# Pete Buttigieg Says He’s More Than a Résumé
By [The Editorial
Board](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/opinion/editorialboard.html)Jan.
16, 2020
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* * _306_
Mr. Buttigieg interviews for The New York Times’s endorsement.
Former mayor of South Bend, Ind.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed
by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding
##### It can be hard to remember that Pete Buttigieg is just 37 — his deep
baritone and evenness of tone can often seem like a mismatch with his relative
youth among the Democratic field.
Mr. Buttigieg projected steadiness and
thoroughness as he faced questions [[Related: What Is an Editorial
Board?](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/reader-center/editorial-board-
explainer.html)] about his consulting work at McKinsey & Company, his service
in Afghanistan, his faith and his challenges in attracting support from
minorities and younger voters, despite being the youngest candidate in the
contest.
He bristled at suggestions that his McKinsey work involved bread
price fixing in Canada and claimed ignorance of the “Mayo Pete” memes popular
on the internet among millennials.
(“I get the white part,” he said.)
##### Here is a transcript, with annotations in blue, of the 80-minute
discussion, which was filmed for [a special episode of “The
Weekly,”](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/the-weekly/democratic-
endorsement-2020.html) The Times’s TV show on FX and Hulu.
The transcript is
unedited.
[Related: Learn more about [“The
Choice,”](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/13/opinion/election-
nytimes-the-choice.html) and meet [the editorial board
members](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/opinion/editorialboard.html)]
Well, thanks for having me over.
**Kathleen Kingsbury:** **Thank you for coming.
So, we have heard you
obviously talk about health care and climate and the Middle East a lot in the
debates, so we’re going to try to ask you some questions we haven’t heard you
answer in the past, and you will be shocked to hear that we’d like to start
with your time at McKinsey.** _ **You graduated from Oxford with sterling
credentials.
You could have pursued any number of career paths from there,
including the choice you ultimately made to join the military.**_ **Can you
walk us through why you decided to go to McKinsey from there?**
> The week of Mr. Buttigieg’s interview, he had just released his client list
from his tenure at McKinsey.
When he began his mayoral campaign in South Bend,
he leaned heavily on his McKinsey credentials.
In a campaign speech, he
[said](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pete-buttigieg-once-boasted-he-
helped-mckinsey-turn-around-fortune-500-companies-not-
anymore/2019/12/27/032888b4-2347-11ea-bed5-880264cc91a9_story.html): “I am the
only candidate with experience working on billion-dollar decisions, helping to
turn around major companies around the country and around the world.”
Yeah, so the biggest thing was that I had a great academic education, but I
was beginning to feel that there wasn’t as much real-world experience mixed in
with it.
That in particular, I was eager to do as many things as I could,
touching as many fields as I could, and to understand business in particular,
about how people and money and goods move around the world and how that works.
**KK:** _**So you didn’t just want to make a lot of money?**_
> A typical starting salary for analysts at McKinsey is now roughly $85,000
before annual bonuses.
What’s that?
**KK:** **You didn’t just want to make a lot of money?**
_I definitely noticed the paycheck and that was important, too._ I needed to
make a living.
Yeah.
I’m not going to pretend that that wasn’t on my mind,
too.
> Mr. Buttigieg [said](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12
/pete-buttigieg-mckinsey/603421/) he lived off his savings from McKinsey
during his first two runs for office.
**Binyamin Appelbaum:** **We’d like to talk about some of those real-world
experiences.** _ **So one of the companies you worked for, Blue Cross Blue
Shield of Michigan, you said that you were analyzing costs there, and after
you completed that project, the company moved ahead with hundreds of layoffs
and rate increases.**_ **Did you understand that what you were doing as a
McKinsey consultant at that company that you were working to prepare for
layoffs and price increases?**
> Blue Cross Blue Shield was Mr. Buttigieg’s first assignment at McKinsey.
He
worked there for three months in 2007.
After he left, the company cut as many
as 1,000 jobs, or nearly 10 percent of its work force, according to [The
Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-mckinsey-
clients.html).
I had nothing to do with premiums, prices, fees or anything like that.
Mostly
what my team was looking at was overhead.
There’s no way to know the
relationship between analysis _I did in 2007 and decisions they made in 2009,_
but certainly our focus was making sure that cost was under control there.
> Blue Cross Blue Shield announced its layoffs in January 2009, after the
company reported a loss of about $140 million.
The company also announced that
it would freeze pay for nonunion workers and cut 25 percent of discretionary
spending.
Tune in Jan. 19 for a special endorsement episode of [“The
Weekly”](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/the-weekly/democratic-
endorsement-2020.html) FX 10 P.M.
Hulu 11 P.M.
This video excerpt has been edited by “The Weekly.”
**BA:** **You surely understood why a company like that would hire McKinsey to
come in.
Yeah?**
How do you mean?
**BA:** **When companies hire consultants, they’re usually trying to reduce
their costs, right?**
_I think that’s the only cost-cutting study I did out of all my time at
McKinsey, so I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that that’s what most
consulting work is._
> One of Mr. Buttigieg’s McKinsey clients was the Postal Service, which called
in McKinsey to address widening revenue losses.
In a 2010 report, McKinsey
recommended cost cutting by, among other things, replacing unionized career
employees with a “more flexible” work force.
Read the report
[here](https://about.usps.com/future-postal-service/mckinsey-usps-future-bus-
model2.pdf).
**BA:** **So it surprised you when that resulted in layoffs and price
increases cases.** _ **That didn’t seem like what you would’ve done if you had
had that information.**_
> Over time, Mr. Buttigieg has distanced himself from the work he did at
McKinsey.
When he was running for Indiana state treasurer in 2010, it was a
[key part](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/pete-
buttigieg-mckinsey/603421/) of his campaign pitch.
I wasn’t following news out of Michigan in 2009, so I found that out since,
but yeah, I’m not surprised.
I mean, if an organization needs to cut costs,
then that can involve layoffs.
**BA:** _**Another of your clients, Loblaws, the grocery chain, has since said
that it was involved in the price fixing of bread during the time that you
were analyzing grocery prices for them.**_ **I’m curious first, just, did you
analyze the price of bread for them?
Is that part of your agreement?**
> In December 2017, Loblaws admitted to participating in a more than 14-year-
long scheme to inflate the price of packaged bread.
The
[revelation](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/loblaw-parent-
company-alerted-competition-watchdog-to-bread-price-fixing/article37387816/)
came from a Competition Bureau criminal investigation into the country’s bread
price-fixing.
Not in any detail.
_Basically the way my job worked was, they have about
50,000 items that they sold and I was creating and then crunching a database._
What we would do is we would figure out, based on a year’s worth of sales, if
they tried to cut a certain percent off their prices across a certain number
of hundreds of stores, what would the impact of that be?
So, bread was
probably one of the U.P.C.
codes in there, but I didn’t pay attention to one
product over another.
> Mr. Buttigieg was
[tasked](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/pete-buttigieg-
mckinsey/603421/) with building an analysis that could help the company cut
its prices without hurting the bottom line.
**BA:** **When you were working at McKinsey, did you understand the company’s
purpose to be exclusively maximizing its own profitability?
Did you understand
the purpose of the companies you worked for to be exclusively to maximize
their profitability?**
Well, many of my clients as, you know, were public sector and nonprofits, so
obviously their function is not about profitability.
But yes, I worked for a
company, a for-profit _company._
> Two-thirds of Mr. Buttigieg’s clients at McKinsey were nonprofit or public
sector, [including](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/pete-
buttigieg-mckinsey/603421/) the Energy Foundation, the Natural Resources
Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of
Energy, the Postal Service and the Department of Defense.
**BA:** **Do you think that that should be the sole mission of a corporation,
though, to maximize profitability?**
Well, I think that there’s something to be said for the dialogue that’s
happening with, for example, what’s going on in the Business Roundtable, but
also this is where policy needs to come _in._ We can’t expect corporate
America to spontaneously change what it is about, without imposing different
kinds of left and right boundaries.
> In August, the Business Roundtable, a lobbying organization that represents
many of the country’s largest companies, issued a statement redefining the
purpose of a corporation.
In addition to advancing the interests of
shareholders, the group said, companies must also protect the environment,
invest in employees and commit to ethical engagement with suppliers.
Read the
statement [here](https://opportunity.businessroundtable.org/ourcommitment/).
To me, where the public sector and the function of regulation meets what
private companies do is precisely to set up those kinds of boundaries.
I
welcome any time a company undertakes what is called corporate social
responsibility, charitable activity or other factors in what they care about.
_I have been very interested to see the development of things like a B Corps,
which has been a big conversation, especially around South Bend actually.
Because one of the pioneering ones was a company called Better World Books
that grew kind of up and around Notre Dame._ But I also don’t think we should
be naïve about how corporations behave unless they are regulated to ensure
that their profit-seeking activities don’t cause harm.
> B Corporations are companies certified for meeting high social, ethical and
environmental standards.
Better World Books, an online bookseller, became a
founding B Corp in 2007.
B Corps are certified by a nonprofit called B Lab.
There are now more than 3,000 such businesses.
**KK:** **In your view, if a company engages in criminal conduct, are the
employees responsible for that conduct?**
Well, obviously there’s a whole theory in law about how liability works, but
yeah, if somebody undertakes illegal behavior, they are as a general rule
liable and should be.
**BA:** **But bring that down to the practical level then: If you’re working
for a consultant to a company that’s engaged in a massive price-fixing scheme,
what’s your responsibility?**
Well, if you have anything to do with any wrongdoing, then you’re responsible.
**BA: You have criticized some of McKinsey’s more recent engagements with
clients.
Do you think that something fundamental has changed about the company
since you** _ **left?**_
> In December, [ProPublica and The
Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/mckinsey-ICE-immigration.html)
reported that McKinsey consultants had recommended in 2017 that Immigrations
and Customs Enforcement cut spending on food and medical care for detained
migrants.
When asked about the reporting at a campaign event, Mr. Buttigieg
[said](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-
mckinsey.html): “The decision to do what was reported yesterday in The Times
is disgusting.
And as somebody who left the firm a decade ago, seeing what
certain people in that firm have decided to do is extremely frustrating and
extremely disappointing.”
It’s difficult from the outside looking in to gauge whether this reflects some
kind of systemic shift or whether they just have a failure in terms of their
guardrails.
When I was there, there was a lot of talk about values.
Firm
values.
Now, a lot of that was around impact and making sure that you put the
client’s interest first.
_There’s one story that they were proud of that I
remember was part of our training.
Where they had gotten some big contract to
help a large multinational move into China, and it was going to lead to tons
of work.
But in the initial analysis, while they were doing their first round
of work, the conclusion they reached was that this company shouldn’t go to
China at all._ So, the story, at least the story as it was told within the
firm, was that they gave the right advice, even though it cost them, right?
So, you would hear a lot about a certain kind of ethic, but it was always
about putting the client’s interest first.
> McKinsey’s work with Chinese state-owned companies has recently come under
fire.
The firm has advised at least 22 of the 100 largest state-owned
companies in China.
Times reporting revealed that one of McKinsey’s Chinese
clients helped build China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea.
This
was after Mr. Buttigieg left the firm.
Read The Times report
[here](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china-
russia.html).
What you didn’t hear as much was about whether what the client was doing had
moral consequences that the firm didn’t want to touch.
I believe I remember a
decision not to serve tobacco had been made by the time I was there.
But my
point is, there seems to be a problem there with assessing what they want to
be associated with.
_Definitely with the ICE work, with the Saudi work, where
you just say, this is a company that’s good at helping clients meet
objectives._ But some of those objectives are not something we want anything
to do with, and I think they need to step back and reassess what kind of
client work they should take on in the first place.
> McKinsey [worked](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-
china-russia.html) with the Saudi Arabian government to analyze public opinion
on the monarchy’s most important policies.
The firm singled out three people
who drove anti-government conversation on Twitter;
one was subsequently
arrested.
**KK:** **So you have portrayed a lot of the work that you did for McKinsey,
like many analysts and junior staffers starting out in consulting, as mainly
crunching data and making PowerPoint presentations and shuffling paper, more
or less.** _ **Of course, there are also junior consultants and contractors
who go to do government work, like Edward Snowden and Reality Winner, who see
something that they think is wrong and decide to speak up.**_ **Can you tell
us your opinion of Mr. Snowden and Ms.
Winner’s actions?**
> Mr. Snowden is a former subcontractor with the National Security Agency who
leaked information about the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities in 2013.
[Reality Winner](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/us/reality-winner-nsa-
sentence.html) is a former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor who
leaked a government report about Russian hacking.
She was sentenced to five
years and three months in federal prison, the longest sentence ever imposed
for leaking government information to the media.
Well, I think that we ought to have whistle-blower protections so that folks
like that are not forced to choose between maintaining classified information
and speaking up about wrongdoing.
It may well be the case that we’re seeing
the whistle-blower concept work in the way in which the current Ukraine
process and investigation came about.
**KK:** _**So you think of Edward Snowden as a whistle-blower?**_
> Under President Obama, White House press secretary Josh Earnest
[said](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/edward-snowden-not-
whistleblower-earnest-228163) that Mr. Snowden “is not a whistle-blower”
because he did not follow established protocol for releasing confidential
information.
Not necessarily.
I think he could have been, if that framework existed.
Instead I think of him as somebody who divulged classified information.
**KK:** **O.K.
By some estimates,** _ **the federal government’s work force is
between 40 and 70 percent made up of contractors.**_ **What do you think of
that ratio?
What should it be ideally?**
> A [2017 report](https://www.volckeralliance.org/publications/true-size-
government) from New York University professor Paul Light estimated that four
out of every 10 people who work for the U.S. government are private
contractors, about 3.7 million people.
I think it’d be arbitrary to just say there’s some number that should be
contractors.
What I think we need to do, across our economy, and in some ways
the federal government reflects this, is _remove some of the magic between
being an employee and being a contractor._ So I think the biggest example
we’re seeing of this in the new economy is, of course, with the gig economy,
right?
> The Times editorial board has condemned the labor practices of companies
like Google that rely heavily on contractors because they do not have to offer
their contractors the same benefits afforded full-time workers.
Read the
editorial [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/opinion/google-contract-
labor.html).
_This idea that you can drive for Uber and somehow not be a worker because you
are contractor._ A lot of this is about getting around labor standards.
A lot
of this is about cost-saving.
Now, if we had a benefit structure in this
country that was not only portable but also prorated, then we would be able to
remove some of the magic that creates an incentive to have people be
contractors rather than employees, and some of the incentives to be a part-
time employer versus a full-time employer as well, for people who are
employees on the books.
> In September, California’s State Assembly passed a bill narrowing the
definition of who can be classified as a contractor rather than employee.
Uber
responded by saying its drivers are contractors because transportation isn’t
the company’s primary business.
Read the Times editorial “Take That ‘Gig’ and
Shove It,” [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/opinion/california-bill-
uber-employees.html).
There will always be times, certainly in my administration, there’ve been
times when I’ve turned, in particular, to law firms to supplement the work
that our in-house legal team could do and other consultants with specialized
expertise or some area where it just made more sense.
Of course that’s the
case in the federal government too.
But if it’s just a way to get around the
obligations of having an employee, then I think it needs to be reassessed and
the more that can be brought in house, the better.
I guess what I’m saying is
we can make some changes in our economy and our benefits systems that would
reduce some of the pressure to do that in the first place.
**KK:** **This is just a yes or no question, but would you advise a senior at
Harvard today to go to work at McKinsey?**
Depends on the senior.
I mean I get questions from people who are thinking
about joining the military, as well as consulting companies, as well as
political campaigns.
I’ll tell you when I was a senior at Harvard, they came
around then, too.
The standard that I had for myself was, your early 20s are
such a precious time that you should prioritize what you’re going to get out
of your experience, way more than anything a paycheck can offer you in your
early 20s and, for me, _it didn’t meet that standard when I was leaving
college._
> Directly out of college, in 2005, Mr. Buttigieg went to
[Oxford](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/13/deep-cuts-from-pete-
buttigiegs-rhodie-resume?verso=true) on a Rhodes Scholarship.
Pete Buttigieg speaking to a full house at New England College in Henniker,
N.H.
David Degner for The New York Times
**KK:** **O.K.
We’re going to pivot to a new topic if you don’t mind.**
**Mara Gay:** **Mr. Mayor, can you explain the mistakes that were made around
your Douglass Plan?** _ **Why did your campaign falsely claim support from
black leaders and then use tokenizing stock photos?
Can you just talk about
how that happened?**_
> In July, the Buttigieg campaign released “The Douglass Plan: A Comprehensive
Investment in the Empowerment of Black America.” The campaign released a list
of 400 South Carolinians who supported the plan but faced blowback when some
said the campaign was intentionally vague about whether they were endorsing
the plan or the mayor’s candidacy.
The plan was also
[criticized](https://www.thedailybeast.com/kenyan-woman-featured-in-pete-
buttigieg-ad-for-frederick-douglass-plan-for-black-america) for featuring a
stock photo of a Kenyan woman, who later reached out to The Intercept to voice
confusion about her inclusion.
Read the Intercept’s reporting on this
[here](https://theintercept.com/2019/11/15/pete-buttigieg-campaign-black-
voters/).
My understanding is that no false statement has ever been made about
somebody’s support for the plan.
_My understanding is that there were
miscommunications about the public rollout of people’s names, all of whom had
indicated at some point support for the plan, but not all of whom had
reconfirmed that they were up for ——_
> The Buttigieg campaign [said](https://theintercept.com/2019/11/15/pete-
buttigieg-campaign-black-voters/) it sent the plan to a list of South
Carolinians and told them they could opt out if they didn’t want to appear on
the supporter list.
Johnnie Cordero, chair of the South Carolina Democratic
Party’s Black Caucus, was listed as a supporter, but his name no longer
appears on it and he said he did not endorse the Douglass Plan nor Mr.
Buttigieg.
**MG:** **Right.
They called it misleading.**
—— having their names attached to that.
So that was a process mistake,
obviously, that led to changes in how we communicate with supporters and
people that we’re in dialogue with about our policies.
I don’t know as much
about the stock photo.
I think it was on the website until September.
_I know
that the vendor who was involved in running that part of the website or adding
that kind of imagery has not been with the campaign for a while_ and obviously
that was a mistake.
> The stock photo was removed from the Buttigieg campaign’s website in
[September](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/18/pete-buttigieg-
black-american-douglass-plan-kenyan-photo/).
**MG:** _**How can you win the Democratic nomination, let alone the
presidency, without the support of black voters?**_ **What do you make of the
lack of support for your campaign from that community so far?**
> Black voters will make up about 25 percent of voters in the Democratic
primaries, according to FiveThirtyEight and NBC.
They will be a majority in
Alabama and Mississippi.
A recent Economist/YouGov survey put Mr. Buttigieg at
2 percent among black voters.
Well, I believe, first of all, that we’re earning support from black voters.
_I became mayor and was re-elected as mayor, largely because of support from
every constituency,_ including the black community in my city.
I believe that
it is ——
> Politico analyzed data from the 2011 and 2015 mayoral elections in South
Bend and found that Mr. Buttigieg won the city’s predominantly black
neighborhoods, but he lagged when facing black primary challengers.
Read the
analysis [here](https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/08/pete-buttigieg-
black-voters-support-1395471).
**Brent Staples:** **What’s the percentage of black citizenship there?**
_About 25 percent.
I carried every district, including the minority-majority
districts in our city, in primaries and generals, both times._ I believe that
anyone who proposes to be the president ought to be a president for everybody
and also in particular, given what African-Americans are up against in the
United States today, that the message of the Democratic Party needs to be one
that speaks to black voters where they are.
It’s one of the reasons we’re
being very intentional about that.
> Census data indicates that about a quarter of South Bend’s population is
black.
[Politico](https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/08/pete-buttigieg-
black-voters-support-1395471)’s analysis found that Mr. Buttigieg’s support
from the black community declined between his first and second runs for mayor.
Now, I don’t want to plunge in on polling numbers, but the last couple of
rounds that came back suggested that the way that I’m viewed among black
voters is roughly the same in terms of the proportions as among white voters.
But far more black voters say they don’t know me or don’t have an opinion.
I
think part of this reflects the fact, certainly something I hear from a lot of
black voters, that folks feel not only abused by the Republican Party but
often taken for granted by the Democratic Party.
So the trust that you can
build through quantity of time, through longevity, is very important.
I don’t
have the kind of longevity that obviously some of my competitors ——
**MG:** **So how do you overcome that?**
So two things.
First of all, the substance of what we have to offer.
I’m
really proud of what’s in the Douglass _Plan._ It’s praised as the most
comprehensive plan on dealing with systemic inequality put forward by a
presidential candidate.
Not, of course, because I sat in a room and thought up
all these brilliant ideas, but because we had a lot of conversation and a lot
of dialogue and fit our values to a plan to move forward.
The more I
communicate that plan, the better received it is and the better received I am.
> Mr. Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan, named for the abolitionist leader Frederick
Douglass, [aims](https://peteforamerica.com/policies/douglass-plan/) to reduce
the country’s prison population by 50 percent, address maternal mortality in
the black community and increase funding for historically black colleges and
universities among many other aims.
But I also think before a lot of folks care what’s in your plan, they need to
know what’s in your heart.
And I’m working in not just traditional campaign
formats — big speeches and TV appearances — but also we’ve been doing more and
more quiet and smaller engagements.
Our recent tour to the South, for example, had a lot of conversations that
were between 20 and 50 people.
Some of them very targeted around a policy
issue like health equity or minority entrepreneurship.
Some of it more about
making sure that I was speaking to and hearing from folks who had been
overlooked.
So when we were in South Carolina, for example, we were with an
almost all-black Democratic group in Allendale County.
This is early
presidential primary state, right?
They hadn’t seen a presidential candidate
in more than a decade, and you could feel the extent to which they felt
overlooked.
Those kinds of engagements I think are very important, too.
It’s
not just about obviously, our goal to win, it’s about deserving to win.
I
think that kind of dialogue coupled with all of the things that you do in
traditional campaigning is really important right now.
**MG:** **Your plans for tackling income inequality are not quite as detailed
as some of the other candidates’.** _ **For example, your policies on an
inclusive economy say somewhat vaguely that you’re going to knock down unfair
barriers to entrepreneurship.**_ **What would that look like?**
> A key feature of Mr. Buttigieg’s [plan](https://peteforamerica.com/policies
/douglass-plan/) for an inclusive economy is his Walker-Lewis Initiative,
which aims to triple the number of entrepreneurs from underrepresented
communities in the next decade.
Sure.
So first of all, _we know that there are challenges to access to
credit._ In fact, virtually every small African-American-owned business that
I’ve visited in this campaign, I ask, how’d you get started?
How’d you get
your start-up money?
They always say they had to come up with the cash.
That’s
a pattern of course that’s borne out on everything from how mom-and-pop
businesses experience commercial banking to the well-documented fact of V.C.
[venture capital] money, almost all going to a small handful of people and
kinds of people in a certain number of places.
> Black families on average have one-tenth the wealth of white families;
a key
factor is that black, Hispanic and young people are more likely to be [denied
credit](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/18/credit-inequality-contributes-to-the-
racial-wealth-gap.html).
So there are things we can do about that.
One thing we can do is capitalize
CDFIs better — Community Development Financial Institutions — that have a much
better track record of in turn supporting minority entrepreneurship.
The way I
would do it would be a 5X C.R.A.
super credit for any of the larger
institutions to flow funds into _CDFIs._
> Community Development Financial Institutions are private institutions
created to provide financial services in underserved communities, particularly
low-income people.
They include Community Development Banks, Community
Development Credit Unions, Community Development Loan Funds and Community
Development Venture Capital Funds.
Another thing we can do is direct co-investment — this is part of our Walker-
Lewis Initiative — in businesses led by those who are underrepresented.
There’s precedent for this with TEDCO in Maryland, and I think that kind of
co-investment could be very powerful.
We’ve seen it in other countries — you
actually see it in the Israeli start-up community with state-supported grants.
Part of it is looking at other things that need to be reformed in credit
scoring and credit systems generally, and then part of it is a little deeper
in the chain of cause and effect, right?
Where we know how much of the wealth
in this country is inherited, not just among the ultrawealthy but just in
general.
**KK: Sure.**
And how that flows through the implications for homeownership and access to
education and health and all the other things that become barriers to folks
being able to be empowered economically as they grow up.
**KK:** **Who do you consider to be your most important advisers within the
African-American communities, but also communities of color in general?**
_Well, first of all, our campaign team, we were about — overall, I think we’re
about 40 percent people of color._
> At an N.A.A.C.P.
forum in Detroit last summer, Mr. Buttigieg was
[questioned](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/454513-buttigieg-defends-
campaign-staff-diversity-at-naacp-forum) on the inadequate racial diversity of
his “top-tier staff” on the campaign.
The Intercept
[reported](https://theintercept.com/2019/12/17/pete-buttigieg-south-bend-
administration-diversity/) that of nine top city department heads in South
Bend, seven are white.
Of Mr. Buttigieg’s six executive staff members in South
Bend just two were nonwhite.
I will turn to anybody from the local organizer in a given county that we’re
traveling to in South Carolina to senior figures like _Brandon Neal, our
senior adviser on the campaign who’s got a great track record from the Obama
White House and the N.A.A.C.P.
Or folks like our national investment chair,
Swati Mylavarapu, who can speak a lot to some of those capital-formation
issues._ We try to make sure that I’m listening to everybody I can learn from.
I don’t always start by getting permission for whether I can name check them,
but a lot of conversation going on.
> [Brandon Neal ](https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/12/pete-
buttigieg-2020-hire-1458147)previously served as the national political
director at the Democratic National Committee.
He also worked for the
N.A.A.C.P.
and the 2008 Obama campaign.
[Swati
Mylavarapu](https://www.wired.com/story/pete-buttigieg-swati-mylavarapu-
campaign-investment-chair/) is a former Silicon Valley tech executive and
investor.
**MG:** **Sorry.
Just real quick,** _ **have you been to the museum in
Montgomery?**_
> Ms.
Gay is referring to the Equal Justice Initiative’s [Legacy Museum
](https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum)and [National Memorial for Peace
and Justice](https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial), sites dedicated to
victims of white supremacy and especially lynching.
Mr. Staples wrote an
editorial observer on the museum and memorial
[here](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/opinion/american-lynchings-
memorial.html), and Mr. Wegman wrote one
[here](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/opinion/alabama-lynching-
memorial.html).
I have.
Yeah.
Very recently, and it is haunting because it evokes things that
I’ve seen in places like Cambodia, and it’s on American soil.
The way they’ve
constructed it is, I think, it forces you to understand the relationship
between past, present and future.
That’s, of course, all the brilliant work
that Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative are doing.
_The fact
that it arose out of activism on the death penalty, for example, in Alabama, a
state that does not offer counsel past trial and, I think, maybe first appeal
for the indigent even on death row, shows you that this is not just about
marking something that happened._ This is about connecting all of the patterns
of injustice and surfacing the violent nature of that injustice in a way that
forces us to contend with how it’s all connected.
> Mr. Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice
Initiative, was inspired to push for the creation of the memorial by criminal
justice reform work he was doing in Alabama.
The museum has an exhibit about
Anthony Ray Hinton, who was wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury and
spent 28 years on death row.
**BS:** **The death penalty as we know it evolved out of lynching.**
Yes, as we know it, for sure.
Which is, by the way, part of _why I’m calling
for a constitutional amendment to end the death penalty._ Anyway, it was a
very powerful experience, and I think it’s very important for us to view not
as an antiquarian kind of thing, but as a touchstone for what we’ve got to
deal with right now.
> This is included in Mr. Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan.
**MG:** **Thanks.**
**Aisha Harris:** _Mr. Mayor, you recently said that the failures of the old
normal help explain how we got to Trump.
Where does Obama fit into all of
that?
Because he was in office for eight years.
I know you were misquoted at
one point on that part._
> At a rally in November, Mr. Buttigieg [said](https://www.axios.com
/buttigieg-obama-era-failures-help-explain-trump-ef4b7346-5ef5-4bef-9cba-
3456a0db5f8b.html): “I think the failures of the old normal help explain how
we got to Trump.
I am much more interested in building a future that is going
to have a lot of differences.” The L.A.
Times initially wrongly quoted him as
saying “the failures of the Obama era.”
You noticed.
**AH:** **Yes, but Obama was in office for eight years.
So where does he fit
into the old normal as you see it?**
Well, first of all, let’s acknowledge that under President Obama, the Great
Depression was avoided.
Osama bin Laden was brought to justice.
Health care
was extended to millions of Americans.
The auto industry was, was rescued in
our country, is pretty good for eight years work.
I also think that ——
**BS:** **That’s the other thing that — sorry to interrupt you.** _ **The
other thing to that is the number of racist hate groups kind of quintupled
under his leadership.**_ **I mean the mere fact of a black person in the White
House brought that about.**
> In February 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center
[reported](https://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/02/19/hate-groups-reach-record-
high) that the number of hate groups had grown for the fourth consecutive
year.
Before that, there were three consecutive years of decline under
President Obama.
Which is why we can’t treat the Trump phenomenon as a blip or an anomaly.
I
mean this is surfacing things that — as in a different way, the arrival of the
first African-American president surfaced things that — of course, had been
here all along.
We’re going to have to reckon with the extent to which Trump and Trumpism
reflect a lot more about America than we might want to admit.
_Now, he was
also, I think, capitalizing on a wave of populism that was responsive to what
I would call a 40-year-long Reagan era that President Obama was the last
Democratic president serving within._ In other words, he was constrained by an
atmosphere, a neoliberal consensus, where even for Democrats, most of the
time, the only thing you could ever say you were going to do to a tax was cut
it.
There was this set of constraints that has dominated our political
conversation leading to the conflagration that is Trump and Trumpism, and
we’ve got to find our way out of it to something new.
> It is widely [argued](https://www.brookings.edu/multi-chapter-report/beyond-
neoliberalism-insights-from-emerging-markets/) that the 1970s ushered in a new
era of neoliberalism, whose economic and social policies put capitalism and
free market competition at its core.
**AH:** **So how do you plan to sort of dismantle that old regime?
Because in
part, one of the issues that I think a lot of especially young people have is
that you don’t seem nearly as progressive or as revolutionary in some ways as
some of the other candidates.
That’s something a lot of young people are
looking for.
So how do you — can you explain in a little bit more detail how
you think about that?**
Yeah.
Sure.
First of all, what I’m proposing would make me the most
progressive president in the lifetimes, not only of young people, but I mean,
certainly in the last half century.
I’ll also say that it matters that we hold
together an American majority that is progressive enough that it unlocks
possibilities that were not available even 10 years ago during the Obama
presidency.
_So it took everything that the Democratic Party had just to push
through a health care reform in the A.C.A., invented by conservatives.
Right?_
And that was a major achievement.
> The central features of the Affordable Care Act were modeled by Gov. Mitt
Romney in Massachusetts and advanced by economists at the conservative think
tank The Heritage Foundation.
Read the Heritage speech
[here](https://www.heritage.org/social-security/report/assuring-affordable-
health-care-all-americans).
But that was as far as you could get during the constraints of that time.
Where we are right now is that there is a powerfully large, not everybody
obviously, but a powerfully large American majority.
Not only to do the right
thing on areas where Democrats have generally been trusted — wages, labor,
health — but also areas where we’ve been on defense, like immigration, guns.
Holding that majority together is a big part of the task of the next
president.
I’m not just talking about how to win an election.
I’m talking
about how to govern this country.
We need to have enough clarity of vision
that we can see that the boldness of an idea is not measured only by how many
people it can alienate, but by what it can get done.
So there’s always a more
extreme solution on offer that sometimes I’ll be competing with.
But I also
want to be very clear that what I’m talking about would make the next era —
what I’m proposing we do would make the next era very different from the one
we’ve been living.
**AH:** **Well, one ——**
That’s my concern is to make that happen.
* * *
**AH:** **So one final question.
How do you convey that to younger voters?** _
**How do you counter the “Mayo Pete” memes?
Are you familiar?**_
> The “Mayo Pete” memes feature Mr. Buttigieg’s supporters dancing to Panic!
at the Disco’s “High Hopes";
the “mayo” name plays on the idea that, as [Mel
Magazine](https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/mayo-pete-memes-buttigieg-
tiktok-teens) explains, Mr. Buttigieg is seen by some as “bland and
overwhelmingly white.”
I’m not.
Do I want to know?
**BS:** **You haven’t heard that expression?**
**AH:** **Well, mayonnaise as I think, and a lot of people think is really,
really gross and there have been teens ——**
**BS:** **Wait a minute.
[LAUGHTER** ]
**AH:** **Let’s not get off track.**
**BS: Wait a minute!**
**AH:** **Anyway, people feel strongly about mayo.
There have been younger
people — there’s a meme going around called “Mayo Pete,” and that I think does
speak a little bit to** _ **the lack of youth support that you currently hold,
even compared to those who are significantly older.**_
> A New York Times/Siena College [poll](https://scri.siena.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/11/IADem1019.pdf) in November found that young voters
ranked Mr. Buttigieg as their third choice, behind Senators Warren and
Sanders.
**KK:** **A more generous interpretation is it’s bland.**
PB: O.K.
**John Broder:** **White.**
**Several others:** **And white.
[LAUGHTER]**
I get the white part.
**AH:** **I didn’t mean to imply that you’re** **gross** **.
[LAUGHTER] That’s
not what I meant.**
Well, first of all — again, try to get folks to look at how big these ideas
are.
I mean I’m talking to them about the biggest reform in the American
health care system we’ve had since Medicare was invented.
I’m talking about a
game-changing transformation on the availability of funds to go to college.
I’m talking about getting our climate carbon neutral by 2050.
That will test the limits of human capacity, and there will always be some
folks who say, it’s not real.
Health care reform isn’t real unless you
obliterate the entire private industry.
College isn’t real unless even the
child of a billionaire can go without paying a penny in tuition.
The climate
change thing doesn’t count unless it’s trillions more dollars than it is, and
that’s just not how I measured the bigness of an idea.
**BA:** **If I can put this question in a slightly different way, you’ve been
on the front lines of corporate downsizing.
You’ve been on the front lines of
corporate price fixing.**
Whoa, whoa whoa, that’s, that’s, I’m sorry, that’s ——
**BA: You’ve been on the front of our misadventures in foreign policy.
You’ve
had direct experience in many of the things that make a lot of young people
very angry about the way that this country is operating right now.
You don’t
seem to embody that** _ **anger.**_
> In 2003, Mr. Buttigieg — then a junior at Harvard —
[spoke](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/29/how-pete-buttigieg-
went-war-protester-packing-my-bags-afghanistan/?arc404=true) at an antiwar
rally in Cambridge, Mass., protesting the invasion of Iraq.
More than a decade
later, in 2014, he served seven months in Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the
U.S. Navy Reserves.
So the proposition that I’ve been on front lines of corporate price fixing is
bullshit.
Just to get that out of the way.
**BA:** **You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices.**
No, I worked for a consulting company that had a client that may have been
involved in fixing or was apparently in a scandal.
_I was not aware of the
Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night._
> Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign has
[maintained](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/pete-
buttigieg-mckinsey-canadian-bread-price-fixing) that he only recently heard of
the bread price-fixing scheme and while he was working with Loblaws focused on
price cuts more broadly across the grocery store chain.
**BA:** **Do you feel the anger that many young people feel about the state of
——**
Yeah, of course, because it destroyed my city.
I grew up surrounded by
crumbling factories and empty houses.
_My city lost 30,000 of its 130,000
people, largely before I was born._ So I’m under no illusions about the
problems that are present in American capitalism generally and were unleashed
beginning with the Reagan era specifically.
And while I may not be as emotive
sometimes about my sense of anger or frustration or injustice — and I would
argue that some people are given more room to be emotive than others — I would
not be doing any of this if I were not propelled by a level of passion.
> South Bend had an unemployment rate of [13
percent](https://www.wired.com/story/pete-buttigieg-revived-south-bend-with-
tech-up-next-america/) in 2010.
Under Mayor Buttigieg, it fell to 3.2 percent,
though it rose back to 4.3 percent in 2018.
_Look, let’s talk about why I walked away from the private sector in order to
go to Indiana to run as a statewide Democratic candidate during the Tea Party
wave of 2010 on a platform of defending Barack Obama’s economic policy,
knowing that I would in all likelihood get my ass handed to me, which is what
happened._ But recognizing that the treatment of autoworkers by our incumbent
state treasurer in a dispute — which very few people followed, but really
fired me up — showed everything that was wrong about the way that our
politicians, our corporations, our workers and our communities were
interacting.
And even though I didn’t win, as expected, I also never regretted
the fact that even though I spent down all of my savings doing it with an
income of, I think, 450 bucks a month from the Navy being what I had during
that year.
> Mr. Buttigieg ran for Indiana state treasurer in 2010 and lost to Republican
Richard Mourdock by nearly [25 percentage
points](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/dec/20/amy-
klobuchar/its-true-he-was-mayor-pete-buttigieg-ran-statewide/).
Mr. Mourdock
was a Tea Party Republican.
**KK:** **So much for those McKinsey dollars, right?**
Well, I spent them all, right?
I saved them up, and then I spent them all.
This is one of the reasons why _I’m, by far, the least wealthy person running
for president right now._ I guess my point is my decision to take on that
fight and subsequently my decision to serve my hometown at the time that it
was written off as dying.
Having burned through my lavish McKinsey savings and
now going into credit card debt was propelled by my acute awareness of the
things that are wrong.
> [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2019/08/14/heres-the-net-
worth-of-every-2020-presidential-candidate/#6377cddf37c5) estimates that Mr.
Buttigieg is the least wealthy candidate in the 2020 Democratic field.
**BS:** **When you say you — just a little aside there, some people are given
latitude to be more emotive than others.
What are you talking about?**
I just think that — you are sometimes asked to ——
**BS:** **You being Pete.**
Yeah, sure.
I am sometimes asked to be more, I don’t know, have more of a
flourish in displaying my emotions, and it is precisely because I feel very
strongly about lots of things that I have learned to master how I might feel
about anything and channel that into action.
Now, I still take great pleasure
in firing up a crowd that agrees with me on something I’m passionate about.
But I’m also mindful as the new guy that maybe waving my arms is not the best
way to convey what I care about.
**Jesse Wegman:** **But who’s given more room to be emotive than you?**
Hmm?
**JW:** **Who is given more room to be emotive than you are?**
Others.
[LAUGHTER]
**Nick Fox: Let me get back to Aisha’s question for ——**
**Michelle Cottle: You’re looking to distinguish yourself within a sprawling
field of candidates.** _ **What do you see as real advantages or challenges as
being the first openly gay candidate for a major party?**_
> As recently as 2007, just 55 percent of voters said they would support a gay
or lesbian candidate according to
[FiveThirtyEight](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-some-democratic-
voters-reluctant-to-support-a-gay-candidate/).
**BS: And I have a related question to that, kind of piggy back on it.
You’ve
talked about your decision not to come out over some period of your life,
and** _ **I believe we recorded you in a story of saying at some point you
thought that coming out would be a political death, a career death
sentence.**_ **Could you just recap again why you decided to come out when you
did, and if you feel you’ve handled that in a way — what emotional residue is
left over from that?
You feel you hid too long?
Or do you — what’s the
residual of that previous hidden life?**
> You can Read “Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet” by Jeremy Peters in The
Times [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-
gay.html).
Well, between the time I figured out I was gay and the time I came out, was a
period of consciously avoiding love, and that has a certain cost, it has a
certain weight.
On the other hand, I was also very busy in a very meaningful
and very fulfilling job, certainly during my time as mayor.
So, I’m not sure I
felt the cost as keenly as I would have if I were working 40 hours a week or
if I had a job that didn’t give me as much meaning, which I think numbed me a
little bit to the effect.
What put me over the edge was the experience of the deployment, where you have
that experience where you write the letter, and you put it where your folks
can find it if you don’t come _back._ And I remember writing words that I
really meant about how I did not want anyone to think, if my life were short,
that I had been cheated because I’d had such a full and wonderful life, even
at a young age.
But also, knowing that I was preparing for the risk of dying
at an age where most of my peers had something I didn’t, which is to know what
it was like to be in love.
And that was untenable.
> The Times’s podcast “The Daily” has an episode focused on Mr. Buttigieg’s
decision to come out, featured in its series of interviews with candidates on
pivotal moments in their lives.
Listen
[here](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/podcasts/the-daily/pete-
buttigieg.html).
So, by the time I came back, I knew I had to do it, but there was the question
of how.
Right?
By then “don’t ask, don’t tell” was over, so it didn’t mean
ending my military career.
There was every indication it might mean ending my
political career.
And I reached the conclusion that I had to take that risk,
that was O.K., but also, I had some measure of faith in my community, that at
least my current job might be something that I could earn another shot at
based on the work I did.
But as somebody who lives in Indiana, and needless to say, as somebody who was
not computing the possibility of running for president in 2020 when I was
going through these personal deliberations in 2015, I recognized that it might
constrain, not to say end, a political future I would have in Indiana.
As to
what it means big picture, I’ll tell you.
A couple of things that it means
right now, which are very powerful, which is young people letting me know that
I’m helping them in some way just by doing this.
And not even just young queer
people, the really exciting thing — I’ve shared this story many times on the
trail — was when a teenager let me know that my campaign helped her feel like
she had a sense of belonging in her school and her environment even though she
had autism.
So, that idea of representing difference in a way that validates
others.
**MC:** **This makes you less mayo.**
Maybe.
Hopefully it’s at least a better flavor.
I don’t know.
**KK:** **No longer gross.**
**BS** : **Basil mayo.**
I actually hate flavored mayo — they do this avocado stuff now and it —
because I only use mayo when I’m making tuna salad.
[LAUGHTER] And I want it
as straightforward as possible.
**BS:** **That’s a joke?**
**PB:** **No, it’s high-protein.
It’s very affordable.**
**BS:** **O.K.
I thought you’re making a joke.**
You can put it on toast.
Anyway, where was I?
Yeah.
Sorry.
[LAUGHTER] So, then
you have older folks who, and it’s not unusual — I would say every rope line,
well maybe not every rope line, but often, somebody comes up to me, looks at
me, starts to try to say something and can’t.
They’re usually in their 50s or
older, and I know exactly what they’re saying and that’s all it takes.
And
that is extraordinary.
It’s not why I got into this race, but it’s part of what this campaign means,
and I’m very mindful of that.
I’m also very mindful from a historic
perspective that usually when somebody had — well, we don’t have nearly enough
examples, but when somebody’s broken a barrier going into the presidency, it’s
usually not been the first person to make the attempt.
_So, the first woman
president will not be the first woman to run for president.
The first African-
American president was not the first African-American to run for president.
So, analytically, I’m conscious of the fact that I seek the presidency, if
elected, I’d be the first out gay president, and I’m the first elected
official to make the attempt._
> The first woman to run for president is often credited as Victoria Woodhull,
a stockbroker and newspaper publisher who ran in 1872.
The first African-
American to run for president was [George Edwin
Taylor](https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/12/01/455267676/a
-forgotten-presidential-candidate-from-1904) in 1904.
The son of a slave, Mr.
Taylor ran as the candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party.
**MC:** **Do you feel a burden of representation?
A lot of women have talked
about whether or not they feel this extra burden when they are representing,
or minorities or things like that.
I mean, is this something that you contend
with?**
Well, I don’t want to sit around thinking about it, but it’s certainly there.
Sure, yeah, of course, but so is every — look, when you put your name on the
ballot, and you’ve got organizers who attach their name to yours and drop what
they’re doing and skip college to go to Iowa and help you, and people give you
their money for your campaign, and some of them tell you that they’re passing
up a vacation so that they can contribute to your campaign.
You already feel
that level of responsibility.
Right?
So, calling it a burden — I don’t know.
It’s one more reason I’m motivated to make sure that I do the very best to win
and to deserve to win.
**MC:** **Now, have you given thought, and I know it’s early, but if not to
specific running mates then to factors of what you’d be looking for?
We talked
to people about balancing the tickets.**
Yeah.
**MC:** **Things like that.**
So, first of all, the choice of a running mate is the one choice a candidate
makes that is actually a presidential choice.
The whole country has to live
with it.
And so, in a way, retroactively, it’s your first decision as
president.
And for that reason I think you have to have this deadly serious
bar that it’s really about who is best positioned to lead the country in the
event that I get killed or I’m unable to serve, and everything else has to
follow that.
Having said that, whether we’re talking about running mates or whether we’re
talking about my vision for how to build out a cabinet, yes, balance is
extremely important.
Racial balance, gender balance, balance in experience,
having a shared worldview but different strengths and weaknesses is important.
And so, I’ve made a decision that I should not say anything that would
disqualify anybody from being considered, but in addition to balance and
diversity and range — _this, by the way, another reason I pledged the 50
percent women minimum cabinet._ I’m looking for truth tellers because I’ve
always relied on those I’m with and certainly in my administration, also in my
campaign, to be there to tell me things I wish weren’t true or would rather
not hear.
And that quality, I imagine this is especially important in a vice
president, not to mention a running mate.
> In Mr. Buttigieg’s agenda promoting women’s rights, he committed to
nominating women to 50 percent of his cabinet positions and judicial seats.
He
also [said](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/24/20928483/pete-buttigieg-
womens-agenda) he would put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill and create a
commission to ensure there are more national monuments for women.
**MC:** **Now, l** **ooking at one more with a campaign** **, specifically,
and it speaks a little bit to the youth questions and whether or not you’re
not quite revolutionary enough.
Cleaning up the campaign finance system is a
big issue for Democrats.
They won big on it with the midterms.** _ **Are you
concerned that your broader approach to campaign donations, not eschewing big
corporate donations and things like that, will alienate you from these
younger, more idealistic voters who really see money in politics, big money in
politics, as a problem?**_
> After the board’s interview with Mr. Buttigieg, he [came under
fire](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/us/politics/wine-cave-buttigieg-
warren.html) for a photo that went viral of a fund-raiser held for his
campaign at a “wine cave” in California.
I see money in politics as a problem, but it’s a structural problem requiring
a structural fix.
I mean, we are getting ready to go into the fight of our
lives against Donald Trump and his allies, that last time I checked, put
together something like 125 million bucks in the last quarter.
Right?
_And
tying a hand behind our back to satisfy a purity test is not going to help us
deliver the actual structural change that’s needed._ So, I don’t take
corporate PAC money because I think it’s important to live that ideal.
I also
have 700,000, I think, individual contributors, and I obviously don’t know
most of them personally.
Right?
And I imagine they don’t agree with me on
everything, they don’t agree with each other on everything, but I certainly
believe in grass roots organization building.
And the office of mayor of South
Bend, Ind., is not generally known as an establishment fund-raising
powerhouse.
Right?
So, we got to where we are with a message and a vision
that’s compelling, and my message, whether it’s to young progressives or to
moderates or to the future former Republicans I’m finding out there on the
trail is, “Look at what we could do as a country.” And if that message is
compelling, I have to believe that’s what will decide this election.
> Senators Warren and Sanders are refusing high-dollar private fund-raisers —
which Mr. Buttigieg refers to as a “[purity
test.](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/12/pbs-
democratic-debate-warren-buttigieg-purity-tests/603979/)”
**KK:** **We’re about halfway through our time at this point.
We have about
four more pages of questions here, so we’re going to turn to another topic.**
* * *
**Lauren Kelley:** **Mr. Mayor, I wanted to ask you a little bit about
reproductive rights.
When you’ve talked about your support for abortion
rights,** _ **you’ve in the past said that you’ve taken cues from the
Bible.**_ **I’m curious how you connect with both voters and lawmakers who
have a very different interpretation from the Bible, that abortion is a sin or
even akin to murder, or do you even try to change their minds or reach them?**
> In a radio interview last September, Mr. Buttigieg said the Bible has guided
his views on reproductive rights.
He said, “You know, there’s a lot of parts
of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath, and so even that is
something that we can interpret differently.”
First of all, my interpretation of my religion has no business being imposed
on anyone else through policy.
So, I’ve occasionally shared my own
understanding of the verses beginning with Genesis about the breath of life,
that associate the beginning of life with breath, but that is a personal
encounter with scripture that is not for anybody else to have to live with
from a policy perspective.
**LK: O.K.**
_I think that different people reach different good-faith conclusions about
when life begins, which is a metaphysical and, in certain ways, unknowable
question._ Which is exactly why I think the consensus, or at least the
decision we’ve got to reach, is not to convince one another to draw the same
line in the same place, but to reach a decision, or consensus, about who gets
to draw the line.
Not where to draw the line, but who should run the line.
> Times columnist Ross Douthat responded to Mr. Buttigieg’s comments on
biblical verse and reproductive freedom
[here](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/opinion/pete-buttigieg-abortion-
democrats.html).
**LK:** **So, I appreciate that you take your biblical interpretation out of
the policy arena, but that’s certainly not true of the other side.
Right?**
True.
Yeah, yeah.
And this is the problem, right?
This is the problem with
certain versions of how some people want to bring religion into politics,
which is not just as a formation of conscience.
I think we have an obligation
to be transparent about how our conscience is formed, but something that they
believe others ought to have to live by.
And obviously, as a member of the
L.G.B.T.Q.
community, I’ve seen the consequences of other people believing
their interpretation of their religion ought to be imposed on me.
And we see
something similar in the fight against abortion rights.
**Jim Dao:** **Who does get to draw the line?
How do you define that?**
Well, in my view, it’s the woman facing the decision.
Now, societally, we do
have some broad boundaries.
You look at the Roe v.
Wade framework that has
early in pregnancy, very few restrictions, and late in pregnancy, very few
exceptions.
So, at the broadest level, there’s some societal and legal norms,
but we view this, ultimately, as an individual choice.
And this is another
example of something that most Americans believe.
You wouldn’t know it.
**LK:** **Yeah.** _ **Most of Americans believe it, but that framework that
you’re talking about, Roe, is being chipped away at.**_
> In 2019, a number of states passed laws posing a serious threat to women’s
reproductive freedoms, from Alabama’s restrictive abortion bill to Georgia’s
so-called heartbeat bill.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
And it’s being chipped away in a way that is counter — my
point is that it’s counter to what most Americans believe.
And it will
continue on all fronts, executive, judicial and legislative, which is why I’m
determined to make sure my appointments to the judiciary share my
understanding of freedom.
_My executive actions — some of which can be done
right away, think about the Title X gag rule.
Right?_
> In “The G.O.P.’s War on Women’s Health Gets Results,” the editorial board
wrote about how the Trump administration has undermined Title X, making it
hard for women’s health clinics to stay open.
Read the editorial
[here](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/opinion/planned-parenthood-ohio-
title-x.html).
**LK:** **Sure.
Yes.**
Uphold the right to choose.
But also, that we put more legislative backing
behind things like the need to encode Roe, and the need to withdraw things
like the Hyde Amendment, that are de facto restrictions that make it
impossible to access abortion care for those who are low income.
**JW:** **Mr. Mayor, speaking of your judicial appointments and cases like Roe
v.
Wade, can you give us some names of people you’d consider nominating to the
Supreme Court?**
So, again, I think it’s irresponsible for me to name check folks for the
future.
**JW:** _**Donald Trump did it.**_
> President Trump put out a list of possible Supreme Court picks in May 2016,
and added more names in September.
View the list
[here](https://time.com/4505960/donald-trump-supreme-court-list-names/).
And he is not my role model on things like this.
**JW:** **But it helped him.**
I’m sure it did.
Lots of things he did helped him that I will not be
emulating.
I can tell you that there are justices, I mean folks like — you can
look at the jurisprudence of somebody like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you can look
at the historic contributions of figures like Thurgood Marshall, and get some
sense of what would guide my philosophy, in particular ——
**JW:** **What about their jurisprudence?**
Well, first of all and understanding, most importantly, an understanding of
freedom that includes not just the “freedom from” that is, I think, the only
side of freedom that some of our conservative friends are able to see, but
also “freedom to” live a life of your choosing and the fact that makes a
claim.
And understanding the importance of our proactive positive freedoms,
from abortion rights to voting rights, and what that means for our ability to
thrive and to live lives of our choosing and to function as a country.
**KK: Can you talk a little bit about your plan, the 15-member Supreme Court
plan that you’ve** _ **proposed?**_
> During the October presidential debate, Mr. Buttigieg
[defended](https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/466006-buttigieg-
defends-court-packing-proposal) court-packing — adding additional justices,
five appointed by unanimous agreement of the other 10 — as a way to limit
partisan control over the court.
He suggested term limits for justices as an
alternative.
Yeah.
So, again, I do not want to claim credit for having invented this, but
it was published in the Yale Law Journal, I think in the current edition, as
part of an article contemplating options for structural reform that go beyond
the debate about court _packing._ I’m not talking about changing the court in
order to make it more liberal.
My appointments will make it more liberal, at
least by the likes of the way these debates are tracked.
> [Read](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/feature/how-to-save-the-supreme-court)
Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman’s “How to Save the Supreme Court.”
But I’m talking about a structural reform to change the political stakes of
judicial appointments.
And the one you’re mentioning that I think deserves to
be considered is called a balanced bench.
And the idea is you have 15 justices
overall, 10 of them arrive in the traditional, you might say, partisan process
that we’re used to.
The other five can only be seated by a unanimous agreement
of the other 10.
And the idea is that there will be a depoliticization of
those choices.
And it might be on a rotating basis.
I think the authors in the
Yale Law Journal suggest that they be rotated up from the appellate bench.
That gets you away from these strange phenomena like the Kennedy brief, where
a whole body of casework is done to appeal to the idiosyncrasies of a single
perceived swing justice.
But more important, to make sure that every vacancy doesn’t turn into another
apocalyptic ideological firefight.
A different version that is also
contemplated in that article would be to make the entire court rotated on and
off the appellate bench.
Very interesting debate over whether that would even
require constitutional reform or whether you could do it by law.
By the way,
even though this is admittedly bold, it is far from unprecedented for there to
be changes to the size and makeup of the court.
It’s happened in a substantial
way about half a dozen times.
_I would argue the Republicans changed the size
of the Supreme Court to eight until they took power again, very recently._ But
in terms of actual formal changes, we’ve seen that about half a dozen times.
> Merrick Garland was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016 but was blocked
by Republican opposition.
**JW:** _**And another major structural reform that you supported earlier in
your campaign was the abolishment of the Electoral College in favor of the
national popular vote.**_ **You talked about it a lot early on.
You haven’t
talked about it for a while.**
> Read the editorial board’s stance in “[Fix the Electoral College — Or Scrap
It](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/opinion/electoral-college.html).”
So, that’s false, and I reject any reporting, some of which I’ve seen, I
believe some of it coming from this building, that suggests that I backed away
from it.
I talk about it in virtually every stump speech that I give, and it
is, by the way, kind of a tough sell in places like New Hampshire, but I want
to make sure that people in New Hampshire hear something that’s not that
different from what I have to say when I’m in _Manhattan._
> In December, The Washington Post
[reported](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/buttigieg-shifts-to-the-
center-embodying-the-democratic-primarys-rightward-
drift/2019/12/21/bc1dea68-1df1-11ea-b4c1-fd0d91b60d9e_story.html) that Mr.
Buttigieg was shifting increasingly to the center.
The article opens by
stating that he began his campaign speaking urgently about reforms needed like
the elimination of the Electoral College.
It’s not something I’m under any illusions can be delivered in probably one
presidential term, but it’s precisely because I think it will take a long time
to deliver this, and it may have to be delivered on a delayed-action basis, so
it’s harder to know who benefits in the short term, that I think we ought to
be making the case for it right now.
I mean, first of all, it connects to just
the idea of democracy, right?
Not the technicality, the system of democracy,
but the value that it matters, that we’re a country where the people decide
where we’re headed.
Second, I remember as a student learning about this, you know, as a high
schooler, thinking, “Well, surely the first time it ever actually overrules
the American people, America will get rid of it.” That’s now happened twice.
It doesn’t even privilege small states.
One of the principled arguments for it
would be the small states get overlooked, but it doesn’t, it just privileges
some states.
Right?
Small states like Rhode Island get ignored or Wyoming, and
big states like Texas or New York get ignored.
Plus, our well-being has been impacted by the Electoral College far more in
terms of the outcome over the course of this nation than the number of
presidential campaign rallies held close to where I live.
And so, it’s one of these issues where if there was any principled
justification left for the Electoral College, it was the idea that if the
American people somehow elected somebody manifestly unfit for the office that
there would be some safety valve on that, and instead, the reverse happened.
I
didn’t mean to cut you off.
I just get frustrated when it is implied that I
talk about this less today than I did six months ago.
**KK:** **All right.**
**Charlie W** **arzel:** **If I could pivot to technology and your tech
policy.** _ **You’ve spoken, and I believe you told Vox recently, that
breaking up Big Tech should be an option.**_ **It seems like your proposal is
somewhat more vague than some of your opponents’.
One of the things you
mentioned was doubling antitrust enforcement budgets.
Can you tell me a little
bit about how you plan to go about evaluating whether breaking up should
happen?
For Facebook, for example, do you think Facebook should be broken up
right now?**
> Mr. Buttigieg was somewhat vague in his response to
[Vox](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/3/20965447/tech-2020
-candidate-policies-break-up-big-tech) on whether Big Tech should be broken
up.
He said, “We will rigorously enforce the law, and if they continue the
behavior, breaking up tech companies should be an option.”
Yeah.
So, I think there’s a strong case for that.
The reason I don’t think it
makes sense for me to say as a candidate, “This company shall be broken up,”
is the same reason I wouldn’t generally say of the outcome of a trial in a
judicial process.
This ——
**CW:** **But you can think about their power, right?
Right now, as you see
the influence that they have in modern politics ——**
Absolutely.
Yeah.
**CW:** —— **and say, “This needs to change.”**
Yes.
And that’s the problem with Facebook.
No one company and no one person
should have the kind of power that they’ve accumulated.
Now, under our existing framework, it was designed to handle monopolies mostly
in terms of pricing power.
Pricing power is not the biggest worry around the
harms that the scope and power of Facebook and other large tech companies have
accumulated is, right?
The way I would think about it is to, first of all,
break out certain things that I think are conflated in the frustrations and
anger directed toward big companies.
One set of issues has to do with data security and data privacy.
That requires
a national data law and stronger privacy and security protections, but
frankly, dealing with the monopoly problem is neither necessary nor sufficient
to fix _that._ In other words, that’s a stand-alone set of issues that has to
happen, because a small company could misbehave with data, too.
> Mr. Buttigieg has said he would work with Congress to pass a federal privacy
bill and double funding for antitrust enforcement.
Then we got the monopoly concern, and to put a little more meat on some of
what you mentioned, one of the things I think we’re going to need is a
standard that shifts the burden to large companies, especially when they’re
making acquisitions, like the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, that are
likely anti-competitive.
**CW:** **If that was happening during your administration, theoretically, you
would have vocally supported blocking that?**
Yeah.
Again, the president doesn’t sit there and direct how an administrative
process is going to come out, but yes, there needs to be a prior review.
At a
certain level, instead of the burden being on the state to demonstrate that
some of these mergers will be harmful, I think the burden should be on the
company to demonstrate that they won’t.
**CW:** **O.K.
What do you make of your support from Silicon Valley?
I mean,
the idea that maybe they’re not adequately afraid of you?**
**KK:** _**Can you also speak to your relationship with Mark Zuckerberg?**_
> In October, [Bloomberg
News](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-21/zuckerberg-offered-
advice-in-hiring-to-buttigieg-in-rare-move) reported that Mr. Zuckerberg
advised Mr. Buttigieg on his tech campaign hires.
Yeah.
So, we were in college at the same time, got a lot of mutual friends,
and it doesn’t mean we agree on a lot of things.
So, I’m sure he would
vigorously disagree with my assessment of the WhatsApp acquisition, for
example.
**CW:** **Do you think he holds too much power right now?**
Yes.
No one should have that kind of power.
Now, part of the problem is that a
social network is a natural monopoly, right?
So, if we were just talking about
the, what you might call the Facebook part of Facebook, the product that
people are most familiar with, if you broke that up, you just wind up with two
of them and one of them would die and one of them would be the new one.
The
real problem is how a corporation of that size acquires other competitors and
develops certain powers.
And then, there’s a problem of their refusal to
accept their responsibility for speech that they make money from.
_So, if a
cable company, or a newspaper, if somebody can show that an ad that you all
were going to run is false, you would pull it, and yet Facebook doesn’t want
to hold themselves to that same standard._
> Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly affirmed that Facebook will not check ads from
politicians, even if they contain lies, in the interest of free speech.
Read
The Times’s analysis [here](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/technology
/campaigns-pressure-facebook-political-ads.html).
**KK:** **But I want to follow up on Charlie’s question.
I mean, is Silicon
Valley adequately afraid of you?** _ **There are other candidates who have
used much more bold, intense, I don’t know ——**_
> Mr. Zuckerberg said, in audio leaked to [The
Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20756701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-
leak-audio-ftc-antitrust-elizabeth-warren-tiktok-comments), that having
Senator Warren as president would “suck” for Facebook.
Yes.
And some of them seem to get a lot of support out of Silicon Valley, too,
so I don’t know.
I think you got a lot of folks there who are maybe a little
less ideological, who I’m not going to agree with on everything, but also a
lot of folks who, I think, are wrestling with what it is they’ve created.
The
problem is, it shouldn’t just be left to companies to decide how to solve
these problems.
There needs to be a policy response.
Basically what we’ve done
is we’ve outsourced public policy decisions around the limits of speech and
misinformation and the handling and the use of data to the companies, which
are so big that when they make a corporate policy decision, in effect, they’re
actually making a public policy decision.
They do it.
**CW:** **They’re also just platforms for viral advertisement, too.**
Yeah.
Right.
Which is how they make their money, right?
Although, I would say
that the nonrevenue vitality of social media is just as problematic as the
paid stuff.
**KK:** **We only have about half an hour left, so I want to turn to foreign
policy, but before we do, I wanted to ask you one question which we are asking
all of our candidates, which is, who has broken your heart?**
_I mean, Boston College.
I was 11 years old.
We were this close to the
National Championship.
And they came to South Bend, we were one game away, we
had beaten Florida State, become No.
1._ There wasn’t a B.C.S.
back then, so
when you finish the season undefeated, you’re the champion.
And they came into
our stadium, and they broke my little heart.
> In 1993, Notre Dame’s football team was undefeated and top ranked until it
lost to the Boston College Eagles, 41-39, at home in the final game of the
regular season.
The rivalry between the schools has come to be known as the
Holy War.
**KK:** **As you mentioned,** _ **you’ve talked a lot about your faith.**_
**Given your faith, how do you reconcile directing the largest, most powerful
military in the world with your Christian obligation to love your neighbor?
Or
enemy.
Excuse me.
And your neighbor, but mostly your enemies.**
> Mr. Buttigieg is Episcopalian and outspoken about his faith.
St Augustine is
one of his major religious influences.
It’s one of the biggest problems of being involved in the military at any
level, and I suppose we’re all implicated in this just by belonging to this
country.
You also have to rationalize, as a citizen, how you participate in a
society or a country that sometimes does things that are, even when it’s doing
the so-called right thing, from the perspective of law, or the law of war, is
still doing something that would not be considered Christian or moral by the
lights of any number of different faith traditions.
Some people take the
approach of punching out completely, right?
That’s the Walden approach, I
guess.
I think you have to accept the reality that you are living and working
in a broken world, just as we are all broken and beaten, and try to order your
steps in a way that brings greater good than harm.
Look, when you’re in charge of something important, most of when you earn your
paycheck is when you’re making decisions between two courses of action, both
of which involve harm.
Not just to your objectives, but often to your values,
and you have to figure out what the right thing is to do.
And that’s true for,
I think, any position of executive leadership, but certainly when you’re in
charge of a government body or a military unit or the entire country and
making those life and death decisions.
That’s what you have to weigh.
It’s not
finding what the perfect answer is.
Well, it isn’t a McKinsey puzzle where you
might be able to compute the right answer.
Moral puzzles are different because
they don’t have a correct final answer.
They have courses of action, some of
which can do more good and some of which can do more harm.
**KK:** **So, the number of countries that the United States military now has
troops in is somewhat astounding.
Can you make the case for why we need to
have an American presence in, for instance, the African nation of Mali?**
So, we need to maintain the ability to project force in a way that will
protect the homeland and meet our core security and national objectives.
What
I will also say is that there are a lot of troops deployed around the world
right now, pursuant to an A.U.M.F., that was passed to deal with _9/11._
> Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (A.U.M.F.)
three days after the Sept.
11 attacks.
The agreement authorized use of force
against those responsible for the attacks.
_I’m not sure about Mali, but I remember in Niger, members of Congress
admitting, after troops were killed there, that they didn’t know we had troops
there._
> The [deaths](https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/560826204/niger-ambush-
reignites-senate-debate-over-authorization-of-military-force) of four American
soldiers in Niger in October 2017 ignited debate over the A.U.M.F.
Many
Americans did not realize the U.S. had forces in Niger.
Senator Tim Kaine, of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the deaths showed that U.S.
forces are “in many more countries than Americans have been told.”
**KK:** **It’s also an antiterrorism operation.**
Yeah.
Is that under the A.U.M.F.?
I’d have to think about how those two
strands connected.
But the point is, the A.U.M.F.
had no sunset, and the scope
creep most recently, I think, brought to life by [the Afghanistan
Papers](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations
/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/), but we’ve been
looking at it for more than a decade, is one of the reasons why I believe that
_a future A.U.M.F.
should always have a three-year sunset._ And let’s have
that debate.
> The Trump administration has
[opposed](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/05/24/why-war-powers-
need-an-expiration-date/) putting a sunset clause in an A.U.M.F., on the
ground that it will embolden enemies who might see it as a date for
withdrawal.
If a president, if I or any other president, believe in my judgment from a
national security perspective that it’s appropriate to have troops deployed
somewhere, I should be able to convince Congress of that.
Not to mention the
fact that the war powers are supposed to [inaudible 01:02:20] in Congress
anyway.
And by the way, this also helps with the fact that Congress has been all too
happy, I think, not to get involved in questions like whether the A.U.M.F.
that was supposed to deal with 9/11 justifies troops being in Mali or Niger.
So, some of these deployments are problematic, and we need a much more crisply
defined mission both for the war on terror in general and for future military
engagements, even while recognizing that we are going to have a base
architecture globally that ensures that we maintain global military
superiority, especially as we get into a more and more multipolar world.
**Alex Kingsbury:** **Since you brought it up, can I ask about** _ **the
Afghanistan Papers?**_ **Were you surprised by their broad conclusions, that
the public has been lied to for a great many years about the possibility of
success?**
> In December, The Washington Post reported on a confidential trove of
government documents that revealed how American government officials hid from
the public evidence that the war in Afghanistan couldn’t be won.
Read the
report [here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations
/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/).
Angered, but honestly, not completely surprised.
I remember these debates
raging in the time that I was deployed, and you could argue that was very late
in the war.
In fact, I thought it was the end of the war.
I thought I was one
of the last troops turning out the lights, and that was years ago.
And I even
remember they posted one of those inscrutable PowerPoints on the wall of the
gym by the treadmills.
And I remember staring at it, and _the PowerPoint was
supposed to hold the lines of effort that constituted the mission as O.E.F.
turned into Resolute Support,_ and just squinting at it and thinking, I know a
fair amount about why we thought we were here, and I can’t make sense of this.
> Operation Enduring Freedom was the official government name for the war on
terror.
Resolute Support is a NATO-led operation to provide training and
support for Afghan security forces.
**AK:** **So if the mission is unclear and civilian casualties are at all-time
high now, is the war being waged there a morally defensible war?
To go back to
what you were talking about before.**
Well, unfortunately I think it’s some of our moral intuitions that keep us
chasing after some lofty and possibly impossible outcomes.
**AK:** **Possibly impossible?**
Let me rephrase.
Well, it’s not that it’s impossible.
They’re not impossible.
It’s not impossible for Afghanistan to become a thriving, prosperous,
democratic state, but it is impossible for that to happen quickly.
It is
impossible for it to happen before the time has come when we need to withdraw
our troop presence, which is to say that time has come and it hasn’t happened.
**AK:** **The Trump administration has been trying to do it for three years
now.
How would you do it any sort of quicker?**
Trump’s administration is not big on decision making and also not big on
multilateral diplomacy.
Look, in order to do this, the thing we have going for
us is that leaving Afghanistan is possibly the one thing that all of the
parties think ought to happen.
The U.S. left, the U.S. right, the
international community, the Taliban and in the long run the Afghan government
all want to see this _happen._ So the question is when we leave, are we going
to leave well or are we going to leave poorly?
What leaving well looks like is
to make sure that there is some kind of negotiated political settlement that
gets us here.
Not based on a spontaneous invitation to Camp David, but based
on a proper level of engagement with the government, which has been sidelined
for most of this from what I can tell.
The Afghan government, I mean, the
Taliban and regional players that play a hugely important role in that area.
I’m thinking about Pakistan in particular.
> A 2018 [poll](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-
reports/2018/10/08/most-americans-would-support-withdrawal-afghanista) from
YouGov found that 61 percent of Americans support a withdrawal from
Afghanistan.
**JD:** **Coming back to the question Katie asked about troop deployments
across the world, could you see a scenario in Afghanistan where the United
States would keep some level of troops to maintain some level of stability?**
Well, look at what we had in northern Syria, a very minimal, light,
specialized presence of intelligence and special ops capability that was able
to, while they were there, hold the line.
Not by assuming responsibility for
stability and prosperity of Syria, but by preventing the worst outcomes and
being able to alert the United States command when there were likely to be
things that could imperil our troops or the homeland.
That kind of thing I
think will be part of the pathway out of getting large ground troops there or
part of the pathway for moving large ground troops.
**KK:** **Can I turn to another part of the world?**
Yes.
* * *
**KK:** **Assume that for a moment that the Chinese government makes a
decision that they’re going to flood the streets with troops in order to crack
down on the protests that are happening in Hong Kong.
What would you do?
How
would you respond as president?**
_Well, the message would need to go to China, that if they’re going to
perpetrate a repeat of Tiananmen, that that will lead to them being isolated
in the community of nations, and that the United States will use the tools
that we have, including diplomatic and economic and information tools, to make
good on that so that they have a strong reason not to do it._
> Mr. Buttigieg outlined his foreign policy plans in a [June
speech](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/product-of-the-911-generation-
generational-themes-shape-pete-buttigiegs-worldview/2019/06/11/7239fffe-8bca-
11e9-adf3-f70f78c156e8_story.html) at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar
School of Global and International Studies.
He said China should be censured
for its human rights record but engaged as a strategic partner on a number of
thorny issues including terrorism and climate change.
**KK:** **That’s beforehand, right?
What happens if the troops actually go
into the streets and there’s mass killings and democratic protests are being
squashed?**
I don’t want to jump into hypotheticals, but I’ll say that this is an example
of where U.S. policy should stand on the awareness that our interests and our
values are inseparable.
That every time the United States has tried to pursue
its interest at the expense of its values, sooner or later that’s caught up to
us.
And so our approach needs to be guided by the understanding that part of
what is in the American interest is the fact that we stand up for values that
are shared.
Remember, in a scenario like that or frankly in the scenario we’re seeing
right now — this is not just something happening inside Hong Kong or China and
a conversation inside the United States.
There is such a thing as a global
community, and part of the role of the United States is to mobilize that
global community in the defense of beliefs around human rights and
representation.
That ultimately should also be consistent with the stated
Chinese goal of stability, but is consistent with our conviction that
stability won’t come through repression.
**BA:** _**China has detained hundreds of thousands of its citizens because
they’re Muslim.
It’s your judgment that they haven’t yet crossed that red
line?**_
> Times reporting in November revealed a merciless government-driven crackdown
on Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.
Read the report
[here](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-
xinjiang-documents.html).
What red line?
**BA:** **You were saying that if China were to repeat the Tiananmen
experience, if China were to cross the line and violate human rights, then it
would become necessary to respond.
Is it not already necessary?**
Oh, it’s necessary to respond.
Yeah.
What I’m saying is we should have a
warning about the consequences of those kinds of violent repression, but yes.
Right now we are seeing people rounded up, put into camps in huge numbers, and
we are seeing not a peep out of the United States president, even by way of
moral support for those whose rights are being trampled there and evidenced,
by the way, that that silence was purchased in the course of a trade
negotiation that has yet to yield anything to the United States _anyway._ So
there’s no question that we right now should be using the tools that we have,
especially as what should be a leading voice in the international community.
> In December, the House passed a
[bill](https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20191202/BILLS-116s178-SUS.pdf),
407-1, requiring the Trump administration to condemn abuse against the Uighurs
and call for the closing of China’s detention camps.
Of course, it’s not possible to do that right now because our own president is
fanning the flames of Islamophobia right here in the United States.
So it is
functionally impossible given how much the use of those diplomatic and moral
powers relies not just on policy moves, right?
But on language and tone and
leadership from the American president, it is functionally impossible to do
that so long as this president’s in office.
**Serge Schmemann:** **Mr. Mayor, may I ask you about immigration?
You had
mentioned that this will be one of the major challenges of the next president.
Are you going to, as president, reverse some of President Trump’s policies,**
_ **his agreements with third world countries on asylum or not letting asylum
seekers await the judgment within the United States?**_ **What would you do?
What would be your criteria for deportations?**
> In September, the Supreme Court
[upheld](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/world/europe/trump-america-asylum-
migration.html) the Trump administration’s new rule making it difficult for
most migrants and especially Central Americans to seek asylum in the United
States.
Under Mr. Trump’s rule, migrants cannot apply for asylum unless they
have applied and been denied asylum in a country they pass through on the way
to the United States.
So when it comes to asylum seekers, first of all, it’s recognized that
measures like the family case management program worked.
_Virtually everybody
in that program appeared when they were supposed to and so I would not
continue the “Remain in Mexico” policy._
> The Family Case Management Program used case managers to ensure migrants
adhered to their legal obligations.
It was ended by the Trump administration
in 2017.
It had high levels of compliance, according to a Department of
Homeland Security
[report](https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2017-12/OIG-18-22-Nov17.pdf).
And we need to recognize in our policies and in our tone the idea that asylum
is a right.
It’s not doing somebody a favor.
At least applying for asylum is
recognized as a right.
It’s one of many things that need to change quickly by
way of administrative action.
The thrust of my vision on immigration centers
on legislative reform, but upfront we know that there need to be actions to
ensure that family separation can’t happen again.
To the extent that the government is in the business of housing at all, I
believe that should be handled by H.H.S., which is designed around health and
not by Customs and Border Protection, which is not set up for that kind of
role, and a number of other steps that we’ve got to take right away.
As to what you’re saying in terms of the administration’s posture toward the
countries whose misery, often, is propelling this wave of migration, it is
perfectly self-defeating to threaten to withdraw aid from, for example, the
Central American Triangle countries when by far the best way forward to
prevent a migration crisis in our interest is to make sure that people are
living prosperous or at least minimally can count on safety in their own home
countries.
Part of which can be supported with American investment.
Again,
it’s not that we can fix — speaking about what’s possible and what’s not
possible — it’s not like we’re going to fix what’s going on in every country.
We should at least be doing our part to help.
**SS:** **People will continue trying to reach the United States.
What would
you do as president if tens of thousands of Central Americans showed up at the
border?**
Well, we still need to maintain a border.
It matters, and crossing the border
illegally will be illegal when I’m president, too.
**JD:** **Mr. Mayor, to follow up on that, some Democrats seem to argue that
comprehensive immigration reform could be as politically risky as say Medicare
for all.**
Yes.
**JD:** **How great a priority would that sort of comprehensive immigration
reform be in your administration?**
It’s a priority because of the way it’s being used to divide Americans.
My
biggest priority is to bring the country together.
Could it be divisive?
Sure.
I mean, that’s why this president uses it.
The irony is that there is that same majority I was talking about.
A powerful
American majority, not a consensus, but a majority, to do all of the things
we’re talking about.
Pathway to citizenship, protections for Dreamers, reforms
to the asylum system, reform to the lawful immigration system, like how my dad
got here, and moving away from a system and numbers and quotas and caps that
are not based on anything currently real.
And I think that this
administration, if they wanted to, could have passed comprehensive immigration
reform and taken credit for the achievement.
Unfortunately, this president
believes that it is more useful for him to divide us around the failure than
it is for him to take credit for the achievement, and _so we continue entering
our 35th year or so since there’s been meaningful reform._
> In 1986 President Reagan
[signed](https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/why-does-us-need-
immigration-reform) a major immigration reform bill creating a path to
citizenship for immigrants who came to America before 1982.
There has been
little meaningful immigration reform in the past two decades, though in 2012
President Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program, for the so-called Dreamers.
Mr. Buttigieg’s father immigrated from
Malta.
**JB:** **Sorry, go ahead.
You were in the middle of your answer.**
I was going to say a lot of these concerns that we have around the border
change when we have actually fixed the fundamental problem of the legal
framework that we have.
**JB:** **Can we turn to climate change for a minute?**
Yep.
**JB:** **You’re proposing quite a sweeping reform to the country’s approach
to climate change.
Yet in the detailed proposal you’ve submitted, there’s not
a word about nuclear power, which now provides something like 20 percent of
electricity in this country with no carbon at all.** _ **Would you phase out
the existing plants and stop all research on future nuclear technology?**_
> Other Democratic contenders, like [Andrew
Yang](https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/), have made nuclear
energy a central feature of their climate plans.
I would not look for new nuclear as part of our power mix.
I also don’t think
we can afford to be dogmatic about this.
As you said, it’s carbon free and by
far the biggest threat we face right now is carbon.
However, you can’t ignore
the waste concerns associated with nuclear power as we know it.
_Research to
develop nuclear possibilities that don’t have those risks or don’t produce
that kind of waste, of course we should be pursuing that._ As far as the kind
of nuclear power that we currently have, the kind of fission power that
generates waste, I don’t believe that that is the long-term future when we
know so much potential lies in other forms of renewable energy generation that
don’t have that set of problems.
So yes, it is part of our pathway to carbon
neutrality.
There’s no question.
It’s part of that medium-term mix.
When I
talk about that medium term, I’m really talking about the existing installed
generation base and not adding more.
> The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has devoted
significant time and funds to research on thorium, an alternative to uranium
as a source of clean energy.
Read more from the World Economic Forum
[here](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-waste-to-
create-clean-energy-it-can-be-done/).
**AK:** _**When you phase out the nuclear plants, do you support keeping all
the waste at the closed facilities like it is now or building Yucca Mountain
to store it safely?**_
> Congress designated [Yucca Mountain](https://www.epa.gov/radiation/what-
yucca-mountain-repository) as the site for a nuclear waste repository in 1987,
but it has never been licensed.
If constructed, it would use a complex 1,000
feet below the mountain’s summit.
_So the problem with the Yucca Mountain is it’s not got the consent of those
who would be impacted, and I don’t think it’s an acceptable solution as long
as there is not that kind of consent._ There’s been talk about certain kinds
of safer on-site or near-site storage than we have today.
No solution is
perfect, but we certainly need to continue developing safe methods for storage
and removal.
> In March, Nevada’s Democratic representatives
[unveiled](https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nevada-congressional-
democrats-introduce-bill-to-require-state-and-local-consent-to-build-yucca-
repository) legislation that would prevent the construction of the facility as
long as the state, local and tribal communities haven’t given their consent.
**KK:** **Do you think there’s enough effort to build consensus to build Yucca
Mountain at this point?
I mean we haven’t even, communities ——**
There’s been the reverse.
There’s been no effort.
They’ve completely ignored
communities, right?
**AK:** **But no one’s going to put nuclear waste in their backyard**
**KK:** **Yeah.
Exactly.
No one’s going to want nuclear waste in their
backyard.**
Well, the blue-ribbon commission laid out a framework for some kind of an
informed-consent process, and we’ve seen the reverse.
Just failing to inform
even elected officials about some decisions and some moves.
So what we know is
consensus may be elusive.
The wrong way to get it is what they’ve been doing
lately.
**KK:** **So I hate to cut us off from climate since it’s such a huge issue,
but we have only a few minutes left and we have a lot of other things we want
to get to.
Maybe we can turn to health care for a few minutes and then go back
to a couple of economic questions.**
**Jeneen Interlandi:** **Do you think that families should be able to obtain
religious or personal exemptions for mandatory vaccination?**
No.
We’ve seen the public health impact of, I can’t even call it
pseudoscience, but the way that people have been steered off things that are
necessary.
This is complex.
Different states have different frameworks, some
of which acknowledge these kinds of exemptions and some of which don’t.
_I
acknowledge that those differences exist among the states, but we have to move
forward a world of universal vaccination._ And I believe this strongly enough
that personally I’ve done what I can just from a public education standpoint,
including this somewhat awkward spectacle of inviting news cameras to watch me
get my vaccinations at the county health department.
Just to try to send that
message to remind folks of that responsibility.
> Earlier in his campaign, Mr. Buttigieg
[said](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/claudiakoerner/2020-presidential-
candidates-vaccines-measles-health) he backed “personal belief and religious
exemptions” on vaccines, then
[backtracked](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/05/01
/pete-buttigieg-vaccines/3639678002/) and said he only supported medical
exemptions.
**JI:** _**Have you thought about what you would do as president to promote
that message and to kind of shore up public trust in vaccines?**_ **Because it
is waning.**
> Recent reporting has shown that trust in vaccines has
[declined](https://www.researchamerica.org/sites/default/files/MAY2018_VaccinePressRelease_final.pdf)
in the past decade among American adults.
Yeah, I think that people need to hear that from the president.
The president
is a messenger on public health and maybe I’ll continue that spectacle,
hopefully I’ll have a little more to show up here.
[MAYOR POINTS TO BICEP.
LAUGHTER] But also in terms of the message we send about the role that this
has in parenting and in citizenship and in being part of your community to
make sure that the community is safe from communicable disease.
**JI:** _**As president, would you use march-in rights to produce low-cost
insulin?**_ **So overriding corporate patents on drugs that are overpriced?**
> March-in rights were created in 1980 under the Bayh-Dole Act.
Some argue
they could be used to lower the cost of drugs like insulin.
They allow a
government agency to “march in” and circumvent a patent if a therapy isn’t
made available to the public within a reasonable time.
I would view that as a last resort, but I believe it should not be taken off
the table.
**JI:** **Something you would consider.**
If only because I think knowing that is being held in reserve might be what it
takes to get a better result while at the table.
So definitely something I
would hope never to use, but I would not rule it out.
**JI:** **I just want to talk a little bit very quickly about the public
option, which is what you’ve supported in terms of health care reform.
You’ve
said yourself a couple of times today that this is still actually a bold
vision.
It’s kind of sort of gotten framed as weak sauce relative to Medicare
for all, but it’s actually still a pretty heavy lift.
So can you talk a little
bit about how you see getting that through Congress, where there’s going to be
a lot of opposition, and what you think it would cost?**
Yeah.
So the bedrock for this as for many of the other policies I’m talking
about that yes, put me certainly further than the Obama administration was
able to be, for example, and would be progressive.
The great thing about this
is they command a support of the American majority.
So Medicare for all if you
want it has strong support.
Often when people tell pollsters they’re for
Medicare for all, this is what they mean, right?
So there’s issue after issue
where what we’ve got to do is manage the daylight between what commands a
majority among the American people and what can get a majority in the American
Congress.
Part of that is why we need structural reforms, why we’ve got to do something
about things like gerrymandering and other issues that help to explain why
Congress is the way it is.
But I also believe that a very good use of the
president’s time and energy is to be personally present in even conservative
states or districts where measures like this have popular support.
I don’t
think there’s anything fanciful about this because you can just look at the
political life of the A.C.A., which again _was toxic for Democrats in 2010
when I was getting crushed in my first experience on the ballot in Indiana,
and by 2018 was the winning issue for Democrats such that even when the
Republicans controlled everything, they could not make good on their central
campaign promise, even when they were in charge._ Right?
So we know that when
we restore the center of gravity of politics to the lived experience of
Americans who are affected by political decisions and not the noise that this
president creates, we have a winning hand to get these policies through.
> In 2017, Mr. Trump claimed “we have essentially repealed Obamacare.” In
fact, the Affordable Care Act has grown only more popular — a Kaiser Family
Foundation [poll](https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kaiser-
health-tracking-poll-february-2018-health-care-2018-midterms-proposed-changes-
to-medicaid/) in 2018 found the law’s favorability at 54 percent, its highest
point since it began surveying people about it in 2010.
**JI:** **Can you talk a little bit about the cost itself?**
_Yeah.
So we’ve scored it at $1.5 trillion over 10 years._ In order to achieve
that, actually a fully 1.4 of it can be recouped just from rolling back the
corporate tax rate portion of the Trump tax cuts.
For the other 0.1, $100
billion, I would account that as part of the savings that we will get from the
negotiation of prescription drug prices by Medicare and H.H.S., which I think
narrowly that move alone C.B.O.
had between $3 billion and $400 billion over a
decade.
We believe the overall savings to the Treasury of the different moves
we aim to make would come to over $600 billion.
Anyway, I only need 0.1 to
make up the gap between 1.4 and 1.5 [trillion].
> Mayor Buttigieg’s campaign
[said](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-20/pete-buttigieg-
eyes-35-corporate-tax-rate-to-fund-health-plan) his health care
[plan](https://peteforamerica.com/policies/health-care/), “Medicare for all
who want it,” would be almost entirely paid for by rolling Mr. Trump’s
corporate tax cuts back to 35 percent rates.
**JI:** **So here’s the thing I kind of want to talk about.**
Yeah.
**JI** : _**$1.5 trillion is a lot less than Medicare for all, than Elizabeth
Warren’s plan would cost, right?**_ **But that’s over 10 years.
If your plan
succeeds and more people choose the public option versus private insurance
beyond 10 years, it could become quite expensive.
What do you say to arguments
that ultimately it would be just as expensive as something like Medicare for
all, so why not just do that?**
> Senator Warren’s “Medicare for all” plan is estimated to cost $20.5 trillion
in new federal spending over the next decade.
Read how she did her math in the
[Upshot](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/upshot/elizabeth-warrens-medicare-
for-all-math.html).
Well, the problem with Medicare for all or that version of Medicare for all
that my competitors have isn’t just the cost.
I certainly believe that when
you propose something with a cost, you got to be able to explain how to pay
it.
And that’s a problem there.
It’s also the idea of dictating to people what
their choice ought to be.
You look at the plans that a lot of folks, including a lot of folks in labor,
have fought for, sometimes trading off wages to get them.
They’re not
interested in being kicked off the plan.
I think just baking that little bit
of humility into the policy pays off because it also, it’s not just — sorry —
but it’s not just the problem of dictating that this plan will be better.
There’s a comparable danger of policy arrogance in supposing that we can guess
from Washington the correct number of years before the transition should
happen.
So what I’m supporting is a way for the transition to be organic.
**JI:** **O.K.
So just one very quick follow-up to that.
With respect to the
public option being a better choice and that’s the thing that’s often used to
kind of promote the idea.
How do you make that work if doctors and hospitals
can simply choose not to accept the public option as long as private still
exists?
How do you address that concern in your thinking?**
So I believe the economy of scale, especially if you compare it to Medicare,
right?
The places where Medicare is accepted indicate that as long as a
reimbursement is appropriate, that there should not be a problem on the
provider side.
Now I do think that you can’t just copy-paste what we’re doing
with Medicare now because if that were where we needed it to be, we wouldn’t
see the problem we have with the loss of ——
**JI:** **So do you reimburse at a higher or lower rate?
Sorry, last one.**
**KK** : **Jeneen!**
Overall reimbursements are likely to have to go higher, not just in the public
but in Medicare as we know it, especially in areas that are losing providers
like rural areas.
**KK:** **So we have a couple of questions about your time and your mayorship
in South Bend and I want to get to those if you don’t mind.
Then we’ll come
back to the economic questions.**
**NF:** **If you don’t mind, I wanted to get back to what Aisha was saying.
I
found your answer to her kind of vague, quite vague, and I thought she was
asking something really important.
A lot of young people and not so young
people are disgusted by growing up in a system in which they’re seeing more
and more of the wealth of the country going to a smaller and smaller group of
people at the expense of everyone else.
That small group of people having an
increasing amount of political and economic power.
Some of your opponents have
had very clear solutions or what they call very clear solutions for those
problems.
I’m wondering if in that time we have, if you could give specific
solutions to say what the government could do to address the growing financial
inequities, what the government could do about the power of the financial
industry, about the corruption of politics, about the corruption of industry
itself?**
Of course.
Yeah, I mean, I would argue that the proposals I’ve put forward on
dealing with precisely this set of problems is more specific than most of my
competitors’.
That’s everything from my proposal to double the rate of
unionization in this country, to my insistence that _we increase the minimum
wage to some of the other labor market reforms I’ve proposed around taking
care of contractors and gig workers, to campaign-finance reforms up to and
including a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United._
> Mr. Buttigieg is one of several candidates who have earned the
[approval](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/us/politics/end-citizens-united-
pledge.html) of the grass roots group End Citizens United for his commitment
to anti-corruption legislation.
He defended his
[intent](https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-mentions-in-round-2
-of-the-democratic-debatesexplained) to use a constitutional amendment to do
so, arguing: “Does anybody really think we’re going to overtake Citizens
United without constitutional action?
This is a country that once changed its
Constitution so you couldn’t drink and then changed it back because we changed
our minds about that.”
Not to mention things we could do in the shorter run, ranging from ideas
already baked into H.R.
1, around drowning out dark money, to heavier-lift
reforms around public financing of campaigns, while we are working the bigger
generational fight on things like Citizens United.
I believe that we need to
be investing in the sources of social mobility and domestic competitiveness to
include my proposal that we triple funding for Title I in education, to
include everything that’s contemplated in the Douglass Plan, to include what
we need to do around _infrastructure._ And that in order to do that, we must
raise taxes on wealthy individuals and on corporations.
So I am no less
determined and no less specific than my competitors about this.
What I think
might be happening ——
> Mr. Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Sanders have all
[pledged](https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2019/12/07/mayor-pete-
buttigieg-k-12-education-plan-charter-schools/) to triple Title I funding for
low-income schools, and Senator Warren has pledged to quadruple it.
**NF:** **What are your questions on raises?**
Sorry?
**NF:** **What are the questions on raising taxes?**
Say again?
**NF:** **On raising taxes, what are your proposals?**
So a financial transactions tax, rollback wholesale of the Trump tax cuts with
a special focus on what’s going on in the corporate-rate tax cut.
Close the
199A loophole, deal with some of the enforcement deficiencies that are driving
the big part of the revenue gap right now I think.
I’m also open to a wealth
tax.
I just would not put my signature proposal in a position of being
completely dependent on a tax that is constitutionally _untested._ In
principle I think it’s fine.
I’m just not counting on it.
> In the December Democratic debate, Mr. Buttigieg criticized Senator Warren’s
wealth tax plan as “extreme.” He
[cautioned](https://thehill.com/policy/finance/475419-buttigieg-attacks-
warrens-wealth-tax-proposal-as-extreme) that candidates should “be smart about
the promises we’re making, make sure they’re promises we can keep.”
Now just to get to the heart of the question that maybe we didn’t touch about
what interests a younger generation of voters.
I think part of this might be a
question of tone, too.
I think that the younger I was, the more I was inclined
to think about politics as combat.
Having been responsible for a city, I think
about it differently today, but what I don’t view as different is the
importance of restoring power to workers and citizens.
When I say power, I
mean both political power and wealth, which becomes both economic and
political power at the expense of those who have concentrated it too much in
today’s world.
**NF:** **How would you double unionization?**
So part of it has to do with who can organize.
Making it possible, for
example, for gig workers to organize, as I’ve called for.
Making it possible
for there to be more scope for multi-employer bargaining.
If you are one of
those fast-food workers and you’re in a McDonald’s and there’s an Arby’s
across the street, you should be able to team up.
Part of it is how you can unionize.
We have penalties for company interference
in union elections, but the penalties are so weak that even when they are
imposed by what I view as a much-weakened enforcement structure — both in
terms of the Department of Labor and N.L.R.B.
— even when they are imposed,
they’re not really enough to change behavior.
Which is why I’ve specified the
need for fines in the adequate range of the multimillions that would actually
make it a different calculation for companies to make it difficult to unionize
and we need an end to right-to-work.
_Right-to-work is a restriction.
It’s
talked about differently in conservative political language, but it is a
restriction on the ability of employers and employees to negotiate, and I
would remove it._
> The Times editorial board [weighed
in](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/opinion/democrats-2020-jobs-
benefits.html) on the importance of centering labor issues in the 2020
campaign, particularly ideas like sectoral bargaining and prohibiting “right
to work” laws, which allow workers in union workplaces to refuse union
membership.
**KK:** **Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I want to get back to South
Bend for a minute.
Rape, robbery, and assaults are all crimes that are at much
higher rates in South Bend than they are for example in New York City or in
Indiana versus** _ **New York.**_ **Why haven’t you been able to do much about
those types of crimes?**
> Since 2012, Mr. Buttigieg’s first year in office, South Bend has averaged
5,890 reported serious crimes a year, down from an average of 6,845 in the
three years prior.
According to [The South Bend
Tribune](https://www.southbendtribune.com/news/publicsafety/fewer-crimes-
reported-in-south-bend-but-shootings-linger-
as/article_e6a6368d-5887-5131-8643-0dfdb21f278c.html), burglaries declined
under his administration, but aggravated assaults increased.
Well, I’ll tell you what we have done.
_We have group violence intervention
that has been able to deal with gang and group violence and in particular gun
violence in our city, hasn’t ended it.
We’ve had some terrible years, but my
first year we had 18 homicides, I believe, and we have been able to see a
shift in that._
> The South Bend Group Violence Intervention strategy was introduced to the
city in 2013 with the aim of curbing gun violence.
The
[strategy](https://cfsjc.org/cfsjc-leadership-initiatives/south-bend-group-
violence-intervention/), developed by David Kennedy at John Jay College,
relies on direct communication with people most likely to commit violence.
Of course, it’s different from New York.
The per capita personal income in my
city has finally gone above $20,000.
_We have poverty rates similar to
Baltimore’s, but in many of these categories, crime rates there are
different._ Now having said that, I should also mention that you brought up at
least two categories of crime, rape and aggravated assault, where reporting
has changed.
And it is my fervent hope without coming over and telling you
what to do that when folks report on in particular data that is compiled in
the F.B.I.’s uniform crime database, U.C.R.
database, that attention is paid
to the language warning about why it is not a good idea to compare between the
different jurisdictions due to reporting differences and also some of the
pitfalls of reporting over the years when some of the standards changed.
> The poverty rate in South Bend is estimated at 25.4 percent.
The poverty
rate in Baltimore is estimated at 23.8 percent.
**NF:** **Haven’t reporting standards had been changed for other
jurisdictions, too?**
Say again?
**NF** : **Haven’t the reporting standards for aggravated assault changed for
other jurisdictions, too?**
_Yes and no.
So what happened with rape was a nationwide change in the U.C.R.
reporting standards and so you can even break out what is called legacy rate
and the new standard._ In the case of aggravated assault, I know of changes
that happened that led to more reporting of it in my jurisdiction.
I don’t
know how much that’s part of moves that have been made in other police
departments.
> In 2012, the attorney general announced a new and more expansive definition
of rape, a victory for survivors and advocates.
The definition is available on
the Department of Justice’s website
[here](https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition-rape).
**NF:** **How much of the crime increase do you think might be due to the bad
relationship between the police and the black community?**
I believe police officers by and large get up in the morning and do their job
no matter what’s happening in politics.
I do think that there is a cost to
reductions in police legitimacy that come about, especially when there are
cases of abuses both from around the country and what happens in any local
area.
What we’re seeing a lot are cycles of gun violence, assault too, but
especially with gun violence where you have a family, someone is attacked or
killed.
The family weighs whether to take that to the police or to handle that
in a way that leads to more violence and so the less comfort there is reaching
out to the police, the more likely it is that there will be contagion between
one violent act and another.
That’s actually even more true as you get out of
the ones that we’ve been better able to get a grasp on through our group
violence intervention strategy where it’s connected to, whether it’s a formal
gang or what’s called a group, it can often be comparatively easier to map and
enforce on the associations that lead to that violence than when you have
looser associations and sometimes families.
**NF:** **You mentioned poverty.
You’ve done in a lot in the downtown area of
South Bend.
In the poor neighborhoods you’ve knocked down a lot of buildings
and some have said you’ve not done enough for housing there to replace that
and that there are sort of two South Bends.
Is that a fair criticism?**
**KK:** **I want to be respectful of the mayor’s time, so after this maybe we
can ask you one last question and then we’ll let you go.
Is that O.K?**
Sure, yeah.
So our effort on vacant and abandoned houses was very much about
directing dollars for improvement in low-income and predominantly minority
neighborhoods.
Because the No.
1 thing I heard knocking on doors in those
neighborhoods from voters and residents when I was a candidate was why has
there been a collapsing house next door to me for 12 years?
Often they didn’t
know or necessarily care that the city did not own that property, just because
it was vacant and abandoned.
Often we didn’t even know who did own it because
in our housing market, again ——
_I know this doesn’t always compute in New York, but you can get a pretty good
house on the west side of South Bend for 25 thousand bucks.
So when it falls,
it’s in bad shape and it falls to eight or nine thousand bucks._ Someone who
just owns this as a line on a spreadsheet anyway, and they’re not even from in
town, just walks away.
They don’t even bother selling it or disposing of it,
or they cleverly hide who owns it.
Anyway, my point is we directed dollars to
remove the houses that couldn’t be saved and to improve the houses that could
precisely because of the importance of supporting low-income neighborhoods.
> In 2017, the median property value of a house in South Bend was $81,100,
according to Data USA.
Nationally that figure is closer to $217,600.
So while we did a lot of work in our downtown for sure, and I’m proud of the
fact that a downtown that used to be characterized as dead or dying is
growing.
It’s equally important to me, if not more so, that we’ve created
opportunity for folks around the city and that we’ve invested directly in
neighborhoods.
We’ve also invested directly in home repair, knowing that
there’s not only a moral and economic empowerment rationale for keeping people
in their home, but frankly it’s also a public safety rationale.
There are a lot of folks in these neighborhoods who are not afraid of the
police or don’t respect the police, but they respect Grandma.
And I want
Grandma to be able to afford to own her home, stay there and be on her porch,
as part of what keeps the fabric of the neighborhood intact and makes it
safer.
So there have been justified critiques that we may have used code
enforcement as a blunt instrument in some cases and listening to neighborhood
feedback improve that over time, but it’s very important to me that it’d be
understood that our effort to direct dollars, whether it was for demolishing
collapsing structures or for enhancing ones that could be saved, was very much
about supporting low-income residents.
**KK:** **Brent, you want to finish?**
**BS:** **Something we ask everybody: What is it that you are most likely to
fail at as president?**
Wow.
**BS:** **And that’s the same expression we get.**
Well ——
**MC:** **Don’t cop out on this.**
I know.
I’m tempted to go with a condiment reference, but I’m going to behave.
Well, let me say this.
First of all, there are some problems you can solve and
then there’s some problems you can manage and a lot of the most important
problems we face, both internationally and domestically, will be managed,
improved, but we have to face that one presidential or two presidential terms
won’t be enough to solve them.
If I’m being more specific about something that I don’t think I will win, I
would say social media.
I view myself as a digital native.
I spend less and
less, but a fair amount of time, on social media.
People in my generation have
become preposterously wealthy creating it, but we have not yet got a handle on
it.
The one thing I am learning is just how much daylight there is between
what has currency on social media and what I’m getting asked about when I’m on
the ground, and I would not be surprised if it continues to be the case that
doing what I view to be the right thing as president is not just politically
costly in general but may cost me the hearts and minds of those who are
disproportionately represented online.
**KK:** **Wait.
So, your answer is you’re going to get canceled on Twitter?**
I just might get canceled.
**KK:** **All right.
Thank you very much.**
Thank you.
This interview was conducted Dec. 11, 2019, and published Jan. 16, 2020.
Illustrations by Jules Julien;
Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times