Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg may just be the smartest man in DC, likely even a card-carrying Mensa member, according to a fawning WIRED interview published Thursday.
Virginia Heffernan, a contributor to the magazine, came to this dazzling conclusion when she sat down to speak with Mayor Pete “in his undernourished corner office one afternoon in early spring.”
“I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers,” she recalled. Cockburn, however, thinks the people of East Palestine would like it to take up slightly more mental headspace.
Heffernan is right, however. Buttigieg does hold much of his mind’s “functionality in reserves.” How else could he have brilliantly pulled off some of the greatest fiascos of the Biden administration — the supply chain crisis and the largest aviation shutdown since 9/11?
Of course, us mere mortals ought to cut Buttigieg some slack. Planes, trains and automobiles — the things he is paid to handle — must seem droll and insignificant from the lofty apse of “his cathedral mind.” His “voluminous mind” has simply wandered elsewhere, as is often the case with a genius.
Buttigieg’s mental prowess was also on display as mayor of South Bend, a large town in Indiana. There, his inability to descend to pedestrian issues left the city impoverished and with a record number of homicides.
Until Thursday, what exactly Buttigieg has been pondering since entering office has been a mystery. But, thankfully, Heffernan unveiled it to the public.
“Mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography and Knausgaard’s Spring — though not in the original Norwegian,” she wrote. But Cockburn thought Pete learned Norwegian in order to read Norwegian literature? Or are we just memory-holing that detail from the 2020 campaign?
And yes, Heffernan did confirm that Buttigieg devotes considerable brain power to the obsequious press.
The full genius of Buttigieg will only be fully appreciated in hindsight, but until then Cockburn can rest easy knowing that the half-pint secretary will spend future paternity leaves tackling the perennial problems of neoliberalism, masculinity and Christianity.
