How Mayor Pete Screwed Up

I would offer these five observations over Presidential candidate....'Mayor Pete' Buttigieg, and how he screwed up, and lost any chance of winning, or even getting a VP chance....or even a cabinet slot.

1.  The minute that he choose to run....he should have resigned from the mayor's office.  By staying around....anything that went wrong (like some cop shooting a black guy)....was going to demand your time and burn up opportunities.

2.  For all the stuff that Mayor Pete said that he did.....the one thing that he did as mayor....was a lousy job in handling black/minority progress in South Bend.  This event brings out the marginalized job, and begs the question of what he did over the past couple of years that really shows progress.

3.  In terms of real responsibility, this past seven years as mayor of South Bend, is it.  He has supervised more people than Hillary Clinton did over a twenty-year period....but in terms of identifying a real difference in South Bend in that period....he hasn't show much.

4.  The last you want to do in a dramatic public event....is to allow uncontrolled confrontations to occur.  He did precisely that three days.  I was surprised....figuring the mayor's office would have had PR people attached to their office and control the interaction.  But no.....he went and did a two-star job with that confrontation.

5.  Finally, you come to handling public emergencies or chaotic events.  From my period in the Air Force, the one big thing that I learned....you don't make any decisions based on half-ass information.  You appoint someone to to dig through the mess, and a month down the road....you assess blame, and improve the system.  If mistakes were made, you admit them.  But you don't go and do some rush to judgement and make things twice as bad as they should be.  In this case, Mayor Pete really screwed up badly. 

What happens now?  Mayor Pete will stand for election in South Bend, and probably win one more election....then move to run for governor of the state.  Maybe twelve years from now....he gets invited to be some cabinet secretary.