The General US Politics Thread

If you know only one thing about Pete Buttigieg, it’s that he’s The Small-Town Mayor Who Is Making A Splash. If you know half a dozen things about Pete Buttigieg, it’s that he’s also young, gay, a Rhodes Scholar, an Arabic-speaking polyglot, and an Afghanistan veteran. If you know anything more than that about Pete Buttigieg, you probably live in South Bend, Indiana. This is a little strange: These are all facts about him, but they don’t tell us much about what he believes or what he advocates. The nationwide attention to Buttigieg seems more to be due to “the fact that he is a highly-credentialed Rust Belt mayor” rather than “what he has actually said and done.” He’s a gay millennial from Indiana, yes. But should he be President of the United States?

When he is asked about what his actual policies are, Buttigieg has often been evasive. He has mentioned getting rid of the electoral college and expanding the Supreme Court, but his speech is often abstract.

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Here is one thing I keep noticing about Pete Buttigieg: When asked why he wants to hold an office, he talks much more about who he is than what he will do. Here’s his passage explaining why he wanted to be the mayor:

“The reason to run—the ideal reason to seek any job—was clear: the city’s needs matched what I had to offer. The city was fearful of losing its educated youth, and I was a young person who had chosen to come home and could encourage others to do the same. Its politics were mired in the struggle between two factions of the Democratic Party, each with its own candidate in the race; I belonged to no faction, and could arrive without strings attached. … This didn’t just feel like an opportunity; it felt like a calling.”

The city feared losing its youth and I was young. It was mired in factional struggle, and I was a person of no commitments. It was as if I was called by Destiny herself!

Here’s another remarkable thing you’ll notice throughout Shortest Way Home: When Pete Buttigieg reports having meetings with people, it’s usually party bosses and advisers rather than ordinary voters, around whom he often seems uncomfortable. In a city that is ¼ Black, the most visible encounter he has with a Black constituent is an extremely telling one:

“A big man who was also a deacon at Mount Carmel, the fastest-growing black church in town, he leaned back in his seat and shifted between knowing glances at his fellow firefighters and piercing stares at us. He seemed interested but skeptical. ‘I like what I’m seeing, and I like what you’re saying. But how do I know you’re not just another sweet-talking devil trying to get my pants off?’

It was hard to think of a good answer to that, so I kept on with the pitch. ‘I don’t know about that, but you’ll be able to hold me accountable for what we achieve from day one…’ You could never be sure, but I felt our case was convincing…”

The fireman gets it: Pete is a skilled rhetorician trying to get people’s pants off. How do you know the fireman is right? Because Pete can’t even think of an answer to this extremely simple question. If someone asks you “How do I know you’re not just some bullshitter?” and you’re not just some bullshitter, you can say “Because I have done X, Y, and Z. I have shown that I’m a person of my word. I have clear plans, and I can tell you why they’ll work, how they’ll help you, and exactly what I’m going to do to make sure they come about.” If, on the other hand, you are just some bullshitter, and your entire life experience up to this point has been going to Harvard and working for one of the world’s worst companies, you will flounder. You have no plans, no ideas, you have no record of good deeds and community service. He’s got you figured, and all you can do is “keep on with your pitch” and stammer the word “accountability.”

Buttigieg speaks of turning Indiana into a “Silicon Prairie,” filling the “once-moribund Studebaker corridor with data centers and start-ups.” He is giddy about the prospect of using “machine learning,” “big data,” and “artificial intelligence” in city government. Buttigieg talks about changing the town-gown dynamic between Notre Dame and South Bend. Usually when people talk about “town and gown” they refer to a class divide between the professional university and its working-class environs. To Buttigieg, however, it means creating “College Town 2.0,” a situation in which the college would share its talents with the city. He cites examples of Notre Dame students creating a micro-lending nonprofit for the community, and a student group presenting a slideshow on neuroplasticity to a group of recently-released ex-offenders.“This could be the future of what it means to be a college town,” he says.

Alright, so Buttigieg sounds like a bit of a Silicon Valley “growth is everything,” “we can make an app for that” kind of guy. So what? Well, so, I didn’t realize the whole way through Shortest Way Home that South Bend actually has a serious poverty problem! Over ¼ of its residents are poor. It’s not just that Buttigieg is interested in hooking the sewers up to wi-fi. (I’m a “sewer socialist,” I like progressive wastewater management.) It’s that he spends zero time in the book discussing the economic struggles of the residents of his city!

Did you know there’s a giant racial wealth gap in South Bend? You won’t if all you read about South Bend is Shortest Way Home. Oh sure, he takes us on an ambling tour through the city, shows us people kayaking on the old industrial canal, wanders under the railroad bridge, takes us to see live music in an abandoned swimming pool. He tells us about twilight on the river, the fish-stealing heron on his running route (“To some he is a villain… but to me he is an elegant bird.”) But have a look at Prosperity Now’s “Racial Wealth Divide in South Bend” report and see if you think these should really be the mayor’s narrative priorities.

South Bend African Americans make ½ of what South Bend whites make. They’re twice as likely to be in liquid asset poverty as whites. Their unemployment rate is nearly twice as high. Moreover:

“The median African American household income level in South Bend is $14,000 lower than African American national average and they hold an income poverty rate of 40.2%, which is almost two times higher than the country average for African Americans.”

As the report makes clear, the situation for Hispanic residents of South Bend is similarly disturbing.

What did Mayor Pete do about this? Well, to do something about it he might have had to care about it, and there’s no evidence from his book that he’s ever even thought about it. In fact, as I started reading about South Bend after getting through Shortest Way Home, there was a lot Buttigieg had left out. The eviction rate has been nearly three times the national average, a “crisis” among the worst in the country. If the word “eviction” appears in Buttigieg’s book, I did not notice it. The opiate crisis, homelessness, and gentrification are all serious issues in South Bend, but Buttigieg mentions them offhandedly if at all.

All of this made me go back and rethink one of Buttigieg’s proudest stories. Every time the media talks about Buttigieg, if they mention anything other than his résumé, it’s his signature initiative to deal with “blight.” Buttigieg says that when he took office, there were “too many houses,” that the main complain he received from residents was about the proliferation of vacant homes. His major policy goal, then, was to “repair or demolish” 1,000 homes in 1,000 days, a number his staff thought impossible. The council president called this an initiative to “right-size the city” (“right-size” is a euphemism from the business world used to make layoffs sound like the simple reasonableness of a corporate Goldilocks). Thanks to his diligent, Mc Kinsey-esque management, Buttigieg blew past the goal.

But news coverage of the plan makes it sound a little less savory:

“By leveling fees and fines, the city leaned on homeowners to make repairs or have their houses demolished. In many cases, Buttigieg said, the homeowners proved impossible to find amid a string of active and inactive investment companies. In other cases, he said, they were unwilling or unable to make repairs.”

Make repairs or have your house flattened? Wait, who were these people who were “unable” to make repairs? Were they, by chance, poor? Also, how did these houses become vacant in the first place? Were people evicted or foreclosed on? Look a little deeper into the coverage and you’ll find that this was not simply a matter of “efficient and responsive government,” but a plan to coerce those who possessed dilapidated houses into either spending money or having the houses cleared away for development:

Community advocates in poorer, often African-American or Hispanic neighborhoods began to complain that the city was being too aggressive in fining property owners over code enforcement. The city leveled fines that added up to thousands of dollars, in certain cases, to pressure homeowners to make repairs or have their houses demolished.

Buttigieg’s autobiography does not discuss the social implications of his plan. He brags about his “audacious goals” and “ambitious initiatives,” but questions of justice and injustice are absent.

And there are issues of justice in South Bend. In places, gentrification is apparently “gobbling up more of the smaller more middle class and more black parts of the neighborhood.” Last winter the city’s inaction on homelessness left “the chronically homeless to camp in the woods as temperatures drop[ped],” and activists say Buttigieg’s “leadership has fallen short on homelessness.” (Buttigieg declined to appoint a homelessness czar.) A charter school company (“Success Virtual Learning Centers”) is trying to introduce one of those most hellish of things, the “online charter school” where students sit in a bare room all day being taught by a laptop instead of a teacher. The school-to-prison pipeline is a serious problem, with black boys being suspended and kicked out of school. But community activists aren’t characters in Shortest Way Home, and you won’t hear about the actions of groups like Community Action For Education.

You will, however, hear a very weird story about the “police tapes.” In the book, Buttigieg defends himself from accusations in a scandal I’d never heard about. He talks about having to fire the city’s much-respected African American police chief, after the the chief was investigated for allegedly blackmailing five white officers with illegally recorded tapes of them. It’s a complicated scandal, and I’m not quite sure I understand it, but there were apparently allegations that the tapes contained racial slurs, and at one point community activists were demanding that Buttigieg be impeached after he refused to release the tapes or disclose their contents. A portion of the book is dedicated to Buttigieg’s insistence that he exercised sound judgment and that this should not be held against him.

Instead, Buttigieg wants us to focus on his legacy, like “addressing a thousand vacant homes, staging for the 150th anniversary celebration of the city, and redesigning the two major arteries in our downtown streetscape.” He imagines traveling back in time to the bustling industrial South Bend of the Studebaker years, thinking about what they were missing out on and what they’d be impressed by if they saw his new, improved South Bend with lower unemployment and impressive rates of growth:

“Those shopping there would never know the simple pleasure of a taco de chorizo, a chicken pad thai, or a California roll—all now taking their place alongside cheeseburgers and goulash as part of South Bend’s twenty-first-century menu. … They would surely appreciate the sewer sensor system, the 311 system, the law enforcement technology.”

(Yes, if the African American residents of South Bend who came north during the Great Migration could be transported from the 1940s to today, I’m sure they would marvel at the California rolls and law enforcement technology, rather than sighing about the persistence of the income gap.)

Mayors can’t solve all problems. What’s disturbing about Buttigieg is that he doesn’t even seem very interested in the problems at all. Someone should ask him: Why does his book spend less time talking about poverty than about the time he played Rhapsody in Blue on the piano with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra? (“Technique sometimes took precedence over expressiveness” was the review of Buttigieg’s performance in the local paper, which sounds fitting.)