Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg ( BOOT-ə-jəj; born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer who is Presid...
Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg ( BOOT-ə-jəj; born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer who is President Joe Biden's nominee for the position of United States Secretary of Transportation. He was the 32nd mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020, earning him the nickname "Mayor Pete".Buttigieg is a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University, attending the latter on a Rhodes Scholarship. From 2009 to 2017, he was an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve, attaining the rank of lieutenant. He was mobilized and deployed to the War in Afghanistan for seven months in 2014. Before being elected as Mayor of South Bend in 2012, Buttigieg worked on the political campaigns of Democrats Jill Long Thompson, Joe Donnelly, and John Kerry. While serving as mayor, Buttigieg came out as gay in 2015. He married Chasten Glezman, a schoolteacher, writer, and LGBTQ rights advocate, in June 2018. Buttigieg declined to seek a third term as mayor.
Buttigieg ran as a candidate for president in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, launching his campaign for the 2020 United States presidential election on April 14, 2019. He became the first openly gay person to launch a major presidential campaign. Despite initially low expectations, he gained significant momentum in mid-2019 when he participated in several town halls and debates. Buttigieg narrowly won the Iowa caucuses and placed second in the New Hampshire primary. By winning Iowa, he became the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus. Buttigieg dropped out of the race on March 1, 2020, and endorsed Joe Biden the following day.In December 2020, President Biden named Buttigieg as his nominee to be Secretary of Transportation. He is the first openly gay Cabinet nominee in U.S. history.
VS
Mitt Romney
Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American politician, businessman and former presidential candidate who has served as the junior United...
Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American politician, businessman and former presidential candidate who has served as the junior United States senator from Utah since January 2019. He previously served as the 70th governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and was the Republican Party's nominee for president of the United States in the 2012 election.
Raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by his parents, George and Lenore Romney, he spent over two years from 1966 in France as a Mormon missionary. He married Ann Davies in 1969; they have five sons. By 1971, he had participated in the political campaigns of both parents. In 1971 Romney graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in English from Brigham Young University (BYU) and in 1975 gained the JD–MBA degree from Harvard. Romney became a management consultant and in 1977 joined Bain & Company in Boston. As Bain's chief executive officer (CEO), he later helped lead the company out of a financial crisis. In 1984, he co-founded and led the spin-off company Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm that became one of the largest of its kind in the nation. Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) throughout his adult life, Romney served as bishop of his ward and later as a stake president, for an area covering Boston and many of its suburbs.
After stepping down from Bain Capital and his local leadership role in the LDS Church, Romney ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 United States Senate election in Massachusetts. After losing to longtime incumbent Ted Kennedy, he resumed his position at Bain Capital. Years later, a successful stint as president and CEO of the then-struggling Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics led to a re-launch of his political career. Elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney helped develop and later signed a health care reform law (commonly referred to as "Romneycare") that provided near-universal health insurance access through state-level subsidies and individual mandates to purchase insurance. He also presided over the elimination of a projected $1.2–1.5 billion deficit through a combination of spending cuts, increased fees and closing corporate tax loopholes. He did not seek re-election in 2006, instead focusing on his campaign for the Republican nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Though he won several primaries and caucuses, Romney ultimately lost the nomination to Senator John McCain. Romney's considerable net worth, estimated in 2012 at $190–250 million, helped finance his political campaigns prior to 2012. Romney again ran for and won the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, becoming the first Mormon to be a presidential nominee of a major party. He was defeated by incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, losing the Electoral College by a margin of 206–332 and the popular vote by a margin of 47–51%.
After re-establishing residency in Utah, Romney announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring Orrin Hatch in the 2018 election; he defeated state representative Mike Kennedy in the Republican primary and Democrat Jenny Wilson in the general election. In doing so, he became only the third individual ever to be elected governor of one state and U.S. senator for another state (the others being Sam Houston and William Bibb). Romney was sworn in on January 3, 2019. In the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, he voted to convict the president of abuse of power (over Trump's attempts to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden), becoming the first and only senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a president of his own party.
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!