'Worked out poorly for Pence': Buttigieg highlights fundamental flaw in Vance campaign

Sen. J.D. Vance isn't that hard to understand if you know one thing about him, according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Buttigieg made this claim to the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein in a newly released interview about playing Vance to help Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) prepare to debate former President Donald Trump's running mate on Oct. 1.

"There’s a real contradiction in him," Buttigieg said. "But I think sometimes we make these things way more complicated than they are."

Buttigieg told Klein that some basic similarities with Vance — namely midwest roots and an early assent into national politics — helped him enter into the head of what Klein described as his "occasional foil."

Both purport to push policies that would benefit the industrial Midwest, but Vance holds a vastly different "faux populism" perspective that Buttigieg said he found easy to understand.

"He achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties," Buttigieg said. "But then all the prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for, or act for, are ... good old-fashioned Republican policy."

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That policy Buttigieg again finds easy to simplify, and to tear down.

"The problem is, what he’s saying is, 'These institutions don’t work for you, the people, so we’re going to take them back," Buttigieg said. "But what he means is, 'These institutions don’t work for me, a right-wing politician. And so we’re going to put them under the control of right-wing politicians.'"

Klein argued there was a deeper complexity to Vance, whom he described as a frustrated man who shouldn't be, considering his meteoric rise from "hillbilly" to Silicon Valley venture capitalist to a potential future vice president.

"He became angrier and resentful and contemptuous of people who disagree with him — at the same time that things were going really well for him personally," Klein said. "His book was a best-seller. He was the toast of the town."

But when Klein asked Buttigieg what this said about Vance's temperament, Walz's debate prep partner effectively shrugged.

"He is simultaneously the Republican who’s supposed to explain a new kind of conservatism to the world, including New York Times readers, and he’s supposed to embody this kind of angry populism and this facts-don’t-matter nihilism of what Trump represents," Buttigieg said.

Then Buttigieg ascribed to Vance one simple motivation — that could have potentially disastrous results for the Ohio senator.

"There’s a bunch of people, including him, who know deep down how bad Donald Trump is for the country but realize that they could gain power by attaching themselves to him," Buttigieg said.

"That’s one thing that he has in common with a very different Midwesterner, Mike Pence. It worked out really poorly for Mike Pence."