Former President Barack Obama (Adam Schultz / Biden for President) and Secretary for Transportation Pete Buttigieg (Gage Skidmore)
Former President Barack Obama joked that U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg couldn’t win the 2020 election because he is “gay” and “short,” according a new book.
TheHill has published an exclusive excerpt from Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, the latest book from journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, who co-wrote 2017’s bestselling Shattered, about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign.
Lucky — which received a middling review from the Washington Post — documents the campaign of President Joe Biden, whom Allen and Parnes called the “process-of-elimination candidate” after he emerged from a crowd Democratic field and ultimately won the 2020 election.
Allen and Parnes write about a private, Oct. 2019 meeting between Obama and a number of Black corporate donors, including executives from American Express, Citigroup, and Merck.
The former president, who reportedly spent most of the meeting trying to convince the donors to get behind a potential Sen. Elizabeth Warren presidency, called Buttigieg a “rising talent” and said he liked him.
However, Allen and Parnes claim that Obama then listed a number of reasons why Buttigieg would not win the presidency. (Buttigieg dropped out of the Democratic primary prior to Super Tuesday, throwing his support behind Biden.)
Allen and Parnes write that Obama was “on a roll” during the meeting, “using the tone of light ridicule he some-times pointed at himself— ‘big ears’ and ‘a funny name,’ he’d said so many times before.”
“He’s thirty- eight, but he looks thirty,” Obama allegedly said of Buttigieg, drawing laughter from the crowd. “He’s the mayor of a small town. He’s gay, and he’s short.”
Obama’s jokes came, according to the book, only months after Buttigieg had visited the former president “seeking counsel on how to maintain equanimity in the face of homophobia on the campaign trail.”
“Now, behind his back, Obama was riffing on him to some of the wealthiest Black men in America at a time when Buttigieg had been dubbed ‘Mayo Pete’ by critics who believed he couldn’t connect with African American voters,” Allen and Parnes write.
After leaving the 2020 race, Buttigieg became a key surrogate for the Biden campaign, including viral appearances on Fox News slapping down right-wing talking points.
Buttigieg was later nominated by Biden to be Secretary of Transportation, becoming the first openly gay person to be confirmed by the Senate to a presidential cabinet.
Reacting to his confirmation last month, Buttigieg said he could “feel the history swirling around us when [Vice President Kamala Harris] was swearing me in with my husband, Chasten, at my side.”
More than 9 in 10 LGBTQ adults are out to someone in their lives about their sexual orientation or gender identity -- yet many remain closeted when it comes to family members or co-workers.
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January, 96% of LGBTQ adults say they have told someone about their identity, while only 3% say they have not come out to anyone. However, up to one-third of LGBTQ adults -- including those who have come out to “someone” -- say they are not out to extended family members, such as grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins.
John Reid, a gay Republican radio host running for Virginia lieutenant governor, posted a 40-minute video of himself debating an AI-generated version of his Democratic opponent after she declined repeated debate requests.
The attention-grabbing video, posted to Reid's YouTube channel, shows him standing behind a podium as if at a formal debate, facing what his campaign claims is an AI-generated version of State Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D-Richmond), programmed with her policy positions and a robotic approximation of her voice.
Republicans are seizing on former Vice President Kamala Harris' new book, 107 Days -- a reference to the length of her abbreviated campaign following President Joe Biden's delayed exit from the race -- to accuse Democrats of prioritizing identity politics over merit.
In the book, Harris reveals that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was her preferred running mate in last year's presidential election, but she ultimately chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, citing concerns about how voters might respond to a ticket featuring both a Black woman and a gay man.
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