Biden team deletes old campaign ad criticising Pete Buttigieg during primaries

President-elect nominates ex-mayor for transport secretary but earlier barbs still linger

Joe Biden’s transition team has been scrambling to delete an old campaign ad attacking Pete Buttigieg after the president-elect nominated his former rival for the Democratic candidacy to be his new transport secretary.

Mr Biden hailed Mr Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, as “a new voice with new ideas” earlier this week, backing him to become the first openly gay Cabinet secretary confirmed by the Senate.

“We need someone who knows how to work with state, local and federal agencies,” he said, explaining his choice.

But the attack ad in question - released in February when the men were competitors at the height of the primaries and since removed from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - makes for a marked contrast.

“Both Vice President Biden and former mayor Pete Buttigieg have taken on tough fights,” the promo’s voiceover observes. “Under threat of a nuclear Iran, Joe Biden helped to negotiate the Iran deal. And under threat of disappearing pets, Buttigieg negotiated lighter licensing regulations on pet chip scanners.”

The clip continues in this vein, dryly mocking Mr Buttigieg’s comparative inexperience by contrasting his modest smalltown achievements with the veteran’s more consequential accomplishments on the world stage.

While Mr Biden, as Barack Obama’s deputy, was helping pass the Affordable Care Act, the mayor was commissioning decorative coloured lights under South Bend’s bridges, it observes.

More seriously, the advert attacks Mr Buttigieg’s record on race: “When public pressure mounted against him, former Mayor Pete fired the first African American Police Chief of South Bend. And then he forced out the African American fire chief too.”

Following its release, the Biden campaign’s digital director Rob Flaherty gloated on Twitter: “This video now has more views than the population of South Bend.”

Sparring is of course integral to any good political rivalry and there was plenty of it on the campaign trail, with each man saying of the other that he was “no Obama”.

Countering Mr Biden’s accusation that he was inexperienced, Mr Buttigieg warned Democratic voters during the primaries: “History has shown us that the biggest risk we could take with a very important election coming up, is to look to the same Washington playbook and recycle the same arguments and expect that to work against a president like Donald Trump, who is new in kind.”

Theirs is by no means the only blue-on-blue argument to haunt the president-elect as he prepares to enter the White House.

He was also memorably taken to task by California senator Kamala Harris, subsequently his running mate and now vice president-elect, during the 27 June presidential debate last year.

Ms Harris described Mr Biden talking up his record of bipartisan cooperation by boasting of working with segregationist Republicans in the past as “hurtful” in light of her own experience of being bused to school as a child as part of a controversial civil rights integration policy of the mid-1970s.