Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Eli | Email Lauren When MIKE PENCE mocked PETE BUTTIGIEG at Saturday’s Gridiron dinner for taking a “maternity leave” after the birth of his twins and giving “everyone else” “postpartum depression” in the aftermath, he reignited a four-year old blood feud with his fellow Hoosier. The joke possibly violated the Gridiron rule of “singe, but don’t burn,” for its focus on the Transportation secretary as a new parent of twins born prematurely, both of whom caught the respiratory virus RSV. His and husband CHASTEN’s son, JOSEPH “GUS” AUGUST — named after Buttigieg’s late father — spent a week on a ventilator. On Sunday, LIS SMITH, Buttigieg’s former communications adviser, called Pence “an unambiguous asshole.” A day later, she told West Wing Playbook that Pence’s comments were “gross and hardly in line with the upright, Christian image he tries to project.” Chasten took umbrage, too, on Twitter. While a DOT spokesman for Buttigieg declined to comment, the White House and Pence’s people exchanged some unusually sharp words. Press secretary KARINE JEAN-PIERRE told West Wing Playbook “[t]he former vice president’s homophobic joke about Secretary Buttigieg was offensive and inappropriate, all the more so because he treated women suffering from postpartum depression as a punchline.” Pence senior adviser MARC SHORT, for his part, accused the White House of “faux outrage.” “The White House would be wise to focus less on placating the woke police and focus more on bank failures, planes nearly colliding in mid-air, train derailments, and the continued supply chain crisis,” he said in a statement. The episode is only the latest turn in a long simmering vendetta between the two ambitious Midwestern politicians whose paths have become both inextricable and politically symbiotic. Their relationship has been documented in at least four political memoirs so far — Buttigieg’s 2019 book Shortest Way Home, Chasten’s 2020 memoir I Have Something to Tell You, Smith’s Any Given Tuesday and Pence’s So Help Me God. At South By Southwest four years ago, Buttigieg, then a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate polling in the single digits, called Pence a “cheerleader for the pornstar presidency.” It was a set piece Buttigieg had workshopped days before and practiced in a final prep session. A “nut cutter of a line,” Smith said in her book. Buttigieg raised $600,000 in 24 hours, and $1 million in 48 hours, entering the primary’s top tier. Later in the campaign, at the LGBTQ Victory Fund brunch, Buttigieg also landed one of his more notable lines of the campaign: “Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator,” Buttigieg said, taking aim at the deeply religious Pence. Prior to that moment, Pence and Buttigieg had a cordial, if complicated, co-existence as Indiana governor and South Bend mayor. Buttigieg attended his gubernatorial inauguration. And Buttigieg once helped Pence and KAREN PENCE exit a drunken Dyngus Day event in South Bend. In his book, Pence called it a “good working relationship.” Pence’s Regional Cities economic development initiative helped rebuild the Studebaker plant at which Buttigieg would launch his presidential campaign. Pence also wrote that he phoned Buttigieg as he prepared to leave for his Naval Reserves deployment in Afghanistan in 2014 to offer his prayers. In 2015, Buttigeg came out nearly two months after Pence signed into law his Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, which detractors said would result in LGBTQ discrimination. Asked for his reaction, Pence said that “Pete is a good public servant, a patriot, and I look forward to continuing to work with him.” “When Peter says Mike Pence is a decent guy,” Chasten wrote in his own book, “he doesn’t mean everything he does is acceptable. He just means that he’s quiet and capable of exchanging pleasantries with an openly gay man.” But things broke down when Buttigieg launched his presidential campaign. Buttigieg would channel his years of working with Pence into playing him in vice presidential debate prep opposite then-Vice Presidential nominee KAMALA HARRIS. Theirs became the kind of relationship like the one portrayed in the movie “The Banshees of Inisherin,” with two longtime allies turning on one another. “He suddenly adopted the caricature of me and of Indiana held by many of his West Coast donors,” Pence wrote in his book. “Politics can do that to you.” Pence may have played into that same caricature last weekend with his shot at Buttigieg, and, in the process, further cemented the two as epic frenemies. MESSAGE US — Are you ARIANA BERENGAUT, senior adviser to the National Security Adviser? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
| 
