Last weekend, CNN published a lengthy piece on Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Often reading closer to PR than journalism (sentences like “Buttigieg came into the Cabinet knowing this would be an odd transition — he’s the only winner of the Iowa caucuses and one-time Jimmy Kimmel guest host to take a lower-level Cabinet job” bring a certain sitcom to mind), the report runs through various recent controversies surrounding Buttigieg, mostly narrating them from his point of view.

If there’s an implicit thesis, it’s that Buttigieg has unfairly become a target for ire on both the Right and Left. Late last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders had the gall to say Buttigieg was being soft on major airlines. More recently, Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio have called for his resignation over February’s catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Summing up the predicament of its protagonist, one paragraph early in the piece reads:

To the left, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is the corporatist compromiser without the vision or guts to go as big as he should. To the right, he is the embodiment of elitist abandonment of real Americans, hopped up on his own grandiosity, who thinks more about social engineering than transportation.