'Nature of the beast': Pete Buttigieg lays bare why Biden's landmark bill fell flat

Outgoing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg sat for a lengthy interview with Politico's Adam Wren about the legacy of the Biden administration — and why he believes the president never got a public boost from the policies he got signed into law.

Biden's four years in office saw a wave of ambitious legislation, with one of his signature accomplishments being a bipartisan infrastructure bill that has committed money to thousands of upgrades to roads, bridges, and transit — one of the largest such investments since the original creation of the Interstate Highway System.

But Buttigieg, who was tasked among many other things with implementing that law — and became notorious as being one of the biggest voices going into conservative spaces like Fox News to sell the administration's accomplishments — freely acknowledges it did nothing to improve Biden's polling, which was dismal for most of his presidency.

And he thinks he knows the reason.

"The nature of good policy and being politically rewarded for good policy is it doesn’t tend to happen — in the same way that an artist is not necessarily appreciated in their lifetime, a policy is rarely appreciated in the same political cycle where it happens, especially a good one," said Buttigieg.

"Think about the political life of the ACA, to go from being an albatross to being our winning issue in eight years. And even then you have to do all the finessing for folks who don’t think of the ACA and Obamacare as the same thing. There’s a lot of that here with this stuff."

As to why that happens, he continued, "Part of it’s that we were competing with a lot of other things for attention. Part of it is good news is no news: That unambiguously and uncontroversially good things command less attention. So I can go out there and wave the flag. I think it will matter over time. I think it did matter."

Asked about Biden's recent exit interview with USA Today bemoaning how long it took to get any of his infrastructure projects started, Buttigieg said, "I think what the president was getting at is an impatience we all feel about the recognition and credit that this work deserves, when the nature of the beast is that these are very long-term projects.

"Precisely because they’re unambiguously good news, they don’t get as much attention as the controversy. To be clear, of the 66,000 projects that we’ve announced, about 16,000 of them are complete from a federal perspective."