Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg downplayed his presidential ambitions Wednesday amid frustration among some White House staffers that Buttigieg’s potential 2024 bid is “disrespectful” to Vice President Kamala Harris.
As President Joe Biden has dropped in the polls and believed by many to not be “mentally fit,” a power vacuum has begun to whip up rumors of Buttigieg’s plan to run for the Democrat nomination in 2024.
Harris, however, has positioned herself as the likely heir to the nomination if Biden decides to not run for a second term. Reports indicate Biden will run for reelection in three years, but “few, if any, Democrats really believe this,” Politico Playbook asserted.
“Nobody in the West Wing shuts that down,” an individual with inside knowledge told Politico about the Buttigieg rumors. “It’s very open.”
The undisguised conversation within the White House about Buttigieg’s potential bid has “frustrated” some White House staffers “of color” who believe Buttigieg’s ambitions are “disrespectful” to Harris, “the first Black woman vice president,” Politico reported:
Some of Buttigieg’s former campaign staffers also question whether challenging Harris is feasible given how critical the Black vote is in any Democratic primary, and how Buttigieg struggled to attract those voters the last time around.
The White House declined to comment on Politico’s inquiry about the two presidential hopefuls.
Breitbart News reported in mid-November that Harris is allegedly bitter over Biden’s favoritism toward “white man” Buttigieg.
The bitterness is likely a result of Buttigieg’s new found power to wield the $1.2 trillion infrastructure funding around Washington, DC, while Harris has been given tasks of reducing election integrity, a project that has gone nowhere, and solving the Biden-made southern border crisis.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” a former Harris aide told CNN.
Biden, meanwhile, has sent his press secretary Jen Psaki to squash the drama from becoming public by praising Harris for a job well done.
“The Vice President is not only a vital partner to the president but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country — from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration,” Psaki tweeted.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø
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