South Bend, Ind Mayor Peter Buttigieg Running for President

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Mayor Pete to President Pete? It's crazy, but he thinks his ideas aren't.


South Bend, Ind., Mayor Peter Buttigieg. (Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune via AP; Malta Today; Washington Post; New York Times; Chicago Tribune; Politico; Rolling Stone)
Mayors may make excellent presidents. That is, if they ever get the chance. So far, however, the mayor’s office hasn’t exactly been a pipeline to the Oval Office. Only three presidents have ever served as mayors — Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge — and all three had plenty of experience in between, so that by the time they assumed the presidency, their time at the helm of Greenville, Tenn. (Johnson), or Northampton, Mass. (Coolidge), was little more than a shoot of youthful ambition.

For the most part, the American voter is suspicious of mayors, maybe because for so many years in the 20th century, cities were seen as sites of disfunction and squalor, if not violence and decay. Rudy Giuliani discovered this the hard way in 2008, when “America’s Mayor” — as he had come to be called after 9/11 — finished an inconsequential third in the Florida primary and promptly dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. He may have had what his predecessor John Lindsay famously called “the second toughest job in America,” but the voters in Wauchula, Fla., didn’t seem to care.

The 2020 election may be different. Cities have been resurgent for at least the last 20 years. Your aunt has done a walking tour of Brooklyn; your second cousin blogs about Pittsburgh’s first-rate dining scene. The urban renaissance has gone through so many iterations, and is now so far beyond Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, that it has settled on—really, you should wait for it — Fort Myers, Fla., and Midland, Texas, two of the fastest-growing cities in the country.

Which brings us to South Bend, Ind., whose 37-year-old mayor would like to make the improbable jump from 227 West Jefferson Boulevard to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and, in so doing vault over perhaps more than a dozen Democratic governors, U.S. senators and perhaps a billionaire or two, not to mention mayors of much bigger cities, including Bill de Blasio of New York and Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles. Then there would be the small matter of defeating the sitting president.

To his credit, Mayor Pete Buttigieg gets how insane that is. His counterargument is that presidential ambition is fundamentally insane, no more so for the Indiana mayor with a funny name than, say, a U.S. senator from Illinois with an even funnier name and no legislative accomplishment other than a fairly obvious vote against invading Iraq.


Buttigieg in downtown South Bend. (Photo: Nam Y. Huh/AP)
His name, which is Maltese, means “the owner of chickens” and it is pronounced booty-JIDGE, though he is just fine if you call him “Mayor Pete,” since pretty much everyone already does. And as he made clear during a recent conversation with Yahoo News, a Democratic primary field large enough to fill out a football roster is not going to deter him.

“The previous understanding of what hurdles or bars there are to the presidency have been wiped out by Donald Trump,” says Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a close ally of the Clintons. Though she would not speculate on Buttigieg’s chances, she welcomed him and any other potential candidate “to contribute to the debate about what it means to be a Democrat.”

Buttigieg has not declared for the presidency yet, and won’t say definitively that he will run. But the two-term mayor declared last December that he wasn’t running for reelection. Right after that announced he headed for Iowa, presumably to introduce potential first-in-the-nation primary caucus voters to his brand of pragmatic progressivism. It was his fourth time there since the fall of 2017.

On a recent winter afternoon, Buttigieg was in Manhattan to record an audio version of his forthcoming book, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, the cover of which shows Buttigieg on a South Bend street, head reverentially bowed, rolling up his shirt sleeves. That evening, Buttigieg attended an event on the Upper East Side hosted by Molly Jong-Fast, the novelist and anti-Trump activist. In attendance was New York City Council speaker Corey Johnson, who with Buttigieg is probably the most prominent openly gay elected leader in the United States.

Buttigieg is a study in contrasts, as are his policies. He is small but broad-shouldered, mayor of the nation’s 301st most-populous city, yet unafraid of showing his intellectual ambition. “This is not a time to be arguing over the appropriate calibration of the butter subsidy,” he says.

A graduate of Harvard College and a Rhodes Scholar, Buttigieg does not bother hiding his own ambition. He is obviously restless, annoyed at his fellow Democrats for having few ideas other than opposing Trump. The Democrats used to be “the intellectual party” but Buttigieg laments that today “it’s the Republicans who can get you from Hayek and Ayn Rand all the way to Paul Ryan.” But having also served in Afghanistan as a naval intelligence officer, he likes ideas that are practical, ideas that are not merely dreams.

His message to Democrats is classically mayoral, to think big but to also think local, recalling the approach Michael Bloomberg — himself a potential 2020 candidate — had to running New York City. He approvingly cites Bloomberg’s 2003 ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, once regarded as New York’s death knell. But Bloomberg refused to bow to the doomsayers, and when he left City Hall 10 years later, the smoking ban remained one of his great policy triumphs.

“When you follow facts where they lead, it often takes you to places that are fairly radical,” Buttigieg says. We debate, for a little while, whether he is a progressive pragmatist or a pragmatic progressive. He says that the distinction is, as commonly purveyed and understood, “bulls***.”

Pete Buttigieg
Buttigieg, also a candidate for Democratic National Committee chair, greets supporters in Baltimore, Feb. 11, 2017. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Buttigieg does propose some fairly radical solutions, even though he acknowledges that the platform for a not-yet-declared presidential run remains inchoate. He wants, for example, to make every home in the United States a “net zero” energy consumer, a goal he intends to achieve by retrofitting homes with solar roof paneling: “Uncle Sam is gonna mail you a kit,” he says.

And he explains how Democrats must come to understand that no matter how well-meaning, job retraining programs are not what the Midwest needs. “If you understand yourself as a machinist,” Buttigieg says, “and some well-meaning center-left program comes along and tells you, ‘From now on, you’re going to be a nurse’s aide,’ that just may not be how you think you fit in the world.”

Politics may be the art of the possible, but Buttigieg believes that is too often an excuse for thinking small. So far, he shows no sign of succumbing to that ailment. He wants Washington, D.C., to become a state, which is something that Democrats have long wanted and Republicans have long resisted. Give statehood to Puerto Rico too. And abolish the Electoral College, which favors low-population states. Even more, he argues they are entirely reasonable goals that are pragmatic. Only, he warns, “pragmatism is not the same thing as incrementalism.”

This is the kind of talk that has excited Democrats for two years. Some weeks after Trump was elected president, the New Yorker published an article about how Barack Obama was “reckoning” with what had transpired on November 8, not to mention with what would come on January 20. Obama named four promising Democrats. Three of them were well known: Tim Kaine, the U.S. senator from Virginia who had just finished a run as Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential candidate; Kamala Harris, the new junior senator from California; and Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado. The fourth name was close to totally unknown, and it belonged to Buttigieg.

Buttigieg was, at the time, a second-term Democratic mayor of the most rusted-through Rust Belt place imaginable. South Bend had once been defined by an enormous Studebaker campus, which by 2016 was nothing more than a rusted hulk, a tribute to greatness lost. And yet, somehow, the voters there had not succumbed to a politics of grievance, or at not nearly as much as did their counterparts across the Midwest. Clinton had won in St. Joseph County, which includes South Bend and its environs, by 231 votes; exactly a year before, Buttigieg won reelection with 80 percent of the electorate on his side.

Buttigieg did not let the Democratic Party’s crisis — or the name-check from Obama — go to waste. In January 2017, he ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee. He lost that race to Clinton ally Tom Perez, but without squandering the sheen of a presidential quasi-endorsement.

Peter Buttigieg
Buttigieg during an 2017 interview with host Seth Meyers. (Photo: Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty)
And while South Bend had not been garnering many Brooklyn or Austin comparisons, it had under Buttigieg avoided the fate of cities like Peoria, Ill., and Toledo, Ohio. South Bend’s airport gained “international” status in 2014 and added many domestic routes, a sign of Buttigieg and others’ efforts to keep their city in the global economic conversation. The old Studebaker plant was well on its way to becoming a major technology hub (Silicon Bend, here we come?). The defunct car company had even given its name to the brand of business most closely associated with urban resurgence: a brewery, in this case, Studebaker Brewing Company, whose motto is “Hops and History.” The population under Buttigieg showed a steady if modest growth of about 1 percent per year since 2012. That has been helped along by the rise of data centers in the city in the greater South Bend region, which is also home to Notre Dame.

And the mayor himself remained accessible, intelligent and thoughtful as his visibility rose throughout 2017. So the good press kept coming: “He’s a rock star. He represents all that this party is about,” a DNC official told Business Insider. “The Mayor of Nowhere, USA,” a Politico headline declared in early 2018. He has been on Late Night with Seth Meyers and progressive darling “Pod Save America,” hosted by Obama alumni. In the summer of 2018, he met with Obama. Several months after that, Buttigieg announced that he wasn’t running for a third term.

Buttigieg acknowledges “generational impatience” within the Democratic Party. Other potential 2020 candidates include Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who is 40 years old and also a military veteran, and Beto O’Rourke, the former Senate candidate from Texas, who is 46.

There is also the matter of gender and race. Buttigieg is a white male at a time when when Democrats are yearning for more diverse candidates. “There’s a lot of interest in having a ticket that better represents America,” says Tanden of the Center for American Progress. Though he would be the first openly gay man to seek a major-party nomination, Buttigieg — who married his partner last summer — plays down the historic nature of a potential candidacy. “I’m not interested in being the gay candidate any more than I am the gay mayor,” he says.

Pete Buttigieg with husband Chasten Glezman
Buttigieg, right, hugs his husband Chasten Glezman following a press conference in which he announced that he will not seek another term as mayor. (Photo: Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune via AP)
If he decides to run, Buttigieg may have a relatively easy time in Iowa, a very white Midwestern state. As an underdog, he might do well in New Hampshire too. The first real test — for him, and for most other candidates — will be in South Carolina, where he will have to appeal to an African-American electorate that has reasserted its power in the Democratic Party. “He has a high mountain to climb,” says Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist in that state.

It will be the first state, Seawright says, where a candidate will have to deploy a massive ground operation and invest in sophisticated media buys, while playing to a racially and economically heterogeneous population. Buttigieg will have to “measure three times and cut once with his message and his approach” if he hopes to survive until Super Tuesday, Seawright warns.

There will be candidates with more money, Buttigieg knows. There will be candidates who are more famous. Buttigieg knows this too. He believes that he can prevail on the basis of ideas, ideas grounded in Midwestern sensibility but not lacking in ambition. “We shouldn’t filter all of our proposals through whether they can be plausible tomorrow,” Buttigieg says. “If we do, we’re always gonna be doing piecemeal, incremental stuff.”
https://news.yahoo.com/mayor-pete-presi ... 44192.html

Pete Buttigieg Thinks All the 2020 Democrats Are Too Old

The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has announced his candidacy, promising “intergenerational justice.”

Edward-Isaac Dovere is a staff writer at The Atlantic.5:00 AM ET

“It is important when you get to the stage to be able to say, ‘I am the only person on this stage who dot dot dot,” said Pete Buttigieg, explaining the presidential campaign he's launching.Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press
Pete Buttigieg, the Millennial mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will formally launch an exploratory committee on Wednesday and make official the presidential run he’s been not-so-subtly edging toward for the last year and a half. His run will be explicitly about a generational contrast not just to the people in power, but to most of the people running in his own party.



“I think a lot about intergenerational justice. Short-term versus long-term helps to explain a lot of the policy disagreements that happen between the parties, and I would argue that in most ways we are the party with more long-term thinking,” Buttigieg said, in his first interview officially discussing his run.

Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani have both said that if there are bad consequences to what they’re doing, they’ll be dead and gone by then.

Trump is turning 73 in June, and Giuliani will be 75 in May. Buttigieg just turned 37 over the weekend.

“If you’re my age or younger, you were in high school when the school shootings became widespread, you’re going to be dealing with climate change for most of your adult life in specific, noticeable ways,” Buttigieg told me recently over a lunch of tempura fried chicken in New York. “You’re going to be dealing with the consequences of what they’ve done to the debt, you’re on track to be the first generation ever to make less than your parents, unless something changes, and your generation furnished most of the troops for the post-9/11 wars. It just gives you a very different relationship to political decision-makers and decision-making.”



For all the growing power of young voters, Buttigieg (it’s Maltese, pronounced BOOT-uh-judge, and means, roughly, “lord of the poultry”) is one of the few candidates under 50, and even fewer under 40.

Other than Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who’s also 37 running for president, and Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton, who’s continued flirting with a run at 40, he’s the only candidate in this giant field who’s a veteran, who did a tour in Afghanistan as a Navy lieutenant. He will be the first and only openly gay presidential candidate ever. He is also one of the few Midwesterners looking at the race, and might end up as the only one who’s actually jumped in. And he could be the only mayor to run for president in 2020.

Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar, is a clearly a very smart guy, so he knows this is a long shot, or maybe a loooong shot, just as he knows that ending up with the nomination or the White House would obliterate whatever conventional wisdom is left in presidential politics.


But he’s not the only one who thinks that in a field like this, at a time this wacky, when the race might be defined by impeachment or recession or war, anything could happen. He’s been encouraged by Howard Dean, who’s in love with his youth, and Obama strategist David Axelrod, who talks about his distinct profile and potential in this moment.

“Pete has the background and profile to do well in Iowa,” said another top Obama campaign alum, who didn’t want to be public about praising any one candidate at this moment. “It will be a very crowded field, but caucus-goers will want to hear his vision for the country and give him a shot. South Bend isn’t that different from cities in eastern Iowa, too.”

He’s been making the most of those connections. In November, he got together with Obama megadonor Robert Wolf when Notre Dame played Syracuse at Yankee Stadium, talked up the story of South Bend and his ambitions for more. “The people who know him better than me feel he’s one of those special guys,” said Wolf, who concurs.


Buttigieg was back in New York in January to record the audio version of his new book in a studio a few blocks over. Shortest Way Home is his story of quitting the fancy but amorphous consulting job he had, like all his Harvard friends who’d moved to either coast, and heading back to the small city he grew up in. He ran for Indiana state treasurer at 28 and got crushed. He turned around and ran for mayor the next year, won in a blowout.

But the book, which will be out in March, is obvious about the greater political mission it’s part of—the subtitle is “one mayor’s challenge and a model for America’s future,” the cover photo is a shot of him crossing the street and rolling up his sleeves, and the epigraph is a proverb from Afghanistan, where he served.

My interview with Buttigieg paused briefly so that he could taste the wasabi-honey that came with the fried chicken. He dipped his fork in, tasted it. Considered. “That sauce,” Buttigieg announced with the intrigued wonderment that’s his natural tone, “has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s fantastic.”



He is slight and soft-spoken and looks even younger than he is. He has thoughts. He has theories. He’s spent the last year wowing the intelligentsia at dinner parties and in aggressively courted press coverage. He comes across more as a pretty regular guy than as a rip-roaring politician who’ll get people riled up at rallies.

Except crowds take to him. In March, I saw people line up for an hour to shake his hand and take photos after a speech he gave to the Kansas Democratic Party at the Topeka Ramada. In December, a few days after announcing he wasn’t going to run for a third term in City Hall, he was in Des Moines as one of the featured speakers at the holiday party for Progress Iowa, a statewide activist organization.

“The reaction that I saw in the crowd while he was speaking was that he inspired people and got people fired up. He just really connected,” said Matt Sinovic, the executive director of Progress Iowa.

Sinovic said he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why—maybe it was Buttigieg’s youth, or maybe some of what he was saying, but the personal connection was palpable to him among the 300 people in the room, their largest turnout ever.


There’s a big difference between that and getting enough votes for the third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses that Buttigieg figures he probably needs to prove he’s serious.

“Whether it’s him or whether it’s any of these candidates, all of them are going to want to have that kind of impact,” Sinovic said. “He certainly shows that he has that ability, he has that capacity to connect.”

Buttigieg doesn’t have a tactical plan of the states to prioritize. But he does talk about how “political affinity is so overdetermined” and how he’s overcome being unknown and overlooked in his past campaigns by putting himself out there and talking to people. He’s basically unknown nationally, but he makes sure to note, “an average member of Congress who’s been in office for 12 years has been on national television probably 10 times more than I have. But I have been on television 10 times more than they have, total.”

He’s run a city, and along the way led it through a revival and modernization that has earned him some notice. So now all he has to do is convince people he’ll be a better president than all the candidates with national experience, and a more viable candidate against Trump than all the candidates with higher name ID and bigger bank accounts.


Buttigieg’s answer: “Part of it would be the strength of some ideas that are compelling. And part of it would be demonstrating that at least the experience of a mayor of a struggling city is government experience that in many ways is better preparation than some other more traditional pathways into the office, right? That’s our job, to make that case. It’s not an easy one, but I can do it.”


The plan is to transmogrify the ins that he’s built up with the insiders and turn that into enough recognition to get him a moment in the sun.

He doesn’t have much time.

The first two Democratic debates are in June and July, each a mix of frontrunners and longshots. Even the strongest candidates right now view those as moments likely to help define the race, and they’ll all be looking for breakout moments. As Buttigieg himself acknowledges, he’ll likely have to get to the stage with some momentum and profile already behind him so that he’s spending his allotted minutes doing more than correcting the pronunciation of his last name and explaining where South Bend is.


“I’m not like the others. And that’s going to be really important. The other thing is, ‘How much depth is there to your account of how America works, how politics works, and where the world is going in our lifetime?’” he said. “Mine will have to be an account of how the country and the world works which makes more sense than what the others are saying.”

Being the toast of the Democratic circuit over the last year has meant that Buttigieg hasn’t been spending a lot of time in South Bend. He’s about to spend even less time there, though his term goes all the way through the end of the year. He’ll be traveling to Iowa, New Hampshire and all the other states presidential candidates rush through, with appearances in Washington, and meetings with donors in New York, California and beyond.

That’s exactly the kind of far from home itinerary that people in Los Angeles and New York have griped about when thinking about their own mayors going national, and maybe running for president. Buttigieg says no matter where he is, the people of South Bend will get “a full-service mayor,” and that in this, being a small city mayor is an advantage. But also, he argues that he’ll help the city by being a walking commercial for South Bend’s growth, and by bringing more reporters and supporters in to see him and what he’s done there. He’s a particular fan of Dyngus Day, the Polish holiday celebrated the Monday after Easter by people spending the day stuffing themselves full of sausages and beer.


“South Bend, in many ways, is our message,” he said.

He’s also privately talked up the possibility of tapping into a network of gay donors and supporters, in the way that Howard Dean did for the 2004 campaign because of his support for civil unions, which at the time put him far out ahead on LGBTQ rights. One of the people he’s laid that plan out to argued that with gay marriage legal, the energy may have dissipated, historic as his candidacy is.

When I floated that response to Buttigieg, he tensed up. Whoever said that must be from a big city, he figured. (He was correct.)

“In one sense, obviously that’s correct, but also you can still get fired in Indiana for being gay. There’s no rule against that. Not in South Bend, we have an ordinance about this, but in other parts of Indiana it’s all the time. We had a kid beaten to death for being gay in South Bend last year. So, it’s not like the fight’s over,” Buttigieg said. “Some people may not find this interesting anymore.” For others, it “may really mean a lot to them to—especially the older generation, who, you know, spent most of their lives at a time when it was inconceivable you could be out and in office anywhere. They’re just so thrilled to live to see this.”



Buttigieg didn’t come out himself until the spring of 2015, right before the Supreme Court decision, when he was already running for his second term. He got married last June at a South Bend church with about 200 guests, including David Axelrod, and walked with his new husband from the ceremony to the city’s Gay Pride parade, adding rainbow beads around their necks to go with their dark blue wedding suits.

It was another demonstration of how much the world has changed, and how quickly, Buttigieg said. Younger Americans can’t get mortgages because they’re drowning in student debt, economic mobility is sputtering because there aren’t enough good-paying full time jobs, bridges are falling apart, debt is mounting because generations of government have kicked the can down the road, and it’s the people who haven’t been in power who are going to be around when the bill comes due. And when China is trying to collect on that bill.

“Consequences are being exposed now. And I do think there’s a way generationally to say, ‘Look, we weren’t around when you all decided for some reason it was OK to like, not have DC be a state, but we think that’s dumb, doesn’t make any sense, and nobody can explain to us why that’s right, so we’re going to change that,’” Buttigieg says.


Very Millennial, I tell him.

“I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. When I took office, I drilled into people, especially people retained from previous administrations, that the one phrase that is just not welcome here is ‘We’ve always done it this way,’” Buttigieg said. “Now, if you can explain why we’ve always done it this way, for some reason why this is better, then of course, but not if we’ve always done it this way is literally the only reason we’ve ever done it this way.”

Austin Mayor Steve Adler, who’s 62 himself, said voters “are going to be looking for people that are real successful problem solvers, and people that have demonstrated skill sets, and he offers a new generational perspective.” Adler hails from the home state of two of the younger 2020 Democrats, Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke, and he said Democrats are lucky to see all of them looking at the race. About Buttigieg, he said, “he’s different.”

So different that he’d become the first millennial, first mayor, first gay, first from South Bend, first virtual unknown to be elected president. That’s a lot.

“There’s a moment where you need to prove that you’re viable,” Buttigieg said. “Up to that moment, low expectations can be pretty useful.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... cy/580984/

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