Not very long ago I wouldn't have been able to imagine that we would be having this conversation, but we're now facing the possibility that Kamala Harris could be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States (if anything about the polls is to be believed) and that opens the door to some alarming possibilities. Not only will a large collection of the populace have lost its collective mind, but there will be many changes to deal with in the aftermath. Kamala wouldn't just sail into the Oval Office alone. As  Politico points out this week, she would need to immediately begin assembling a cabinet. Who would make up that august body? She wouldn't arrive with her own trusted staff of insiders because most of the other key players in her orbit are, like her, hangers-on from the Biiden administration. So that's the talent pool (to put it generously) that she would probably draw from. That brings us to the horrifying thought of Secretary of State Of State Pete Buttigieg.

If Kamala Harris wins the election, she will likely approach the task of filling out her Cabinet and West Wing much like she did when she took over Joe Biden's campaign operation this summer.

While she’ll ensure her closest advisers and key Cabinet members are people she personally trusts, there will be some continuity with the current administration, according to five people familiar with ongoing conversations granted anonymity to speak candidly about the transition process. And regardless of whether Democrats keep their narrow hold of the Senate or Republicans take control, Harris will have to game out how much of Biden’s Cabinet she can hold over.

Harris has tasked Yohannes Abraham, who led the Biden-Harris transition four years ago, with guiding hers. But unlike the president, who brought a small cadre of aides into the West Wing who’d been part of his inner circle for decades, Harris doesn’t have a long career in Washington. In filling out her vice presidential office and revamping Biden’s campaign, she has leaned on a small group of trusted aides for advice as well as top operatives from across the party, many of them veterans of Barack Obama’s campaign network.

Unlike virtually every other presidential candidate before her, Kamala Harris came to her position without her own staff of loyalists to draw from for trusted positions of power. She was a DEI selection who checked a couple of important boxes but was laughed out of her own presidential bid having been unable to win over any votes in her home state. She was finally settled upon as Biden's Veep as a safety valve because nobody would want her if things began going south for Scranton Joe. (This was a consummate example of the dog turning to bite the hand that feeds it.)

Pete Buttigieg was similarly plucked from obscurity as a consummate DEI choice. He was lifted from a job in a moderate-sized midwestern city where he earned the nickname "Pothole Pete" for his inability to maintain the roads and made the Secretary of Transportation based ln the fact that he "really liked cars." His disastrous tenure was marked by huge backlogs at our shipyards and toxic spills on our rail lines. So what else would you do with him now except give him a raise? 

Putting sarcasm mostly aside for the moment, stop and consider what this could mean. We have people now seriously discussing putting Pete Buttigieg fourth in line for the Presidency. Would you honestly find him qualified to run a child's lemonade stand? Some might plausibly argue that bringing in fresh blood can inject new ideas. It's an idea that has been tested before to varying degrees of success. But that doesn't feel like what's happening here. We seem to be getting stuck with a combination of people who had no interest in some of these jobs or weren't smart enough to find something better.