February 11, 2019
Ascending to the Oval Office is a
“seismic jump” for senators and governors and national figures,
says the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who is in Iowa
mulling his own bid for the presidency and making a case for
generational change and practical leadership.
“I think the mayor of a city any size
has the kind of on-the-ground, front-line, problem-solving executive
experience whose absence is on display right now in Washington,”
Mayor Pete Buttigieg said in an interview with this newspaper Friday
in the lobby of the Downtown Des Moines Marriott.
Buttigieg, who governs a city of
102,000, the home to Notre Dame University, campaigned in Ames,
Grinnell, Ankeny and Johnston over the weekend. He spent time at the
Marriott in Des Moines, where the Daily Times Herald interviewed him
as he ate a cheeseburger and fries.
“The biggest thing we’ve got to
work on is our democracy itself,” Buttigieg said.
He is not the only current or former
Democratic mayor eyeing the White House. New York City Mayor Bill de
Blasio and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg both have
traveled to Iowa in the last year, as has Los Angeles Mayor Eric
Garcetti. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu is widely considered
another potential Democratic presidential contender.
Senior members of the U.S. House and
Senate often have never managed more than 100 people in their lives,
Buttigieg said in making the case for mayors.
Buttigieg, elected at age 29 as mayor,
said he has more years of experience in government than President
Donald Trump.
“I actually believe experience is an
important part of the equation,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg said being mayor of a
mid-sized city means he’s more involved directly in the day-to-day
operations of his city than his peers in large cities.
“You eat what you cook,” he said.
“We’re in the neighborhood. I get an earful if I go to the
grocery.”
According to his website, Buttigieg, a
Rhodes Scholar, studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford
and holds a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from
Harvard, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Buttigieg was born in
South Bend.
A former officer in the Naval Reserves,
Buttigieg served in Afghanistan. He notes that he would have the most
military experience of any president since George H.W. Bush.
“Somebody who has had that war-time
experience maybe has a little more credibility in pointing out that
we have to end endless war,” Buttigieg said.
He said one the reasons his campaign
resonates is a generational appetite and energy for change and youth.
“It’s not just energy among young
voters,” Buttigieg said. “We’re actually finding a lot of older
voters are excited about the idea of a younger candidate.”
Senior citizens were a big part of his
mayoral races, he said.
Buttigieg would be the first openly gay
candidate for a major party were he to earn the Democratic nomination
in the coming two years. His husband, Chasten, is a junior high
school teacher who has traveled with Buttigieg to Iowa, including on
the most recent trip.
Buttigieg said he understands the
barrier-breaking aspect of his candidacy but quickly added that his
youth, policy ideas and military background are the more interesting
features of his public life.
“I think that is historic in its own
way, the fact that (being gay) is not the leading thing about my
potential candidacy,” Buttigieg said. “It’s part of who I am.
It’s part of my story. I think it’s part of how I can relate to a
lot of vulnerable groups.”
He added, “I think we are getting
toward a day where it (being gay) is not even a thing. (But) we are
not there yet, not in Indiana, anyway.”
On one of the more sweeping policy
proposals to emerge from Democrats, Buttigieg said the Green New
Deal, a plan advanced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York
and Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts that would eliminate all
greenhouse gas emissions and guarantee jobs for all Americans, is a
“great beginning” and a “set of goals.”
“It also, I think, signals a level of
urgency that, in my opinion, we ought to have around climate issues,”
Buttigieg said. “It really deserves the level of national effort
and urgency that we mounted for things like the space program or the
Cold War or getting out of the Great Depression.”
For now, Buttigieg is not an official
candidate. He’s in the toe-in-the-water stages in Iowa with the
formation of an
exploratory committee. He wants to
gauge response from voters and see whether he can put an effective
organizational team together.
“I feel very good about the
trajectory,” he said.
If he formally enters the race,
Buttigieg said voters can expect to see him in small towns in Iowa.
If rural areas are abandoned to the Republicans, then it becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy, he said.
“I think Step 1 is just to show up,”
he said. “I think a great mistake my party often made was to leave
a lot of areas alone believing that they were just more or less
permanently conservative or permanently Republican when actually
there’s a great tradition of progressive thinking and progressive
activism in rural areas.”
Buttigieg said he thinks his home, the
industrial Midwest, is the center of gravity in politics, giving a
candidate from that region an advantage in the general election.
“I feel like we
have gone from being neglected to being studied with exotic
fascination by reporters from the coasts,” Buttigieg said.