Indiana Democrat getting buzz in DNC race
WASHINGTON - Pete Buttigieg was a senior in high school when his team made the 2000 finals of a national student competition to make a monetary policy recommendation to the Federal Reserve.
The St. Joseph’s High School students didn’t win with their proposal to increase the federal funds rate by 25 basis points. But Buttigieg’s performance was so impressive that the Federal Reserve official who created the contest pulled his teacher aside.
“Who was that?” he asked macroeconomics teacher Julie Chismar.
Others have been asking the same thing recently after Buttigieg — now 35 and the mayor of South Bend — joined the crowded race to head the Democratic National Committee.
The next question they ask is: How do you pronounce his name?
It’s BOOT-edge-edge.
“Luckily elections are usually multiple-choice,” he says of his difficult last name.
Buttigieg was a late entrant last month in the race to be decided Feb. 25. The early frontrunners were former Labor Secretary Tom Perez — a favorite of the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton camps — and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, who has the backing of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
But he’s gotten a lot of buzz as someone who could come right through the middle of that establishment vs. insurgent divide in the party.
“The DNC is looking for a real change,” said former DNC chair Howard Dean, who has not endorsed a candidate. “I was speaking at a Yale Young Democrats meeting (the other) night and that’s all they wanted to talk about — Pete.”
What people like most about Buttigieg is he defies stereotypes, said Joe Andrew, who is from Indiana and is one of four former DNC chairs who have endorsed the South Bend mayor. Buttigieg wouldn’t just be the youngest, and first openly gay DNC chair. He’s also a Rhodes Scholar and an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve who worked for the high-powered consulting firm McKinsey before becoming mayor of a Rust Belt city.
“For those people who want him just to be a Rust Belt mayor so he can talk to people, he’s so much more than that,” Andrew said. “People who want to paint him as an Ivy Leaguer, they (then) think `This guy can really talk to people.’ People who want to paint him as a gay activist? God no! He’s from South Bend, Ind.”
He comes across, Andrew said, as authentic.
"Here’s a very 2017 sentence: I started Thanksgiving morning in a deer blind with my boyfriend’s father," Buttigieg said at one of the regional forums preceding the election.
The candidates have been selling similar platforms at the forums. All, for example, are emphasizing the need to build the Democrats’ bench, get back to the grassroots, fight voter suppression and pay attention to redistricting.
Buttigieg is arguing that not only does he not represent either side of the Clinton/Sanders division, but he is best positioned to deliver what all are promising.
"If we’re all saying we've got to fight in red and purple states, put in somebody from Indiana. If we’re saying we've got to pay attention from the top of the ticket on down, put in a mayor — someone whose bread and butter is local office," Buttigieg said at one of the regional forums. "And if we’re all saying that the solutions for our party are not going to come from Washington, put in somebody that does not get up in the morning and go to work in Washington every day."
Early promise
Chismar heard about Buttigieg long before she had him in class.
“I remember one of the English teachers told him, `You’re going to have to change that name if you’re going to run for president,’” said Chismar, who has volunteered for all of Buttigieg’s campaigns. “If you’ve heard him speak, he captures your attention.”
Although Buttigieg was senior class president, the career he initially envisioned in high school wasn’t politics but an airline pilot. He loved technology and loved to travel, including to his father’s native Malta, where Buttigieg is a common last name. Being a pilot seemed like “good, honest work.”
Buttigieg’s parents — both professors at the University of Notre Dame — weren’t politically connected, but they were politically conscious. Dinner table talk covered world events. Between those conversations and the social consciousness he developed through the Catholic social teachings at St. Joseph’s and from being involved with Amnesty International, Buttigieg decided “I had to go out and make myself useful.”
But first, he penned the winning entry for the 2000 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Essay Contest for high school students. His chosen hero? Bernie Sanders.
Buttigieg said he saw Sanders as someone who was passionate about his beliefs without concern for political consequences, yet still able to work with others.
“I thought it was an interesting lesson that often being strong in your convictions makes you actually better able to work with people on the other side,” Buttigieg said, “because even if your values are different, they know that you’re driven by values, and you have that in common.”
Buttigieg, however, endorsed Clinton, not Sanders, in the 2016 presidential race.
“I still think it was really important and a positive thing when he got in,” Buttigieg says of Sanders. “I just felt she was the person I most wanted to be president.”
At Harvard, Buttigieg studied history and literature while being involved in the Harvard Institute of Politics and working on political campaigns.
When he drove former Rep. Jill Long Thompson to events for her 2002 campaign, Buttigieg impressed her as someone both very bright and gifted, but also down to earth.
“I found that people of all ages just took to him,” Long Thompson said. “He just always has stood out.”
After studying politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar, Buttigieg worked for McKinsey, the management strategy consulting firm. He loved the work and the travel, he said, but ultimately needed more of a sense of purpose.
Becoming a candidate
In 2010 he ran for state treasurer, a down-ballot race which would have been an uphill battle for any unknown Indiana Democrat even before a backlash to President Barack Obama and the rise of the tea party made it a banner GOP year.
He got clobbered: 35.7 percent to Republican Richard Mourdock’s 62.5 percent.
“That was how I really learned politics,” Buttigieg said.
When he told Chismar that he planned to run for mayor in 2011, her mind flashed to the recent news that a discount clothing chain was closing its South Bend distribution center, letting go about 700 workers. The city made Newsweek’s list of top 10 dying cities that year.
“I said,`Oh my gosh, Peter!'” she remembers. “He said, `Well, you know me. I like a challenge.’”
The contest in the Democratic city would be decided in the primary and, as in the DNC race, Buttigieg was not the favorite.
“Certainly he caught local attention very quickly and rose to the top in a way I don’t think most political observers anticipated when people first heard — and learned to pronounce — his last name,” said Elizabeth Bennion, a political science professor at Indiana University-South Bend.
He won the backing of the local chamber of commerce, the first time the business group endorsed a mayoral candidate.
“You will see people in South Bend from both sides of the aisle who have supported me, not because I’ve tried to shoot the middle ideologically, but because we’ve delivered, got things done,” he said.
Buttigieg dominated the primary and, at 29, became the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100,000 residents.
He’d argued during the campaign that the high-paying manufacturing jobs that used to be available before the Studebaker car company closed its doors were not coming back, but there was a better way to prosper. The city still makes things, he said. But now workers are making sophisticated things, and there are industries that didn’t exist when the last Studebaker rolled off the line, such as data analytic centers.
He promised to repair or demolish 1,000 vacant properties in 1,000 days. He’s tried to create a more vibrant downtown through streetscape improvements and changing driving patterns. And he’s tried to boost civic pride through public art, a contest to redesign the city flag and performing with the South Bend Symphony.
(To get ready for his piano solo in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the former student piano player took lessons with a world-class pianist and practiced every day for six months. Afraid he would miss a day because of a trip to Florida to go to a football game, Buttigieg rolled his suitcase up to the piano bar in O’Hare International Airport at 5:30 a.m. and sat down to play.)
Bennion said Buttigieg became an important leader in a symbolic way.
“Here is someone who is young and smart and has a world of opportunity available to him, and he chose to come home and work to make his hometown the best it could be,” she said. “That attracted some other young professionals, some of whom he personally recruited here, and others who came as other young professionals and social entrepreneurs and developers have decided to stake a claim here and work on improving the city.”
National attention
In 2014, The Washington Post called Buttigieg “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of.”
He was challenged for re-election, though, in the 2015 Democratic primary by Henry Davis Jr., an African-American on the common council who said some residents felt they were being marginalized or left behind by the changes Buttigieg was bringing to the city.
In endorsing Buttigeig for a second term, the South Bend Tribune praised the renewed energy he’d brought to the city, but said it remained to be seen whether knocking down houses and changing traffic patterns would spur development. And, the paper said, Buttigieg needed to boost his standing with the city’s African-Americans, in part because of a controversy over secretly recorded tapes of police officers which occurred before Buttigieg took office but led to some criticism over how he handled the situation. The tapes allegedly recorded officers making racist comments and talking about breaking the law.
Bennion said Buttigieg has tried to address those concerns, but there hasn’t been a lot of criticism because “people can see visible improvements.”
Buttigieg won the primary with 78 percent. He defeated his GOP challenger with 80 percent of the vote, months after writing a public essay in the local paper announcing he’s gay, called: “Why Coming out Matters.”
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni opined last year that Buttigieg could become the first gay president.
After last year’s election, Obama — who has not endorsed a candidate for DNC chair — included Buttigieg in a list of gifted Democratic politicians new to the scene.
But Pete Seat, spokesman for the Indiana Republican Party, said Buttigieg is running to head the DNC because he knows he can’t move up to a higher office in a red state.
“This is an extremely ambitious individual who realized that his political trajectory had no path forward in Indiana and he needed to find an exit plan,” Seat said. “If the goal is for Democrats to lose more important seats, I guess he would be the best pick. If the goal is to win, they should pick a winner, someone who has actually won outside of a blue city.”
Among the up to 10 candidates seeking to lead the DNC, Perez has the most high-profile backer — former Vice President Joe Biden — and he and Ellison have the most endorsements.
But four past DNC chairs have endorsed Buttigieg, the most of any candidate.
Even though Andrew was one of the endorsers, neither he nor Dean think the race will turn on endorsements.
The number of DNC members voting is small enough — 447 — that the candidates can talk to most of them individually, in addition to speaking at the four regional forums which lead up to the vote.
“It’s going to be much more of a gut thing about personality,” Andrew said.
Despite Buttigieg’s late start, he’s applying the same energy and commitment to reaching out to every DNC member as he did to visiting nearly all of Indiana’s 92 counties for his uphill race for state treasurer, and to learning the “Rhapsody in Blue” piano solo for his South Bend Symphony appearance.
“We’re chewing through the list,” Buttigieg said of his goal of reaching every DNC member. “I’ll just keep calling until I do.”
Contact Maureen Groppe at mgroppe@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter: @mgroppe.
Name: Pete Buttigieg
Age: 35
Born: South Bend.
Home: South Bend.
Education: Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, 2004; honors degree from Oxford University, 2007, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Professional experience: Conference director for The Cohen Group, 2004-05; consultant at McKinsey and Co., 2007-10.
Military experience: Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve, 2009-present, including 2014 tour in Afghanistan.
Political experience: Policy and research specialist for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign; adviser to Jill Long Thompson’s 2008 gubernatorial campaign; 2010 Democratic nominee for state treasurer; mayor of South Bend, 2012- present.