U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, one of the party’s most prominent and highest-ranking LGBTQ+ elected officials, took the DNC stage Wednesday evening to deliver a stinging rebuke of the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance.
The former mayor of South Bend — a blue dot in red state Indiana — joked about his regular appearances on Fox News as soon as he took the stage. “I believe in going anywhere and everywhere in service of a good cause,” he said.
A Rhodes scholar and Navy Reservist who deployed during the war in Afghanistan, Buttigieg attacked former President Donald Trump’s running mate over Vance’s past comments about people without children not having a “physical commitment to the future of this country.”
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Recalling his time in combat, Buttigieg said, “Some of the men and women who went outside the wire with me did not have kids either. Let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.”
Now a married father with three-year-old twins, Buttigieg said his current family life was unthinkable roughly a generation ago.
“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 this world.”
That family was only made possible through dedicated organizing and politics, he said. Buttigieg came out at the tail end of his first mayoral term in 2015, has gone on to marry his husband, Chasten, and adopt.
“This November, we get to choose. We get to choose our president, we get to choose our policies, but most of all, we will choose a better politics… that is what awaits us when America decides to end Trump’s politics of darkness once and for all,” he said.
Rising to national prominence after narrowly winning the 2020 Iowa caucuses in what was considered a long-shot bid, Buttigieg dropped out after the South Carolina primary and endorsed President Biden, who tapped him to join his cabinet as transportation secretary. On the trail this year, Buttigieg was one of Biden’s most visible Democratic campaign surrogates and has pivoted to play a similar role for Harris and Walz.
