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Of the once and current mayors who’ve been on this year’s presidential campaign trail, why is Pete Buttigieg the one who has fired up the two earliest-voting states?
Within striking distance of dislodging the triumvirate atop the Democratic presidential field, at least in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Mayor of South Bend evinced some distaste last Friday at plumbing President Trump’s unconscious.
“It did bother me when he said he dreams about me,” Pete Buttigieg said, after Trump mentioned at a Pennsylvania rally that he had dreamed about the 37-year-old. “I don’t know exactly what goes on in this president’s dreams, but I’m certain that I want nothing to do with them.” This say-no-more quip turned out to be the high point of the Washington Post Live event for Friday’s predominantly white lunchtime audience.
Here’s a dreamscape to unpack: Of the once and current mayors who’ve been on this year’s presidential campaign trail—Julián Castro, Cory Booker, Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and, yes, Wayne Messam—why is Buttigieg the one who has fired up the two earliest-voting states? In search of an answer, one hoped that Buttigieg’s Obama-esque comportment (a presidential trait that some voters have attributed to him) would be on full display during his interview with the Post’s national political reporter Robert Costa.
But after 45 minutes of listening to an undeniably earnest Buttigieg, his status in Iowa and New Hampshire continues to confound. Is it the up-close-and-personal nature of retail politics in predominantly white Iowa and New Hampshire, where small groups of voters can hear from presidential candidates, that makes the difference—a difference that voters in cities and downtown event spaces in the nation’s capital won’t be able to experience?
Buttigieg was nothing if not on message last Friday. He castigated Trump for his “chest-thumping militarism,” and, as an Afghanistan veteran, pointed to the problem of “policy drift,” which produced a war that defies an end point. His proposal to prevent forever wars, however—a three-year sunset provision on future military involvement that would compel a president to return to Congress for a reauthorization—promises to be as hollow as the War Powers Act stipulation that requires an end to incursions in 60 days without a new grant of authority from Congress. Buttigieg surely knows Congress genuflects to presidents on national security and has largely abandoned any meaningful oversight of executive war powers.
He checked off pressing economic issues, calling for a higher minimum wage, family leave, expanding health care, having the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes—issues popular with most voters, not just Democrats. “We need to galvanize, not polarize,” he said.
But if the question is how to galvanize voters, the answer can’t be found in South Carolina, the Achilles’ heel of the Buttigieg campaign. A December YouGov/FairVote poll found that 56 percent of African American South Carolina voters surveyed support Joe Biden, with 26 percent of whites supporting him. Buttigieg comes in second with white voters at about 20 percent.
And how does the mayor do among blacks in this latest poll? Abysmally: 1.3 percent of black voters support Buttigieg.
Buttigieg mentioned his visit to Allendale, South Carolina, a predominantly black community that hadn’t been visited by a presidential candidate in more than a decade, where black women, he said, are “at the forefront” of the local party apparatus. (Black men did not merit a comparable shout-out.)
But he left out the part of the story where Willa Jennings, the Democratic Party's county chairwoman, asked him, “I hear a lot about how you don’t have support from African Americans; I just want to know why.” Buttigieg didn’t have much to say about “the why,” according to a Charleston Post and Courier report, beyond delivering his familiar platitudes about “earning trust” to counteract the phenomenon of Democrats who only come around before elections. State Senator Marlon Kimpson later told the newspaper that Buttigieg would have to talk more about his record as mayor.
At the Post, Buttigieg did discuss his creation of an “office of diversity inclusion” in South Bend and his ordering of an audit of the black businesses in the city of 100,000, in part to help minority entrepreneurs secure more city contracts. (He seemed confident that the federal government could boost its contracting with minority businesses to 25 percent. In 2017, about 10 percent of federal contracts went to minority businesses.) But this was scarcely the type of accomplishment that a black voter in search of a Democratic candidate looks for in a serious presidential contender.
The Post followed up his appearance at the paper with a front-page report headlined “Inside Pete Buttigieg’s Years-Long, and Often Clumsy, Quest to Understand the Black Experience,” a set of mini-profiles of his relationships with black Americans. The piece included the reminiscences of his television journalist internship mentor in Chicago who explained to the dubious youth how white privilege worked after a security guard let Buttigieg enter a building after denying entry to the black journalist and her black videographer.
He saw how whites treated his Harvard roommate of Nigerian descent in the wealthy white Maryland suburb where he lived. Two South Bend city councilors marveled at his inability to grasp racial issues and the cultural dynamics of South Bend.
It’s a curious catalog of stories about a man who has had a fair number of significant interactions with black people. He’s been repeatedly castigated for cluelessness about white privilege. Yet the episodes of his racial naïveté about issues like school segregation continue to pile up, a situation that an exquisite education and acquaintance with the works of Toni Morrison can’t gloss over. These gaffes raise more questions about his ability to treat black voters as little more than a real-world data set of problems to be solved.
In the universe of American officeholders, mayors are perhaps the best situated to understand the everyday realities and needs of average Americans, existing as they do between communities of people who require public services and the city politics and bureaucracies that can dial up tensions and get in the way. Of the mayors on the campaign trail, Castro and Booker seem to understand the perils of the current moment, have more experience, and have displayed more demonstrable passion than Buttigieg, yet they lag far behind the South Bend mayor in political popularity contests.
Though there is more than a glimmer of Barack Obama’s professorial mien in Pete Buttigieg, there is scarcely a flicker of the former president’s charisma or his infectious ease with people. Buttigieg is in need of a moment akin to Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech on race that he delivered after being pressed to defend his relationship with the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright. There’s also his inexperience, born of his troubling tenure as leader of a mid-sized city. Obama’s inexperience blinded him to the perils posed by Mitch McConnell. Trump’s inexperience and unfitness for the office have catapulted the country into a very dark place.
The mayor did not linger long after his Post interview and did not display anything approaching Elizabeth Warren’s “everybody gets a selfie” PR zeal. His response to how he would heal the serious wounds Donald Trump has inflicted on the country (or the world) is to tell us he’d be a “president of all of us.” For now, however, it’s not even clear how this unseasoned candidate could be a president for some of us. Voters should be wary of sending another amateur to the White House.
