Pete Buttigieg: Mayor Pete and his rise to power in 2020, explained

Strange as it may seem, the mayor of a mid-sized Midwestern town is now a true contender for the Democratic nomination for president.

According to a quinnipiace poll in late March, Pete Buttigieg, 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, tied with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for fifth place nationally, placing him in front of the Sense . Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Monday, Buttigieg announced his campaign has raised more than $ 7 million in the first quarter of 2019, a not insignificant figure for a candidate that almost nobody took seriously when entering the race. And a recent Economist / yougov poll found Buttigieg was one of only three Democratic candidates to receive positive national endorsement (although the majority of respondents did not know enough about him to get an opinion).

Buttigieg has some sort of double appeal. Some moderates, such as his Midwestern background, his elite degrees (he is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford) and his soft and competent speech on politics. Liberal Democrats see Buttigieg as an intellectual who could be the opposite pole of Trump and who focuses on political reforms such as the abolition of the Electoral College channeling their frustration at a system that seems rigged in favor of the GOP.

"Recently, appealing to Republican lawmakers was a waste of time because they mostly acted in bad faith," Buttigieg said during a phone call last week.

The interviews and press releases as our call have so far been the bread and butter of his campaign. After a breakout at a CNN City Hall in early March, Buttigieg received a significant increase in media attention and positive coverage. (Now, many more people know that it's pronounced "Boot-edge-edge.") His campaign has helped to make it a growing popularity in social media and a viral celebrity, all of which have translated into a strong increased polls and fundraising.

The way Buttigieg and his team deal with the main stage will ultimately determine whether the recent round of polls is a snap or the beginning of a larger event. Until now, Buttigieg has enjoyed positive media coverage and an indeterminate national reputation. the more serious he becomes, the more questions he will encounter about his past as journalists and opposing campaigns, criticism from the party, and pressure to more clearly take sides in the party's internal ideological wars.

But these are choices that all serious candidates face. And for now, we can not deny that Mayor Pete is a serious candidate.

"He has the fainting factor, the young factor, the honest factor up to the point of vulnerability, and he's great on the trunk," says Jennifer Victor, a political scientist at George Mason University. "By standard measures, it should not be as effective, but I think the primary policy of the US presidency goes well beyond the standard measures."

Why Pete Buttigieg thinks he should be president

Buttigieg's media coverage tends to focus on his biography and impeccable elite credentials.

Born in 1982, at the beginning of the millennium, he graduated from Harvard and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. He then worked at McKinsey, the giant consulting company, and then enlisted in the military – as a gay man – before the repeal of Do not Ask, Do not Tell. He made a seven-month tour of Afghanistan as a naval reserve officer. He apparently speaks seven languages ​​and he apparently learned Norwegian for the sole purpose of reading an interesting book.

But Buttigieg did not come out of nowhere. He is considered a rising star in national democratic politics since being elected in 2011 as mayor of South Bend, the country's fourth-largest city, in Indiana. At the end of his term, President Barack Obama named Buttigieg among the future leaders of the Democratic Party. Party.

Nam Y. Huh / AP

Buttigieg's candidacy for the presidency of the National Democratic Committee in 2017 failed – he was dismissed just before the first round of voting – but that did not dampen the party's enthusiasm for the young mayor. And in 2019, it almost feels like a laboratory designed to attract a variety of Democrats looking for a clear antidote to Trump. The moderates consult his biography and see someone who does not scare them. Liberal supporters who make up the bulk of the party's base examine his positions and speeches and see whoever their fighter type is.

Buttigieg's simple website does not have a problem page (despite its emerging reputation as a great candidate). But reconcile his political positions from various public appearances, and it is clear that he is firmly progressive so as to satisfy the thirst of the Democratic base for a more daring and less centrist political approach.

Buttigieg has approved a single payer health care system, although it proposes to start with a transition policy as a public option or rate setting for any payor. He called the Green New Deal a "solid framework" to fight climate change and called for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. He defended the proposal of the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce a marginal effective tax rate of 70%, without, however, openly committing to respect a particular rate.

It has, however, been very specific in terms of structural change and electoral reform.

Like Elizabeth Warren, Buttigieg is supportive of the abolition of the electoral college. It is also approved automatic voter registration and a state for Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, and marked an opening to the abolition of the obstruction of the Senate.

But his most interesting idea, which he detailed in an interview with Mehdi Hasan of Intercept, is to radically reorganize the Supreme Court.

"One solution I've discussed in recent weeks is to structure it with 15 members, but five of them can only be seated by a unanimous consensus of the other 10," he said. declared to Hasan. "Anything that would make a vacancy in the Supreme Court less an apocalyptic ideological struggle would be an improvement."

This response – one of the most radical plans to change the Supreme Court I've seen from a dominant political figure – testifies to the heart of Buttigieg's political appeal to the Democratic base. It expresses the general feeling of the Democratic Party to be a victim of a system favoring Republicans and a party ready to play hard to enforce the laws regarding voter identification, the gerrymandering and theft of the seat of the Supreme Court of Merrick Garland.

Joshua Lott / Washington Post / Getty Images

Buttigieg may be a discreet and reserved type, but he embodies a kind of political audacity. Rather than forging a political compromise with the Republicans, he wants to transform the ideas and structures that define American politics. If Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a class warrior, Pete Buttigieg is a partisan warrior.

"I think we are in a tectonic shift in America, so even now we can not react to the depth of this moment. I mean, you basically have a Reagan consensus that has lasted 30 or 40 years and has prevailed over the country. And it's done, it's done, "he told my colleague Ezra Klein. "I think it's a moment that really needs big ideas and we have to be careful about the really deep things that are going on."

Buttigieg has elite skills. But he does not seem too invested in all the subtleties of elite politics, where a particular notion of "civility" is often used to oppose efforts to attack Republican politicians themselves. When former vice president, Joe Biden, described current vice president Mike Pence as "honest guy," Buttigieg was the exception. In an interview with Buzzfeed, he disputed the idea of ​​separating Pence's personal politeness from his vision of the global political world.

"I mean, apparently, if he was sitting here, you'd think this guy is very polite," said Buttigieg. "But that masks this absolutely fanatical view of the functioning of the world or the universe that has led to these incredibly harmful, dangerous and harmful policies, and that's what we have now in the White House. think that it shocks a lot of us, especially in the LGBTQ community, to see that someone like that can be in such a position of power. "

For all these reasons, Buttigieg considers, for many Democrats, a different type of candidate: neither a milquetoast centrist who has been surveyed nor a part of a well-established party faction, but a competent executive whose vision responds directly to their concerns and partisanship of the Trump era. anger. This sounds perfect for a kind of relatively educated Democratic voter who consumes a lot of political media, someone who becomes nostalgic for the Obama presidency and listens to every episode of Pod Save America – a show whose animators are from elsewhere big fans of Buttigieg.

Joshua Lott / AFP / Getty Images

"Pete Buttigieg is a really fascinating guy who has a lot of interesting things to say about politics at the time and who has been very clear about why he's running for the presidency," tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, one of the hosts of the show and former senior adviser to Obama.

And yet, at the same time, Buttigieg manages to present this program in a way that meets both principled and non-partisan audiences for more moderate audiences.

Take his reform plan of the Supreme Court. Given the current ideological make-up of the Court, adding more judges would be a considerable advantage for partisan Democratic interests. But when Buttigieg discussed the proposal with Klein, he presented it in the neutral language of good governance and the health of American institutions.

"It irritates me a bit that every time I talk about a Supreme Court reform aimed at making institutions less political, some slips on to give the impression that I'm proposing that we simply add judges in order to clarify things. Court more left, "he said." Everything we do must be grounded in the principle. "And something that makes sense, in principle, is to protect the court from the theater of an apocalyptic ideological fight each once the vacancy is open and set up the court so that more people think for themselves. "

You may think that this argument is misleading, a mask. But that sounds sincere, even in the eyes of center-right institutions like the New York Times columnist David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, MSNBC host. Buttigieg has the ability to be both a grassroots partisan warrior and an attractive image for the moderates: a sort of "all for all" call that does not resemble anyone more than Barack Obama.

The case of Buttigieg depends for himself on his past mayor

All of this is fine in theory. But in practice, can a mayor of a city of about 100,000 really become the most powerful person in the world?

I ask this question directly to Buttigieg, asking him why Democratic voters should support him over senators, governors or a former vice-president. His answer consisted of two parts.

First, he said, mayors have leadership experience that helps them understand what it means to manage a complex set of complex political issues – at least enough to be achievable.

"Nobody goes to the oval office knowing what it's like to be president," Buttigieg said. "I would say that being a mayor of a city, no matter how big … means you have basic government experience on the ground, day-to-day".

Second, he argues, geography is important. South Bend is an old industrial city in the Midwestern Midwest, a city that suffered tremendously from the closure of a Studebaker car manufacturing facility in 1963. Buttigieg says it can get in touch with voters in places like this one, so that other Democrats – coastal countries of enclaves like Vermont or California, for example, simply can not.

Nam Y. Huh / AP

"The experience of someone who comes from within the United States, from the kind of community where people grew up, was convinced that success depended on the release … is an experience of which our national leadership needs more, "he says. And especially in the Democratic Party, because losing contact with this kind of experience has really made us go back as a party. "

This argument is particularly suited to the democratic electorate of the Trump era.

Buttigieg is positioned as the opposite of Trump – a competent and qualified executive who knows how the government works. But it also appeals to liberal America's concerns of winning the white working class and rebuilding Clinton's alleged "blue wall" in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, states expected to assume the presidency of Democrats but pass them on to Trump. .

The argument for Buttigieg's case depends on his current tenure as mayor of South Bend. To what extent was the mayor a competent leader in contact with Central America?

Three different Indiana political scientists who study local politics and have followed Buttigieg's career have all asserted that it was more or less the case.

"I have the impression that at South Bend he has had quite a spectacular success," said Gerald Wright, president of Indiana University's Department of Political Science in Bloomington.

When Buttigieg took office in January 2012, South Bend experienced a slow but steady demographic decline. Over the last five years, population growth has been small but significant. On the first day of Buttigieg, the unemployment rate in the South Bend metropolitan area was 10.2%, 1.6 percentage points higher than the Indiana average. At the end of 2018, it was virtually identical to the national average (3.7% vs. 3.5).

It is difficult to separate its performance from improving the national economy at the same time. Nevertheless, South Bend does well compared to the performance of other Midwestern post-industrial cities in terms of indicators such as employment and population growth. And experts point to several Buttigieg policies that have improved the city's economic performance in recent years.

Buttigieg transformed Highway 31, the main thoroughfare through downtown South Bend that had previously been moribund, from two one-way streets to a series of two-way roads to encourage people to stop and walk. spend. About a thousand people live in downtown South Bend today; That figure was "in reality zero when Buttigieg took office," according to the Indianapolis Star.

"[His policy was] slow down people – they have a better view of what is in the place, they may see a restaurant they have never seen before or a business they have never seen before. And that pushes them to get involved, "said Andrew Downs, director of the Indiana Politics Center at Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Nam Y. Huh / AP

Buttigieg wanted to move South Bend, the headquarters of the University of Notre Dame, away from its industrial past and toward an economic model designed for a global US economy focused on technology and jobs requiring more training. This type of vision is often criticized for ignoring deeper structural inequalities: development can often entrench inequalities or totally exclude poor residents and minorities.

And Buttigieg has been criticized on this front, especially during his attempt to demolish 1,000 uninhabitable and uninhabited housing as part of a larger development program. But what was striking, according to the experts, is Buttigieg's responsiveness to these concerns. Stacey Odom, a resident of the very dark neighborhood of LaSalle Park, learned that her neighborhood was being redeveloped. She asked him for help, including a $ 300,000 grant for home repairs for local residents. Buttigieg gave him $ 650,000.

South Bend still has a number of problems – the foreclosure rate in the city is high, in part due to hostile state laws. But Buttigieg's story about his record – a knowledgeable leader in touch with his Midwestern residents – is reflected in the expert assessments of his tenure.

"What's interesting in talking to locals and sometimes even critics [of Buttigieg] That's how much they said the mayor really worked hard to listen to people, "said Elizabeth Bennion, a state policy expert at Indiana University in South Bend. "I would give him a very good grade."

At the same time, however, the very nature of this report raises questions about Buttigieg's readiness for the presidency. It's one thing to be a competent executive who has to make decisions on a single highway and respond personally to a voter's grievance; it is quite another thing to make decisions on behalf of the largest economy and the most powerful military forces in the world.

Although Buttigieg is as effective a mayor as local experts claim, it is not clear that he has the skills to prepare him for the world's greatest work. He will have to argue that he is not just a good mayor; he is so good that he deserves to make a leap into the high position of the country.

The challenges ahead for the Buttigieg campaign

The extremely local nature of his past experience makes it very strange to mention Buttigieg in the same breath as important candidates such as Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) or the former Texas Representative Beto O & Rourke, not to mention Biden and Sanders. . 62% of Americans do not know who he is, according to the results of the Economist / YouGov poll of late March. Not even many Indiana residents know a lot about him.

Lloyd Bishop / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty Images

"He was the mayor of one of the largest cities in the state and despite this – despite the fact that he handles this city well – he was not well known at a hour and a half northeast of Indiana, "says Downs.

To win, Buttigieg will have to deal with this name recognition problem. It will have to do more than capture the hearts of relatively few democrats who know and appreciate it; he will have to become a well-known name in the places where the primary debates take place (for which he is already qualified)

But the better you know about Buttigieg, the more likely it is to attract criticism that could harm your chances.

"The candidate with a boomlet will generally attract more media attention," says John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. "Once the candidates seem serious enough to pay attention, the media looks more closely at their background and behavior during the campaign.

The truth is that Buttigieg is still, at this stage, seriously undervalued. We do not know what investigative journalists and opposition researchers who are currently interested in his past and past statements will find. And there are already obvious lines of fracture that could divide Buttigieg's support.

The first is the identity. The current group of Democratic presidential candidates is the most diverse of all time. the party brought back the House of Representatives in November during an election wave under the impulse of color candidates and women. In some ways, Buttigieg, a first-time national candidate who is trying to become the first openly gay president, fits that mold.

But he is also a relatively inexperienced white man. For some critics, it is odd that someone like this becomes the insurgent star of the Democratic Party battleground because of his intelligence and political consequences. This sounds a bit like a double standard at work, given that Elizabeth, who has been much more specific about policies ranging from advanced technology to agriculture, has gotten much more negative media coverage on his alleged lack of "sympathy".

"I love Pete Buttigieg a lot. He is intelligent. He is decent. He's curious, "a leading feminist and Jill Filipovic, New America member, tweeted. "But when he says," I think politics is important, I'm a politician, "but all his policies are basically Warren's policies (unless less specific and less progressive), I wonder why he does not work for she."

I've interviewed Buttigieg on this line of criticism. "If anyone reports that there are benefits – often unfair – that go hand in hand with being a man in our society and in our politics, then I am quite desperate." "Agreement," he said.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

But he went on to say, "If anyone says I should not compete because I am a man, I do not know what to say to that. And if someone says that I had an easy life, I would invite him to join the army and to embark on Indiana's politics in 2010 as a person homosexual. "

A much more severe line of attack is already emerging from the socialist left. A widely circulated March 29 article from Current Affairs Magazine, for example, purported to document "compelling evidence that no serious progressives should want Pete Buttigieg to be near a national public station."

Current Affairs Editor Nathan Robinson continues with an extremely critical reading of Buttigieg's campaign book, Shortest way to the house, and a severe criticism of his record in South Bend. Robinson concludes that he's just not the kind of person to whom the left can trust with power.

"Mayor Pete does not have a story totally different from any other politician in our lives. It has the same story that they all have, "Robinson writes. "More brilliant young people with their beautiful families and flawless characters, their elite education and their empty messages of upliftment and solidarity. Give me crazy people with convictions and enthusiasm. Give me real human beings, not corporate, CV-filled zombies.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Buttigieg does not respond to this antipathy on the left. In our interview, he asserted that the rise of a more categorical left-wing policy is good for America.

"We really have to see the farthest limits of our space of ideas. If the debate concerns only a center-left and a center-center-left, we are not really examining all the possibilities currently, "he said. "The essence of boldness in American politics in my lifetime has only happened on the right, and it's refreshing to see this change, even if part of what's going on go left leads to policies that I would approach differently "

It is very clear that Buttigieg does not want to be Democratic foes at this stage of the race. But he is in a primary competition against very popular and well financed opponents. If Democratic voters continue to take it as seriously as it is today, he will inevitably start punching and throwing them away. Does this mean that it has a natural cap or that it might even collapse like some surprise candidates do?

So, for the moment, Buttigieg is appealing to Democratic voters dissatisfied with the other proposed choices. He speaks both of the desire of some voters for Trump's trump and the desire of the democratic base to want a shameless desire to fight against Republicans. This is enough to elevate to the status of serious candidate; the only question now is to know where it can go.