For anyone wanting an introduction to Mayor Pete, including his responses to questions about his assessment of the 2016 presidential campaign and about his stint at McKinsey. I highly commend it.
·
Pete
Buttigieg on How He Plans to Win the Democratic Nomination and Defeat Trump
The surging Presidential
hopeful explains a career that has included Navy service, two terms as a
small-city mayor, and coming out as gay.
2:12 P.M. (April 2, 2019)
“The
condition of our democracy is diminished, and, the worse it gets, the harder it
will become for us to fix anything else,” Pete Buttigieg says.
During an
exit interview in November, 2016, just weeks after the election, David Remnick
asked President Obama who the future leaders of the Democratic Party might be,
and who could realistically challenge Trump in 2020. A surprising figure Obama named was Pete Buttigieg,
the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who, at the time, was only thirty-four. In
recent weeks, Buttigieg’s profile has risen dramatically, and he has collected
campaign donations at a surprising clip, considering that he lacks the national
profile of a senator or governor. The field of Democrats running for President
is enormous, but Buttigieg stands
out for a few reasons. He’s a Navy veteran, born and raised in the city he
governs, so you could say that he has real heartland credibility. He’s also the
first gay Presidential candidate with a real shot at the nomination. Buttigieg
is a millennial who graduated high school in the year 2000 and, if elected,
would be the youngest President by far. In a conversation with Remnick for The
New Yorker Radio Hour, the Democratic hopeful discussed his experience as a
small-city mayor, a Navy officer, and a gay man.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Listen: David Remnick
interviews Pete Buttigieg on The New Yorker Radio Hour. [This podcast episode is not on-line yet, but I suspect it will be soon.]
david remnick: Mr. Mayor, I have to begin with a kind of good-news, sort of
bad-news question. One day after Barack Obama met, that one time, withDonald Trump, I had an interview with the
outgoing President, in the Oval Office. It went for a couple of hours. The
White House was like a funeral parlor. We talked a long time about the election
just past. And, at one point, I said, “Mr. President, what do you have on the
bench? What does the Democratic Party have on the bench?” And he did a long
kind of Obamaian pause, and then he said, “Well, there’s Kamala Harris, in
California.” And I think he kind of made a routine mention of Tim Kaine, and
then he said, “And then there’s that guy in South Bend, Indiana. The mayor. I
think he was a Rhodes Scholar,” he said, and then he couldn’t quite place the
name, or maybe he didn’t dare try to pronounce it. What’s been your relationship
with Barack Obama?
pete buttigieg: You know, I first spent a little time with him when he
travelled to South Bend. He was on his way to Elkhart—Elkhart County, as you
know, the R.V. capital of the country, and something of a bellwether
economically, and went through horrible circumstances in the Great Recession.
And so he was coming toward the end of his Presidency, to take a bit of a
victory lap and remind everybody how successful the auto rescue had been,
because Elkhart was doing great by the end of his term, and they had arranged
for me to spend some time with him in the vehicle as he went from South Bend
airport over to Elkhart—about a half-hour that we got to chat. It’s the only
time in my life I wished that commute would be longer instead of shorter. And
that was the first time, other than a handshake or a photo, that I’d really
visited with him. But really, you know, obviously, I admire him, and really
admired a lot of the people we brought in to work with him.
How do you think his Presidency fell short, if it did, and maybe
led to a Trump Presidency, if it did?
Well, I think his Presidency was very constrained. In a tactical
sense, of course, it was constrained by the partisan makeup of the Congress,
and, I would also argue, by, in many cases, bad faith on the part of the Senate
and House Republicans, who, it turned out, were not very interested in
compromise or in working together. And that also created some constraints that
I would say mattered not in the naïve sense of then making the wrong call but
just literally how far you could go. I mean, for example, if you want to—if you
wish, as I do, that there had been at least a public option as part of the
A.C.A. You got to remember that it was only for a matter of months that he even
had sixty votes in the Senate to work with. So, I think they they went as far
as they could in the direction of progress, given a lot of institutional
constraints. But I think there was an even bigger kind of global constraint
that affected that Presidency, which was that it was still part of a
forty-some-year era that you might call a Reagan consensus, when a conservative
or neoliberal economic worldview really dictated how both Republicans and
Democrats were supposed to behave. So for some of the same reasons that, you know,
a Republican President like Nixon was doing a lot of pretty progressive things
on domestic policy that would have still placed him a little bit on the right
side of the spectrum, as it was in America at the time, the seventies. You
know, Democratic Presidents in my lifetime, Clinton and Obama both, I think,
have been operating in a fundamentally conservative framework, and it’s
something we should remember when we think about the shortcomings of the things
that didn’t happen that we wish would.
Well, you know, you said this very recently, to the Washington Post,
I believe it was: Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he
pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and in our democracy. At least he
didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did. Now,
I know you’ve backtracked a little bit about that latter bit, but you’re saying
something pretty large there. What is it?
Yeah, so, I know that that quotation got circulated a lot. It’s
something I said last year and I think appeared in the profile in January, and
it got circulated, unfortunately, a little bit without context. But the point
I’m making here is that a Presidency like this doesn’t just happen. A figure
like Donald Trump doesn’t just become possible unless there’s a real sense of
brokenness in our political and economic system that makes it possible, not
only for racist and xenophobic appeals to get more traction but also for a lot
of people who have been historically Democratic to vote a different way, almost
as a vote to burn the house down. And, you know, you saw a lot of people—people
aligned with labor, people who had been in the habit of voting Democratic—who
were really angry at the system, or what they perceived the system to be, both
economically and politically. And so, even though pretty much everything the
President said wasn’t true, when he said, for example, you know, that elections
were rigged, in the sense of, you know, busloads of immigrants coming to vote,
obviously, that was false, but it’s not false that elections are rigged, in the
sense that the districts are drawn to where most of their outcomes are decided
in advance and politicians choose their voters, rather than the other way
around. You know, when he said the economy was rigged, obviously, I think it’s
clear to many of us that he’s among the class of people that helped to rig it.
But there was also some truth to that. And so, to the extent that we, the
Democratic Party, in 2016, were perceived as saying that the system was fine—so
he was saying, I’m going to blow up the system, and we were saying, Trust the system.
A lot of people, especially people in industrial Midwestern communities like
mine, didn’t find our message to be convincing because the system really had
let them down, in the sense that, you know, the rising tide rose, just as we
were promised it would, but most of our boats didn’t budge.
As a senior in high school, you wrote an admiring and
award-winning essay on Bernie Sanders, and I wonder if, in the campaign last
time around, you were hoping that Bernie Sanders would edge out Hillary
Clinton.
You know, I supported her at the end of the day in that process. I
do think that a lot of the traction that he got was part of that same instinct,
which was operative among us Democrats as it was in the nation at large, that
there was something really wrong and really ripe for change in the system. So,
in the end, I believe that she was the best prepared to be President. But I do
think that that message got traction for some good reasons.
Do you think he would have won? Do you think he would have beaten
Trump?
I don’t know. I’m certainly struck by the number of people who
seem to think that those were the only two people they would have voted for.
That kind of shows you how kind of a simple nineties account of how ideology
works doesn’t really explain what was going on in the 2016 election.
Now, I’ve got to ask you. You’re two years older than the minimum
to run for President. In the Presidential race, there are at least three
leading candidates who are over seventy, or close to it: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. Are
they too old to be President?
It’s not my place to say, well, why or whether anybody else should
run or not. I do think that there’s a lot of energy and interest in a new
generation putting forward leaders. You know, the consequences for my
generation, of the decisions being made right now, are enormous. I mean, almost
by definition, the longer you’re planning to be here, the more you have at
stake. And when you add to that some of these questions that I think are
questions of intergenerational justice, like, how can you pass a completely
unaffordable trillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthiest? Or, how can you go any
longer without doing anything meaningful about climate change? I think those
have a strong generational angle, and I think, you know, we’ve been a party
that generally has an appetite for new leadership and new faces. One
interesting thing that is not intuitive, because they entered our consciousness
at different ages, but it is true, if you go look it up, is that three of our
last four Presidents—Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Trump—are all almost
precisely the same age. They were all born in the same summer, of, I believe,
’46. And so it does feel like maybe we’re ripe for a watershed moment. But, at
the end of the day, any candidate needs to be able to explain why they should
be supported, not just on the basis of their profile but on the basis of
their message.
Now, I don’t mean to be a wise guy by saying this, but that sounds
like a polite version of a yes to my question, that they are too old, in a
sense, in a substantive way.
You know, I don’t know that I can embrace that. Look, one very
interesting thing, for example, that we saw with the Sanders phenomenon, is
that a lot of younger voters were gravitating toward an older candidate. By the
way, conversely, one thing I’ve learned in my career, beginning when I ran for
mayor, is that a lot of older voters are among the most excited about a younger
candidate. So, you know, I think somebody of any age can deliver a compelling
message. I do think we’re in a generational moment that makes it perhaps more
appealing, or more meaningful, than usual to have somebody stepping forward
from a generation that’s not been represented at the highest levels just yet in
America but is demonstrating leadership across the world. I mean, we’ve, most
recently now, you saw the Prime Minister of New
Zealand, who—I believe she is younger than I would be when I would
take office—who’s one of a number of leaders, Macron is another example, in
France, who is exactly the age, or took office at exactly the age that I would.
And some of these leaders may be better than others. But the world is beginning
to put forward leaders from this new generation, and it’s almost
uncharacteristic that America has been slow to do the same.
The question you’re going to get at every campaign stop, and at
every pain-in-the-neck interviewer like me, is, your experience so far, in
political terms, has been to be the mayor of a modest-size city, South Bend,
Indiana, which is just over a hundred thousand people. Is that adequate experience
to be Commander-in-Chief, President of the United States?
So I get the audacity of somebody in my position talking about the
highest office in the land. Although I think it is no less audacious, and a
little bit obscene, for any mortal to look at that office and think that they
belong there and that they could just walk in.
Obama used to say you have to be a little bit crazy to think that
you can run for that office.
Of course, or to think that you could do it. And yet every one of
the forty-five people we’ve put in there has been a human being with a certain
set of experiences. I would argue that the set of experiences I have is about
as relevant as it can get without having already been President—you know, to
have the experience of managing everything from infrastructure to economic
development to know, in a very literal sense, what it is to get a 3 a.m. phone call and how to make
decisions. To be managing everything from, you know, a Parks and Recreation
puzzle to the urgent question of how to hold a community together when there is
a racially sensitive officer-involved shooting. From hour to hour, and
sometimes minute to minute, you experience the full range of what’s expected
and required in government leadership. Not to mention the fact that I have more
military experience than I think anybody to go into that office since George H.
W. Bush. You know, it’s a nontraditional model, I get that, for a mayor to go
in this direction. We’re roughly the three hundredth city in rankings by size.
But, I think, if I were the three-hundredth-most senior member of Congress I’m
not sure I’d be getting the same question. Which is odd, because you can be a
very senior member of Congress and have never, in your life, managed more than
a hundred people.
And, in fairness, Barack Obama was a U.S. senator for about ten
minutes before he got the question, Are you going to run for President of the
United States? You referred to a 3 a.m. phone
call. What was that?
Well, sometimes it can be about a violent incident, or a swat team callout. We’ve also
had natural disasters that activate the emergency-operations center of the city
twice over the course of two years, for historic flooding—which, by the way, is
one reason why I view climate change as an issue that’s happening not only in
the Arctic but in the Midwest. And that’s why I view it as a security issue. I
mean, to have had a five-hundred-year flood and a thousand-year flood take
place within eighteen months of each other on my watch, it brings home to me
just how pressing an issue like that is, but also teaches you about everything
from incident command to big-picture policy.
Now, you talk a lot about the concept of intergenerational
justice. What exactly does that mean, in practice and on a policy level?
Well, again, climate is a very pressing example of this. I mean,
there will be a reckoning for the costs that have been run up by essentially
discounting the future to the point where you just view it as somebody else’s
problem.
And, unfortunately, the somebody else is us. The somebody else, a
generation that’s alive today, and we’ll be paying the price. So, if we were
properly accounting for the consequences for my generation and those
coming next when it comes to climate, we wouldn’t be having a debate over whether
we could afford to do a carbon tax. We’d be having a debate over how we could
possibly afford to do anything but a major mobilization around this issue. I
also think it’s a lens that maybe could help us navigate the challenging
questions around reparations, which are very much a question, I think, of what
one generation owes to another, and how injustices or choices or inequities
made in one moment in time can be visited upon the heads not just of others
living in that time but of others not yet born.
But what would be your specific policy suggestion on reparations,
an idea that was popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates not long ago, and now we’re
hearing this as a campaign discussion quite a lot, maybe to the surprise of
many people, but not a lot of specifics about it—same with the Green New Deal. There are principles
being, an energy being thrust into the debate, which is fantastic, but a lot of
specifics seem to be missing. So start with reparations.
Well, I think that that’s partly because nobody has it fully
figured out. But we do, I think, increasingly have a consensus that it deserves
to be looked at and taken seriously. It’s one of the reasons why there’s a lot
of traction for a proposal to set up a commission that would try to have a
mature conversation about what this means. One way to look at it—and this is a
framework, not a fully articulated plan—but what I would want to do would be to
look at every inequity in our society that we know is at least partly the
result of intentional, harmful race-based policy.
You don’t have to look that far. For example, there’s a really
important book that came out, I think last year, called “The Color of Law.”
It explains how a lot of the racial segregation taking place in our
neighborhoods that we maybe treat today as de facto actually happened as the
result of very specific and very racist policy choices, going back at least to
the F.D.R. Administration. You would think it would make sense if resources
went into creating that racial inequity that resources would go into reversing
it. Perhaps targeting housing aid in certain ways, by neighborhood, perhaps,
making sure that grant funding available to schools is allocated in a way that
takes into account which school districts are in areas that were deliberately
harmed by intentional, race-based racist policy, or maybe other dimensions that
haven’t really been fully analyzed or mapped out.
But the point is we need to begin to build the capacity to do
this, and, when we do it right, we can also get out of the current framework
that the issue is being talked about, the very reason why, you know, the right,
I think, in a cynical way, is kind of salivating for this to be more of a
campaign issue, which is everybody thinking of it as a check in the mail, which
makes it very hard to come up with a fair explanation for who’s supposed to get
the check and who it’s supposed to come out of.
And what about the Green New Deal? Where are you on that?
So here are the things I think the Green New Deal gets right.
First of all, it correctly positions climate as a major challenge, a
national-security challenge, whose destructive power is on par with that of a
depression or a war. And, therefore, it follows that we need to have a
national-level mobilization to do something about it. The second thing that it
gets right is, in the same way that World War Two is part of what ended the
Great Depression, we can create economic opportunity through that mobilization.
Now, I don’t know that all of these sort of kitchen-sink qualities of the way
it’s sometimes talked about make sense. I’m not sure this is the place to house
some of the policy things I’d like to see us do around health care, or some of
the ideas around a jobs guarantee, for example. But it is the case, and I think
the Green New Deal is correct in this regard, that we need to act incredibly
quickly, at a scale that we’ve not seen in the country, other than other major
mobilizations, to put somebody on the moon or beat the Nazis, for example. And,
if we do it right, there’s a lot of opportunity in having that national
project. Yes, it’s more a set of goals than it is a fully laid-out plan. But,
you know, the rocket trajectories had not been calculated when President
Kennedy said we needed to go to the moon. He united the country around a goal.
Mr. Mayor, the right has very successfully painted the Democratic
Party as the party of the coastal élites. Now, you are the mayor of a
Midwestern city, so you certainly escape that, and you’ve served in the
military, which distinguishes you from just about everybody in the race. But,
at the same time, you have Harvard University, Oxford University, and, an area
where you’ll probably get hit from the left, you worked at McKinsey for a few
years. Why did you work at McKinsey, and what do you make of the reporting
on McKinsey’s work advising Purdue Pharma on how to turbo-charge—their word—OxyContin sales,
and how they counselled dictators worldwide on
how to build more efficient autocracies? Is your work for McKinsey something
that you’re proud of in the rearview mirror?
I’m proud of the work that I did for our clients. I worked on
everything from grocery pricing to renewable energy, and I would not have
worked on a client engagement that I didn’t believe was ethical, as well as
helpful, or at least not problematic in that way. I went to work at McKinsey
because I wanted to understand how the world worked, how people, goods, and
money move around the world, and I wanted that kind of private-sector
experience, and they were willing to take a chance on me even though I didn’t
have an M.B.A., and teach me what I needed to know about business. It was a
phenomenal learning opportunity.
But are you angry at McKinsey for their work on Purdue Pharma, and
with various dictators around the world?
Of course. I mean, my community has been harmed by irresponsible
behavior of corporations of the opioid industry. And I think it shocks the
conscience anytime that a murderous dictator can rely on the legitimacy of a
Western consulting company, especially the most prestigious company out there,
in order to further their goals. And I think that, you know, this firm needs to
be a lot more selective and a lot more thoughtful in the work that it does. I
mean, client-service firms always have a bit of a tradition of being amoral,
and I think that that flows from the legal industry, where, you know, you don’t
as often, I think, hold it against a firm if, for example, a criminal-defense
attorney at that firm represents a nefarious criminal. But, you know, it is a
little different, and should be, when it comes to consulting. There should be a
higher standard because, while everybody recognizes there is a right to legal
counsel, I’m not convinced that there is any kind of right to
management-consulting services.
When you look at Amazon, Facebook, and Google, do you see them as
monopolies? And if so, should they be broken up?
In some respects, they behave monopolistically, and whenever
they’re using dominance of one market to try to get dominance in another, then
I think that that means they might need to be broken up, or there might need to
be a prevention of a further deal or acquisition. I think the F.T.C. should be empowered
to do that. I also think, though, that we’re having a conflated conversation
that should probably be two different conversations. One is about how big these
companies should become, and some of the harm that comes from that. And it’s
particularly true when you see some of the problems that come with just the
emptying out of small communities that can’t deal with big retailers. That was
just, you know, it’s something we’ve learned to talk about when we’re dealing
with Walmart when it was still brick and mortar, becoming even more of a
challenge when you have someone like Amazon kind of gobbling up the market
share.
But that’s only half of the reason I think we’re concerned about
tech. The other half has to do with data security, and data privacy, and
dealing with the monopoly problem, is neither necessary nor sufficient to deal
with their conduct when it comes to data. It’s why we need a national framework
for data law that establishes the rights we have over the data we create and
the responsibilities that go along with collecting that data. Europe has a
robust, if imperfect, regulatory setup. We have basically fifty regulatory
schemes for fifty states, and we need a national policy on this because, over
time, data will continue to become one of the most valuable things any one of
us generates. Yet, right now, we have very few rights over it.
You’re part of the generation for whom the Internet is absolutely
intrinsic. You’re born into it. How has the Web changed our culture for the
good, and how for the ill? How can it be made less toxic?
Well, I think, you know, it’s changed our relationship to
knowledge, the fact that, increasingly, knowledge is simply at our fingertips
is unbelievably important and empowering. It’s also brought us together in many
ways and created different ways for us to engage. I met my husband through an
app that talks to social-networking sites, and that’s how we were sort of
suggested to each other, and it turned out to be a great match. There’s a lot
of tremendous good that can come, obviously, from the way our relationship, the
information in my lifetime has been transformed. And, of course, a lot of harm.
You know, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg visited South Bend, one of the things
I—
A friend of yours from college, right?
I hadn’t known him in college, but I met him after that, and he
was trying to, he wanted to go to every state in the country, and so I made
sure that I encouraged him to visit South Bend, hoping he would take a look at
our tech sector. But he was interested in criminal-justice reform, and so I
took him to the juvenile-justice facility here. More than one of the
kids—inmates—that we met there told him that they wished that social media
didn’t exist, because it was through a fight or something that started on
social media that their lives had taken a bad turn.
Do you agree? Do you wish that social media didn’t exist?
Well, I can’t wish that, because I wouldn’t be married to my
husband. Look, again, you know, it’s like saying, is text a good or a bad idea?
You know, should we or should we not have images? This is a thing that is so
suffused in everything that we do that of course it can do good and bad. The
question is, what are we going to do about it? And, you know, these solutions
can’t come from the tech companies themselves. I mean, right now, we’re in a
world where anytime a large company, a Facebook or a Google, makes a
corporate-policy decision, they’re actually making a public-policy decision,
because of the power they have and the influence they have. But more than
anything, because the policy world has failed to create the left and right
boundaries they’re supposed to work in—and I’m not sure they want to be dealing
with these things, either. So this is something that needs to be said by
democratic means, not by corporate means. And, you know, the spectacle of tech
executives being quizzed by legislators who make it abundantly clear they don’t
even understand the thing they’re supposed to be regulating basically sets us
up for failure, in terms of how this is supposed to work in our society.
You mentioned your husband. There was recently an article in Slate that
I found actually quite confounding. But let me quote it for you: “Buttigieg,
for instance, would register on only the most finely tuned
gaydar . . . That doesn’t mean he’s not gay enough—there’s
really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the
same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture
would be.” Now, you’re going to get written about every which way till Sunday
in all different directions, and, when you read something like that, what do
you make of it?
Well, I don’t love it. It’s a, um . . . I get it. I
remember some of the same kind of strange conversations happening around the
historic quality of President Obama’s candidacy and the Presidency.
Meaning the critique that he wasn’t really black. That kind of thing.
Yeah, you remember all that kind of stuff about whether his black
experience counted the same as other people’s black experience. I can only
speak to my own experience, and ours, and I’m not interested in getting into a
kind of oppression Olympics over, you know, who has suffered in which ways for
being gay, or any other kind of minority. I am interested in tapping into the
experience that Chasten and I have had as a happy, married couple but also as
people who know what it’s like to be othered, and to hopefully use that as some
basis for solidarity, not only with other members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community
but anybody who, for whatever reason, has experienced exclusion, or wondered
whether they belong. And I think there’s a lot of potential for our experience
to help. I know there is because I talk to people who have been impacted in
some way just by the fact of me getting into the field. And, you know, people
are going to write what they’re going to write. You can’t get too absorbed in
it, or else you lose your mind.
Now, you were not out, at least publicly, until a very few years
ago. As an ambitious person in public service, how did that decision work? Why
the reluctance, if that’s what it was?
Well, I first had to overcome a lot of personal reluctance to just
admitting this simple fact about myself, although I got over that somewhere in
my twenties. Then, once I did, as a friend pointed out the first time I came
out to anyone, you reminded me that I had really made it easy on myself
professionally, because there were two parts to my career then. One of them was
public service in Indiana, and the other one was military service, as an
officer in the Navy Reserve. And so both of those were—one of them by law, one
of them just de facto—both of those were professional choices that were
strictly incompatible with being an out gay person. It was a matter of law that
I could not serve in the military and be out. And it was at least conventional
wisdom that I could either be an elected official in Indiana or I could be out,
but I could not be both. And so, needless to say, that helped motivate me to
drag my feet on coming out.
What changed all that? Well, two things. One, as I grew older, I
realized that I couldn’t go on like that forever. Then the thing that really
put me over the top was the military deployment, where I took a leave from
serving as mayor to go serve overseas. And it just, something about that really
clarified my awareness of the extent to which you only get to live one life and
be one person.
Well, tell me about that deployment. What happened?
Well, part of it was just the exposure to danger, even the fact of
writing the letter that I wrote to my family before I left, just in case.
What did the letter say?
Well, a lot of it was about why I felt that my life, how I felt my
life fit together, and why I didn’t want them to think that I’d been cheated if
I didn’t come back, because I had such a full life up till then, I was
thirty-two, thirty-three. But, at the same time, I realized that there was something
really important that was missing, and I began to feel a little bit humiliated
about the idea that I could, my life could come to an end, and I could be a
visible public official and a grown man and a homeowner and have no idea what
it was like to be in love.
And did you come out to your parents in that letter, to your
family?
No. I did that after after I came back. Pretty soon after I came
back.
So you were deployed to Afghanistan, which is the longest war in
American history. How does that conflict finally end? How should it end? And
how would you assess it?
Well, I think it’s ending. I mean, this is maybe where the debate
needs to go, is not whether it should end but will it end well or badly. And
what does that actually mean? Because one thing that the American left—it seems
now that the American right, the Afghan government, and the Taliban all seem to
want is for us to leave. To me, what success looks like is not to believe that
Afghanistan can become a unified, Western-style democracy with a developed-country
economy just yet. I think success in the American interest is some level of
assurance that it’s not going to be a place that again leads to an attack on
the American homeland. I think the international community has an interest also
in human rights in Afghanistan, and especially the rights of women. And we
should participate in support for that. But in terms of what would motivate
U.S. military . . . continued U.S. military involvement? We’ve
got to be more careful and more serious about the thresholds for us to commit
troops abroad. And, you know, this is a conflict that you can be old enough to
enlist now and have not even been alive on 9/11. When I was leaving, in 2014, I
thought I was one of the last troops there. I was helping to shut down the unit
that I had been part of, or, at least, its presence in my part of the country.
So, you know, to believe that I was part of the tail end of it
five years ago and it’s still going on tells us that we have not succeeded in
figuring out how to get out, and the time has come more than once.
Mr. Mayor, President Trump has consistently labelled China as our
biggest geopolitical foe, particularly on trade. And you represent a town,
South Bend, Indiana, which has suffered major deindustrialization. That was
probably your chief mission, to figure out what to do about that. How do you
feel about the President’s use of tariffs? Surely that’s hit South Bend.
It has, and it’s not been terribly helpful, because we have, in
the South Bend metro area, more companies that use and purchase steel than we
have companies that make it. And various businesses were anxiously watching the
rules come out to figure out whether their particular product did or didn’t
qualify for the different tariffs that are being created. Even our conservative
and normally Trump Alliance member of Congress for this district broke with the
President on the subject of tariffs, because it was not good for our economy.
It also speaks, though, to the broader issue, which is that, you know, most of what
accounts for the changes that have happened to our part of the industrial
Midwest is technological. Some of it has to do with trade, but, look, it’s just
easier to blame another country, or to blame immigrants, than it is to confront
some of the faceless but profound changes that have come our way—to do with,
for example, technology and automation. But that’s simply smoke and mirrors
compared to—if it becomes an excuse to not face the deeper and tougher issue.
I’ll tell you something else about China. You know, I do believe
that China is emerging as a competitor, not just a competitor but, in many
ways, an adversary. And, you know, the Chinese model is also being held up
globally as an alternative power model, and I very much believe in our model
versus theirs. But I will say this. You know, there’s an assembly line that was
part of AM General, which makes Hummers, where they got a contract deal for
three years on what used to be an old commercial line to manufacture Mercedes
R-class vehicles. Now, this is an S.U.V. that is only sold in Asian markets.
And so what you had was American autoworkers—union autoworkers, by the
way—making German cars going to Chinese customers. And when that contract ran
its course, the line was sold to another company, which is Chinese-owned. It’s
a startup based in Silicon Valley, and they make electric vehicles, again,
employing, by the hundreds, American union autoworkers.
Now, you can’t do everything first as a President. What would be
your signature first-priority policy as the holder of that office? What would
you really look at to spend your political capital on right away?
Democratic reform. The condition of our democracy is diminished,
and the worse it gets, the harder it will become for us to fix anything else.
Any of the top issues we care about, of which I think climate is the most
pressing. So, you know, for the rest of my life, our system of government will
be probably inadequate to the moments we face unless we fix it.
And so we’re talking voter suppression, redistricting,
finance . . .
Yeah, I mean, certainly the contents of H.R. 1 would be a good
place to start. We also need to be, I think, considering structural reform. So,
in addition to redistricting and money in politics and voter suppression, I
think we need to look at whether we’re going to continue to allow D.C. not to
be a state. We should look at whether the Supreme Court could be reformed so
that it is less political. And the Senate’s going to have to figure out whether
the filibuster is appropriate to the modern environment. I suspect it is not.
You know, we really need to look at the big questions. And it is entirely
possible that the House of Representatives has the wrong number of
representatives, that the U.S. Supreme Court has the wrong number of Justices,
and that the United States has the wrong number of states.
I think you’re looking at a constitutional convention, aren’t you?
Maybe a convention, maybe a series of amendments, like we had in
the late nineteen-seventies, many of them spearheaded by Indiana senator Birch
Bayh. I mean, this stuff is not crazy out of left field; this is something that
the United States has routinely done in every era except the one that I’m
living in.
But the memories of the court-packing debacle under Franklin
Roosevelt are, at least for historians, pretty fresh. How do you propose
rationalizing increasing the size of the Supreme Court?
Well, it’s not simply about adding to it in order to take it
toward the left because it’s too conservative, even though I do think it is too
conservative. It’s about a structural reform that will make that body less
political. We can’t go on like this, where every vacancy turns into an
apocalyptic ideological battle. So there are many options for reform. I’m not
wedded to one of them, although the one I think is the most attractive—which I
think will be discussed in a forthcoming Yale Law Journal article—would
be to have fifteen members, but only ten of them selected by the traditional
political process, and the other five selected in a process which requires the
other ten to agree unanimously. There are other, perhaps less structurally
complex ideas, like having it become a rotation off the appellate bench. But my
point is, whatever mechanism we choose, we need to make sure that this body—which,
by the way, I think has been restructured something like six times, or at least
had its size changed six times in U.S. history—we need to make sure that we
have a structure that stops this trajectory toward coming to be viewed as a
nakedly political entity.
So this collection of reforms and changes is what you would put
your political capital on far before, say, a green initiative, an environmental
initiative?
The way I would put it is you need to set these democratic reforms
in motion right away. And then I think the top individual policy issue to take
up is climate. But we can’t, I think we’ve for a long time known that some of
these structural problems—you know, the Electoral College is another one—have
diminished our democracy, but we’ve tolerated it because it always felt like
something else was more urgent. What we’re realizing is we are totally
sclerotic in our ability to manage even the most urgent issues. We have eighty
or ninety per cent of Americans believing that we should at least do universal
background checks, but Congress can’t make it happen. When immigration reform,
the most divisive issue of our moment, is actually the subject of an American
consensus, if you look at the popularity of comprehensive immigration reform
along the lines of what once passed in the Senate but couldn’t get through the
House. When you think of our total inability to have a debate over who’s got
the best plan for climate change because folks in Washington are still arguing
over whether there even ought to be a plan. What you see is that the center of
gravity of the American political system is no longer within shooting distance
of the center of gravity of the American people. The longer that goes, the more
twisted and dangerous outcomes you get. I’m worried that this could eventually
lead to the instability that could even cause political violence. And I believe
it’s absolutely helped lead to the Presidency we’re living with now.
It’s extremely early in the race. But you’ve got a lot of energy
on your side, even though it’s a very crowded field. Let’s think ahead to
post-nomination. Let’s say you get the nomination, and you are pitted
against one of the most unpredictable minds, let’s put it this way, and
debaters in the history of American politics. How do you propose to defeat
Donald Trump on a debate stage, and in general? What’s the wrong way to go
about it, and what’s the right way to go about it?
Well, the wrong way to go about it is to be focussed on him and
how to defeat him, to concoct in your mind the masterful zinger that is going
to lay flat on the debate stage, because it just doesn’t work that way. It
doesn’t matter, in some regards, what you say. Any energy or attention,
including critical energy or attention, that comes his way is something that he
absorbs and feeds off of, it becomes bigger Trump. So, if you really want to
defeat him, you have to create an environment where it’s not all about him. If
you’re just thinking up the green line to get him at the debate, you’re setting
up a framework where it’s almost as though he’s the one you’re trying to
impress. What we need to do is quickly, effectively, and flatly correct any
lies that he tells, and confront any bad policies he puts forward, and then
move on.
But the press—look, wait a minute—the press has been correcting
these lies at a rate of thousands every few months, to very little effect, it
would seem sometimes.
Exactly. Because that’s just table stakes. That doesn’t get the
job done. You have to do it because you can’t fail to do it. But that’s not how
you’re going to win. How you are going to win is to put forward something
better, and to remind people that this Presidency is going to come and go, that
it’s not all about him. It’s one of the reasons I talk a lot about my concern
for what the world will look like in 2054, when I come to be the age he is now.
We need to treat this Presidency as a symptom, not a cause. And, you know, even
though it can be mesmerizing, as many grotesque things are, at the end of the
day, pointing out all the ways in which he is terrible does not amount to a
message. A message is something that would make as much sense ten years from
now, or in 2054, as it does today, which means it can’t revolve around the
personality or the deficiencies of the President.
In that context, and not in the spirit of insult but in the
context of learning something, what was the biggest mistake that Hillary
Clinton made in her campaign, or the top three, anyway?
Well, again, I think the biggest problem that we had—and this
wasn’t just tactics on the part of the campaigns, this was also partly a
consequence of the media environment—but the biggest problem was the extent to
which we were regarded as defenders of the system. And so, even though we had
better policies, our policies were perceived as sort of what might be called a
framework-reproducing activity that was going to roughly keep things the same.
And people were so disgusted with the way things had worked out for them that
they wanted to burn the house down. I mean, one way to think about it is, how
do you get a so-called economic-anxiety election when you’re under conditions
of statistical full employment? And why do those appeals, naked appeals,
sometimes, to xenophobia and racism, work on the very same voters who made the
difference for Barack Obama? And all of this adds up to an environment where
anything that looked insider, or anything that looked, frankly, overly
familiar, and certainly anything that looked committed to the way things
currently work in our democracy or our economy was not going to be convincing.
And, look, it’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to point to these
problems. I don’t pretend to have been sitting there at the time waving my arms
saying that we needed to do all these things differently. But the whole point
of hindsight, now that we have it, is that we recognize that we can do some
things differently in 2020. And while there are a number of reasons, many of
them nefarious, why this President won, we also absolutely must recognize that
our strategy in 2016 was not flawless—and, more than that, that it should never
have been close. That, you know, a President like this should never have come
within cheating distance of winning. And yet here we are.
How do you appeal to those millions of voters who voted for Barack
Obama and then voted for Donald Trump? Why did they do that? And how do you
appeal to them?
Around here, some of those same people also voted for Mike Pence
and voted for me. I think it is about making sure that it is not about him or
about us but, rather, about them. In other words, if your message is all about
candidates, whether it’s the candidate you’re for or the candidate you’re
opposing, a lot of voters will say, Nobody’s talking to me. And we need to make
sure that everything we care about is expressed not only in terms of our
highest values but also in terms of everyday outcomes. This is why, in my
opinion, the Affordable Care Act, for example, went from being a toxic
issue for Democrats in 2010 to being the winning issue for Democrats in 2018.
What changed? What actually happened is people could see how it worked for
them. And you saw ordinary Americans at town halls getting in the faces of
members of Congress, describing their own lives and the impact that this policy
had had on them. Because, it turns out, it’s just a lot harder to lie to
somebody about their own life than it is to lie about some mysterious group or
theoretical future. So we need to be more grounded. We need to keep it closer
to the everyday impact—which, by the way, also philosophically ought to be the
way we can justify everything we do. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be doing it.
Mr. Mayor, you had a political decision to make, and it was a
complicated one, whether to run for President, whether to run for governor in
the same year, 2020, or maybe the Senate down the line, in 2022. Why did you
decide to go for the whole ball of wax?
Well, I’m as surprised as anybody. Especially if you were to ask
me two or three years ago to find myself in this situation now. I never
believed in running for an office so that you can run for some other office. I
think the discernment process of running for office has to do with mapping out
two things: one, what the office calls for, and two, what you bring to the
table. I ran for mayor, for example, at a time when there was a crisis of
confidence in the city; it seemed to be bleeding its youth, and there was a lot
of controversy over whether the city was even open for business. And I thought,
I’m a young person who believes in this a city with a business background. I
could do some good here. The process, I think, by the way, has also led me to
not run for office more than once, including some opportunities to run for
Congress. I think the process, ultimately, is about figuring out what’s needed.
And I think what’s needed right now is something completely different. But
still, also having some regard for experience in government, recognizing that,
maybe today, experience in Washington is not the best or only proxy for
meaningful experience in government. Coming from a region that my party seemed
to have lost touch with a little bit. Representing a generation whose time has
come, and offering a message that I think is a little more willing to consider
the structural and profound questions at stake in the tectonic shift in our
country. We’re not just facing another election; we’re facing a period between
two eras in American politics. What I was describing earlier is a sort of
Reagan consensus that explained the behavior of Presidents of both parties for
the last forty years, and whatever is next—and whatever is next could be really
enlightened, and it could be really ugly. But that’s going to be decided in
these years and these decisions. And I find, as much as I admire so many of the
others, I find that I am not like the others. And one of the things that’s
different about my approach is a willingness to consider these bigger
structural questions. Even at risk of sounding a little too bold to be part of
a tradition-laden discussion like that, about the American Presidency. So I
didn’t see an opportunity to make the same kind of profound difference running
for governor or running for Senate. And so, instead, I will either continue
down the path to the Presidency or find some other way to make my myself useful
if voters have a different idea for me.
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