person out selling the Biden era Infrastructure Bill that passed Congress. One of the things Secretary Buttigieg really sold hard to the public? Rural Broadband. In fact, Secretary Buttigieg really sold the case for broadband in the bill:

“A connection to the internet is about as important as a connection to the interstate is,” he said. “You need both, you need to be able to connect both digitally and physically in order to do everything; from getting up to date market information on when to sell, to being able to have your kids do their homework or take advantage of telemedicine opportunities.”

The deal would put $65 billion towards expanding the country’s broadband network. Buttigieg said 100 percent of Americans should have fast, reliable, and affordable internet.

“That’s not easy, especially that last couple percent, after you get to 98 percent or so, for folks who are in really spread-out areas,” Buttigieg said. “But it’s important to the President that no one’s left behind and that no one has to wonder whether this bill is going to be for them.”

You know, I couldn’t agree more with all of that. Broadband for all! You see though, there’s some debate about how that went. You see, Governor Shapiro called the program a failure, going so far as to say absolutely no one in Pennsylvania benefitted from it. For real, he said zero people got it. If that’s the case, that is one of the biggest government boondoggles in history. Either Biden’s Administration, and by extension Buttigieg, were a bunch of inept morons, or Shapiro’s Administration was totally inept in applying for the money, or both. Now, I’ve got my opinions on Buttigieg helping Shapiro be successful, but I think it’s fair to say both sides have their opinions on what happened, and they don’t mix.

It may seem a bit inconvenient for Crooksy’s backers that Shapiro says Buttigieg and the team on the infrastructure law were incompetent, especially when they are bringing Buttigieg to the district, but I doubt that bothers Crooksy in the slightest bit. He knows that the Governor butters his rolls in this race, and frankly Buttigieg was just doing a fly in for promotion ahead of 2028. I mean, Crooksy didn’t like Barack Obama, he clearly didn’t like Kamala Harris, by proximity the guy probably thinks Joe Biden wasn’t so bright too, and Pete Buttigieg is just some guy who was junior to all of them anyway. He’s probably glad he came in and gave him a shout out, but he needs the Governor to buy him this office. So don’t be fooled by any of this. It was little more than a publicity stunt, and not a believable one at that.

Oh, Biden Didn’t “Get Shit Done?” Let’s Talk About That Bridge on I-95 in Philadelphia for a Minute.

/ Rich Wilkins / 1 Comment

Josh Shapiro is running for President. Look, that’s no secret, and it is literally why Kamala Harris came out firing at him in her book. It’s also why he’s now releasing a book, and firing back. This is going to be a very different process for Shapiro though than anything he’s faced before- because people are going to say bad things about him now. Basically after he won his first State House race, he has been the darling of the Democratic left, the “rising star” that ran for Montgomery County Commissioner and Attorney General, and then the unchallenged candidate for Governor in 2022. In 2024, he took his first arrows from opponents when he was mentioned for Vice-President, and well, we now know how he handled it. According to him, he removed himself from consideration. The heat was too much.

Not everyone is Joe Biden. A guy who took the heat, was chosen as VP, and then won twice in the role, before being elected President. Ultimately, Biden finally took a permanent political fall in 2024, but he is definitely one of the most significant political figures of the 21st century, so far (I’d argue third or fourth, but still significant). He will probably be remembered as one of the two or three most impactful governing leaders of this time period. From his work passing the COPS Bill and larger 1994 Crime Bill and the legislation authorizing the use of force in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, to his re-write of bankruptcy law (probably the thing I disliked most on his record), to his decades of playing pivotal roles in the confirmations of nearly every Supreme Court Justice, to his roles in the Obama Administration passing his 2009 recovery act, helping administer TARP, and pushing through the votes on Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, to his own Administration passing the Covid Recovery Act in 2021, passing his landmark infrastructure bill, and passing the Inflation Recovery Act, not to mention his numerous executive orders and appointments to the bench. Joe Biden was probably better at actually governing than anyone in this time period, objectively speaking, with the exception of Bush and Cheney (who screwed up the whole world). One thing he was good at was making the government do the things he wanted. That might have been part of the problem he had politically on several major issues.

Back to Josh Shapiro though and running for President. I mean, he’s doing it unless he somehow loses to his crackpot opponent in 2026, which God willing, he won’t. Josh is carving out his pathway to national contention, which is understandable, and he’s doing it by creating separation between himself of the Biden-Harris Administration. I don’t blame him there. I loved Joe Biden, but he left office deeply unpopular, and Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg are likely to be opponents of his. We have seen other Democrats, namely Gavin Newsom, carve out some separation on actual policy and his political ability to engage the opposition, which you can like or not, but seems like a fair place to carve out your differences when you were a very loyal and supportive Governor for the former President. Josh Shapiro seems to be taking a different route- he’s saying the former President was ineffective, unlike himself. He’s also carving out a retroactive difference with himself and Kamala Harris by saying he told President Biden to drop out earlier, but I’m going to leave that alone because it’s literally impossible to verify how either actually felt on the matter. His argument on effectiveness is fascinating though, he’s citing that absolutely no one in Pennsylvania actually received any of the rural broadband promised in the 2022 Infrastructure Bill. It is, at best, a reach of an argument, and at worst entirely cynical. You see, that bill was passed into law in November of 2021, going into effect in Fiscal Year 2022. It was meant to run from 2022 to 2026. Highway projects were always going to be the fastest (more on this in a minute). Broadband and mass transit projects were going to take several years to happen. They often require studies and approval processes meant to make sure that the most worthy projects got through. For instance, AMTRAK service from New York City into Northeast Pennsylvania was one of the first projects that got pushed through, and it won’t be finished for years. It’s not uncommon for federal government projects that require state partnership to take years, Obamacare was passed in 2010 and didn’t become operational until 2014 for the public. Dodd-Frank was passed early in the Obama Administration and many of the new agencies (such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) weren’t created until 2011 and later. Government moves slow sometimes, so we can avoid waste and fraud. There’s also that other matter of Donald Trump taking office with two years left in the implementation of the Infrastructure Bill, and immediately freezing some projects and seeking clawbacks. Of course Josh Shapiro knows that’s how the Federal Government works, he’s a smart guy. The Broadband component of the bill that he talks about ran out of money at the end of 2024, but was expected to take longer to actually complete from the start. Now we have a President who doesn’t even want to do a lot of it. That’s a bigger reason why Governor Shapiro’s state hasn’t seen broadband yet than some sort of problem with Joe Biden.

Governor Shapiro wants to show himself as the symbol of impactful governance. He chose to lead off his re-election campaign with an ad about the I-95 bridge collapse and subsequent repair that all got done in a few short weeks. It was incredibly impressive, and he deserves credit for it. But… yeah, he didn’t do that alone. You see, when that bridge collapsed there was this guy, Pete Buttigieg, who was Secretary of Transportation, and that was an interstate highway, and so… yeah, he kind of showed up with big checks. Who did Pete Buttigieg work for? That would be President Joseph R. Biden, the guy who was apparently ineffective and asleep at the wheel. Or at least that’s the line now. Secretary Pete’s money was *the* reason everything could move so fast, and that bridge repair was done in 12 days. Without that money, it really would have taken months to re-open. The Biden-Harris Administration got that done. Now it’s literally being used as a contrast to them.

I find the early jockeying between both Shapiro and Harris to be off-putting. We all know that political campaigns are full of hypocrisy, and I certainly don’t blame the Governor for trying to carve out his own lane. With all of that said, let’s try and be just a little bit honest when we do this? Like maybe 1%? I would never make the argument that the Biden Administration was 100% responsible for getting that bridge back up, let’s be honest, the state is more impactful at spending money, and they were here. But if we’re going to go with the “Biden sucked” argument to prop up quixotic 2028 ambitions for everyone, let’s at least be somewhat in reality.