Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Thursday that he and Vice President Kamala Harris are “squarely focused on the job at hand,” downplaying speculation that they could become rivals for the Democratic nomination in 2024 to replace an unpopular President Biden.
“It’s 2021,” Mr. Buttigieg told reporters on Air Force Two on a trip with Ms. Harris to North Carolina. “And the whole point of campaigns and elections is when they go well, you get to govern. And we are squarely focused on the job at hand.”
He said he is “excited to be part of a team led by the president and the vice president, and I think the teamwork that got us to this point is really just beginning.”
Mr. Buttigieg and the vice president traveled to Charlotte to tour transportation facilities and highlight the administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package signed into law last month.
The transportation secretary seemed to go out of his way to give credit to the embattled Ms. Harris.
“As transportation secretary, I get to be the face of a lot of these [infrastructure] investments that we’re doing, but we would not be here without the leadership of the vice president as well as the president; of course,” Mr. Buttigieg said.
The trip is being watched more closely than usual because of political infighting in the administration and Ms. Harris’ plummeting job approval ratings, which fell to a record low of 28% in one poll last month.
Just as the pair departed Washington, the White House announced that top Harris adviser Symone Sanders was leaving her job after less than a year in office. Her departure follows the resignation of communications director Ashley Etienne, who quit the vice president’s team two weeks ago.
Former Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said drama “happens in every administration, but it’s another thing when you’re completely ineffective.”
“These two people, the president and the vice president, are completely unusable on the campaign trail,” Mr. Priebus said on Fox News. “People would run through a wall for Trump, and the same was true for Barack Obama. The core support was very strong.”
But he said Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are “not delivering any policies to their base. So [White House] communicators are the first ones out.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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