Buttigieg brings up Vance beef at Democratic convention

CHICAGO — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg dredged up his grievances with Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) during his 2024 Democratic National Convention address, a window into an alternate universe in which Vice President Kamala Harris tapped him as her running mate.

“At least Mike Pence was polite,” Buttigieg told Chicago’s United Center on Wednesday. “J.D. Vance is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life he has in mind for you, then you don’t count. Someone who thinks that if you don’t have kids you have ‘no physical commitment to the future of this country.’”

“You know, senator, when I was deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then,” he said. “Many of the men and women who went outside the wire with me did not have kids then. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.”

Democrats have started criticizing Vance as “weird” after comments he made in 2021 about Harris, Buttigieg, and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives.”

Buttigieg reportedly met with Harris regarding becoming her vice presidential pick before she decided on Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who will accept the second-in-command nomination on Wednesday.

Buttigieg, appearing in a personal capacity and not as President Joe Biden‘s transportation secretary, described former President Donald Trump‘s respective decision concerning his No. 2 as “doubling
down on negativity and grievance.”

Instead, Buttigieg appealed for “a better politics — one that finds us at our most decent, and open, and brave,” a perspective he contended he came “through idealism but through experience” as an openly gay man. In doing so, Buttigieg, who himself ran for president in 2020, amplified Harris and Walz’s “happy warrior” approach to their campaign as he endorsed their bid.

“The makeup of our kitchen table, the existence of my family, is just one example of something that was literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago when an anxious teenager growing up in Indiana wondered if he would ever find belonging in the world,” the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana said. “It was brought about — by idealism and courage, organizing, and storytelling, and persuading — and, yes, through politics, the right kind of politics.”

“I don’t presume to know what it’s like in your kitchen, but I know, as sure as I am standing here, that everything in it — the bills you pay at that table, the shape of the family that sits there, the fears and
dreams you talk about late into the night there — all of it compels us to demand more from our politics than a rerun of some TV wrestling deathmatch,” he added.

Harris will accept the presidential nomination on Thursday.