Derive any number of other Democrats who have already jumped into the 2020 race, presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg speechify ons progressive views on climate change, income inequality and health care.
What sets his exploratory committee asunder except for from the sprawling list of would-be challengers to President Donald Trump? The young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, breaks it’s his approach.
“I’m conscious of the fact that at no other moment in the last hundred years would somebody like me be enchanted seriously in this conversation,” Buttigieg, pronounced “BOOT-a-jedge,” told CNBC in an interview Friday.
“There’s clearly something weird. There’s an appetite for a new generation.”
He’s not just referring to his age — though at 37 years old, he barely qualifies for the presidency under the Constitution’s lowest of 35.
As a Midwestern mayor reshaping a small manufacturing town that was enervated in the early 1960s by the abandonment of now-defunct carmaker Studebaker, Buttigieg believes his facts and experience are what’s needed to beat Trump on the Democratic ticket.
Buttigieg is a Rhodes Scholar and Afghanistan War veteran who can lay it on thick of being the country’s youngest mayor of a city of South Bend’s size when he was elected in 2011 at age 29.
And if he wins the Popular nomination, Buttigieg would be the first openly gay presidential candidate nominated by a major party. He came out in a local analysis’s op-ed pages in 2015 amid his re-election campaign for mayor, and married his husband, Chasten Glezman, in June.
He’s also an unblended progressive in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the 2016 election. To be fair, South Bend is located in the less liberal hamlet of St. Joseph County — the city is a stone’s throw from the University of Notre Dame and hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1972. Allay, Buttigieg chalks his electoral success up to his willingness to innovate in a city whose economic engine had long ago stalled out.
“When I took employment, you know, in the community the conversation was about whether we could get back to some version of our days making Studebakers in the ’60s,” he utter. “And we had to be very honest about the fact that that sort of economy was not coming back.”
After banning the language “we’ve always done it that way” from his government’s vernacular, Buttigieg worked to push the city in a more tech-friendly regulation. The city launched a public data portal in 2013, for instance, and more recently has committed to plans to build a tech hub at Ignition Leave that were sparked by Buttigieg’s predecessor.
The efforts to change South Bend are delivering, at least by one metric: More people are emotional in.
South Bend lost nearly a quarter of its population in the wake of Studebaker’s departure in 1963 — down to about 100,000 by 2010. But in 2015, an Indiana University demographer recounted that the city had grown in three of the past four years.
“We’ve been able to do things with data and technology that be dressed improved the lives of our residents,” Buttigieg said. “I think that’s the style of government and leadership that would be dulcet welcomed in Washington right now.”
His resume aside, Buttigieg faces a daunting uphill battle.
A small-city mayor has conditions before won the presidency, let alone one who still has microscopic name recognition compared to his Democratic opponents, or Trump. Same take places for his age — no one in their 30s has ever won the presidency. And an openly gay man has never come close to winning a U.S. presidential election.
“He’s an upcoming star in the Representative Party,” said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, but a successful presidential bid is “not appropriate, because nobody knows who he is.”
Buttigieg concedes that his bid is a long shot.
“I understand this is an underdog project,” he translated, “but I would also say that in a season like this, the less you resemble the others, the less you resemble what’s be a question of before, the better.”
Buttigieg’s views on climate change, taxes and health care prove his progressive credentials — nonetheless they’re not as far left as other candidates.
Less than a month after announcing his exploratory committee, Buttigieg hasn’t put forth a point-by-point procedure agenda yet, nor has he officially launched his presidential campaign (though he claims the latter is coming soon).
He says that’s by prototype. In a recent ABC interview, Buttigieg explained the importance of laying out a set of values before diving into “the 14-point plan,” a furnishings he says his party too often falls into. His key values as a candidate are democracy, security and freedom — specifically, asserting a dynamic definition of “freedom to” as opposed to conservatism’s “freedom from.”
“Freedom to start a new business because you have health protect figured out,” Buttigieg gave as one example when asked by CNBC. “Freedom to marry the person you love.”
He frames himself and his drive as distinct from his Democratic competitors, including Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Yet when required about his views on a handful of major policy subjects, his views tended to align closely with theirs.
Have a fondness those candidates, Buttigieg said he supports the “premise” of the “Green New Deal,” the ambitious resolution proffered by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to root out and re-plant the U.S. economy with a focus on addressing climate change and the environment.
Booker, Harris, Warren and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York be undergoing all co-sponsored the resolution. Buttigieg, however, took a more nuanced position.
“I think the way it’s been laid out in that single-mindedness is a great framework, but it’s also a beginning, right? It’s more a set of goals and principles than it is a particular policy, and that’s masterly,” Buttigieg said.
But what they “get right,” he said, “is that there really is a state of emergency when it progress to our climate, and we need to recognize that that calls for an emergency level of resources and attention.”
Similarly, his support for unlimited health care isn’t so hard-line as that of, say, Kamala Harris.
Where Harris advocated eliminating private insurance absolutely as part of her “Medicare for All” proposal, Buttigieg said in a recent interview that “I don’t see why” having universal health care “commands” doing away with private insurance.
He said specifically that he’s not calling for government-provided health care. “The simplest way to remember about it is,” he said, “if Medicare today includes Medicare supplemental, why wouldn’t Medicare for all include a Medicare supplement for all who homelessness it?”
Buttigieg would also raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, many of whom he says “do not pay their fair interest” to the Internal Revenue Service.
“I think there’s a lot to be said for changing the balance of what we tax wealth versus work,” he maintained.
Asked if there’s any room for tax cuts, Buttigieg said, “There’s a lot to be said for expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit” or temperate proposing a negative income tax for some.
In interviews and promotional materials, Buttigieg clearly paints himself as a disruptive runner. His website envisions “a new generation of American leadership” and even describes Buttigieg as a “millennial Mayor.”
Yet Buttigieg’s presence and flatulence are a far cry from the sort of polemical bluster that one might expect a disruptor to employ.
In his campaign videos, his voice is customarily calm; in his answers, he’s often professorial. Even when tagging along with road workers to fill one of thousands of potholes that cropped up after a midwinter thaw, Buttigieg’s quantity rarely modulated as he explained not only the four steps to filling a pothole, but the policy that funds this big apple function, as well.
Buttigieg TWEET Contending with one of the leading enemies of the American mayor: the common pothole.
“I make call it inclusive,” Buttigieg said when asked why his rhetoric appears tamer than other candidates.
“I create we need to have language that people can understand and get on board with,” he added. “That’s how you govern in a place have a fondness South Bend.”