Alex Ward reports on why Buttigieg is ducking so many foreign policy questions:

The reason? Apparently the Buttigieg campaign’s new stance, as expressed in an email they sent to the Times and shared with Vox.

“We actually looked through the questions and feel that Pete has addressed these issues on the campaign trail and in previous surveys,” a campaign spokesperson wrote to a Times reporter on December 23, about six hours after receiving the newspaper’s Google questionnaire with many yes-no questions. “We are declining and instead point you to his responses in this survey from the Council on Foreign Relations as well as his full remarks from his foreign policy speech in June.” The team included links to both.

The Buttigieg campaign’s refusal to respond to new foreign policy questions is lazy at best. There are bound to be new developments and events that require something more than referring back to an underwhelming speech that your candidate gave eight months ago. Buttigieg’s speech had some interesting things in it, but it barely scratched the surface. As a first foray into talking about the subject, it was a decent beginning, but to think that you can keep falling back on that in response to all future questions is ridiculous. Obviously there were some issues that Buttigieg did not address in his previous remarks, and that is why all of the new questions about Afghanistan went unanswered. Someone who wants to be president can’t ignore questions on foreign policy when this is the area where the president has the greatest power and latitude.

Ward notes that Buttigieg and the campaign haven’t just been ignoring questionnaires. They are also ducking questions on new issues as they come up:

Even in my own reporting, Buttigieg’s team failed to respond to pointed questions about US landmine policy and whether the US should have low-yield nuclear weapons on submarines. These were new questions, not ones he’d answered in previous surveys.

It seems that Buttigieg would like to have it both ways. He wants to be taken seriously on foreign policy despite his lack of experience, and he talks up the importance of judgment when he wants to attack his rivals, but when it comes to offering up his own views he doesn’t want to be bothered to do the work. The fact that Buttigieg and his campaign think it is acceptable to blow off these questions suggests that he doesn’t think the voters deserve to know where he stands on these issues. Why should voters should trust him to wield such enormous power when he won’t level with them about how intends to use it?