Irvine Mayor Christina Shea graces the editorial pages of today’s Washington Post with an op-ed about Mayor Pete Buttigieg and how being a mayor of a “large college town” doesn’t make him ready to be president.
Oddly enough, she uses most of the piece to promote Irvine and her leadership, forgetting of course that Irvine is the city it is today because of many people who have a commitment to public safety, quality education, and respect for the environment. It’s not all because of her.
Shea’s boasts are the equivalent of hr being born on third base and claiming to have hit a triple — more in line with our current president. Mayor Pete’s policies have succeeded with much less to work with than the resources Shea has at her disposal and Pete doesn’t have millions from a billionaire developer at his disposal in exchange for puppet strings like Shea has (you never hear Shea speak when FivePoint CEO Emile Haddad drinks water.)
Shea’s argument is that she’s not qualified to be president and because she’s a lot like Pete (but without the advance degrees, military experience and ability to speak seven languages fluently), he’s not qualified either. But Shea would defend the reality TV star “billionaire” who sits in the Oval now.
Like I said in the headline, Shea buried the lede. Her issue isn’t with Buttigieg because he’s young or a mayor. It’s because he’s gay. Shea’s history of anti-gay rhetoric extends back 30 years from her work on Measure N that denied same sex partners benefits to a more recent vote against flying the Pride Flag at City Hall. From a 1989 LA Times story, this money quote:
Since the story is behind a paywall. Here it is:
As the mayor of a college town, I’ve followed the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., with interest. The most common argument against him seems to be that he’s not qualified to serve as president. The debate has made me wonder: How far-fetched is it for a mayor of a midsize college town — say, me — to think that a run for president is viable? The basic constitutional requirements are pretty minimal: I was born in the United States and am over 35 years of age. Plus, I’ve been a city council member and mayor in Irvine, Calif. — a nationally recognized, master-planned community — for more than two decades.
But experience tells me that trying to jump from city hall to the White House is akin to one of our Little Leaguers thinking they can strike out Angels outfielder Mike Trout. They might have the talent, and one day they may achieve enough speed and skill on the mound, but not without first graduating through several successive levels of play, and all the grueling training and many years of practice they entail.
It takes much more than experience leading a thriving town to be president. As mayor, for example, one of my priorities has been to promote the health of our environment. In 2016, I proposed legislation regulating pesticide use in our parks, greenbelts and open spaces. Across the country, more than 160 cities have adopted similar measures. When a section of the 2018 Farm Bill threatened to preempt local rights to control pesticide use, the city council, under my leadership, gathered support nationwide to successfully pressure Congress to remove it. Even this hard-won victory, though, can’t compare with crafting federal regulations on clean water, oil production and air quality through the Environmental Protection Agency (which essentially decides which kinds of energy industries prosper and which perish) — and potentially having to defend them in the courts.
My job requires me to build consensus among demographically and politically diverse colleagues. Yet no matter how contentious our council meetings get, they are smooth sailing compared with dealing with Congress’s 535 members. While Irvine is a diverse city, that’s nothing compared with the vast array of communities that make up the United States. My experience running Irvine hasn’t prepared me to craft policy for Los Angeles or New York, let alone for rural North Dakota or American territories in the Pacific Ocean. As mayor, I’ve helped solve local road and traffic problems, but what constitutes a major public-works project for us — like turning the former site of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station into a 1300-acre park and veterans cemetery — is a small undertaking compared with our country’s sprawling, eroding infrastructure, which spans mass transit, airports, dams, oil pipes, electrical grids and rural broadband.
Our city has consistently earned high ratings for fiscal health from Truth in Accounting, a government transparency nonprofit. By law, Irvine must balance its budget every year; what’s more, I cannot raise taxes without a vote. That has hardly prepared me for the dizzyingly complex economic levers, from trade policy to entitlement budgeting, controlled by the executive branch. Signing off on the country’s $4.4 trillion budget without a line-item veto is not a remotely comparable task. As president, I would no longer control the power of the purse: Congress would.
To sit behind the Resolute Desk requires more than a mayor’s nodding acquaintance with issues foreign and domestic. Judging by FBI statistics, Irvine is one of America’s safest cities, thanks to the 232 brave men and women on our police force who risk their lives every day. The City Council and I ensure they have what they need to protect our residents. But I don’t think that prepares me to serve as commander in chief, controlling state-of-the-art weapons systems and leading the 1.4 million people serving in the armed forces on bases throughout the country and the world (and, God forbid, deciding whether to send them into harm’s way). It’s true that Buttigieg has some experience beyond the mayoralty, working as a naval intelligence officer. Those are respectable credentials. But do they bestow the experience and judgment he’d need? Though I’ve been roused in the middle of the night to respond to blackouts, serious accidents and the occasional homicide, those situations are more contained than the crises that wake a president at 3 a.m.
Through Irvine’s affiliation with Sister Cities International, our nation’s leading citizen diplomacy network, I have worked with my counterparts in communities in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico and Korea. These relationships generate tourism and business investment, as well as trade, educational and cultural exchanges. But it would be naive to think that the program has prepared me to deal with rival governments and their leaders, like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, China’s Xi Jinping or Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Nor has it equipped me to tackle the complexities of immigration and border policy.
Irvine and South Bend are not exactly the same, even if the largest employer in each is the local university. Irvine is a midsize city with more than 280,000 residents and a general-fund budget of $215 million; South Bend has 100,000 residents and a general-fund budget of around $65 million. Here, a city manager runs the government’s day-to-day operations under the direction of my office and the city council, which adopts legislation and sets our budget and policies. In South Bend, the mayor is the town’s elected chief executive and has more direct administrative authority.
But towns like mine and Buttigieg’s are more like each other than they are like the United States. The mayoralty is a demanding job, but it’s not the presidency. (Maybe that’s why so many mayors who’ve sought the Oval Office have failed: Sam Yorty, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Martin O’Malley, Bill de Blasio and our own former mayor Larry Agran , to name a few.) Whether a former mayor of South Bend has the skills and experience to win, and then succeed, in the presidency is questionable. Though I consider myself to be a quick study and a fast learner, it takes a huge ego to think that mayoral experience alone would empower anyone to hit the West Wing running. Going from local politics to the Situation Room, from leading a town of a few hundred thousand to a country of 330 million, the chance of a rookie mistake is high — and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
To say nothing of going from Reality TV to the Oval office to bullying people on Twitter. I applaud Shea’s ghost writer for this piece. Too bad she didn’t mention her homophobia or that she’s the subject of a recall.
A column in the Washington Post.? Her puppetmaster, Emile Haddad, must have spent a ton to get her published in the Post. C’mon, she’s an irrelevant, unelected Mayor. There’s 400 other Mayors more important than this lady.
Pete is the only candidate Shea has come out against and he’s the only gay candidate. This is not a coincidence. She hates the LGBT community. Wake up Irvine. Your Mayor is a bigot.