Pete Buttigieg's Case Against ‘return To Normal’

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — When you fly into this summer destination, Up North in Michigan parlance, you arrive at the Cherry Capital Airport. Drive over to the shores of Grand Traverse Bay, and there's a flower bed designed to appear as three cherries hanging from a branch. And you want to take in a minor league baseball game? Well, you'll be going to see the "Pit Spitters" (the cherry logo is spitting out a baseball, not its own pit).

So you'll be not at all surprised to learn that when I came to Traverse last week to chat with Pete Buttigieg for the latest episode of "On the Road," we indulged in the local delicacy. We hit the vaunted Moomers for some Cherries Moobilee — a decadent mix of cherries, chocolate and more cherries.

It met the hype.

That, of course, is the question hanging over Buttigieg himself: If he goes for a second Pete for President campaign — can he match the hype again?

It is, Buttigieg suggested, not easy to capture lightning in a bottle twice. He'll never be a thirtysomething mayor who vaults from nowhere (no offense, Domers!) into contention.

Experience, though, has its advantages. Running for president once and running a major federal agency, as he did at the Department of Transportation, has expanded his network, deepened friendships and opened his eyes to how politics works at the highest levels.

That's part of his challenge, however. Buttigieg is a bit like a doctor able to diagnose himself. The last six years, combined with his native grasp and long study of the political game, present his obstacles in stark relief.

One of those is whether his measured manner works in an era that rewards provocation. Buttigieg's bet seems to be that his dedication to a suite of structural reforms will elevate his candidacy — and that his party and the country crave two sorts of change. There's the substance he's promoting — expanding the Supreme Court, for example — but implicit is the break from bombast to a calm, articulate and multilingual Midwestern striver by way of Harvard and a Rhodes.

It would be, to borrow the formulation of David Axelrod, one of Buttigieg's early mentors, the ultimate remedy-not-a-replica succession to Donald Trump.

Whether that bet pays off is an open question — and one that shaped much of our conversation. We also discussed if he was born too late, if being gay has helped or hurt his rise and whether he could connect with voters of color this time around. Oh, and I caught up with some of the beauties that put the "moo" in Moomers.

You can watch the full video on YouTube or listen to it as a podcast. 

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So a Hoosier here in the Mitten State. We're here on the banks. You can see it: the Grand Traverse Bay. You couldn't put this in a bottle and make it any more pure Michigan. 

And Pete, I hope that you brought your ballot with you because I told your folks, "Make sure he brings out his filled-out Michigan primary ballot." I know you're a Michigan voter here, so we get the full tight shot of who you're picking. But in all seriousness, this is gonna be one of the marquee races in the country — the Senate race here. Have you decided yet who you're voting for? 

I'm gonna keep that in the ballot box.

Oh my gosh!

I'll tell you why. It is important to me that I play a good role in helping the party come together. We're one of those states that's got an unusually late primary, right? I came up with spring primaries; in Indiana, it's May. I got used to that.

Obviously, it's a very spirited primary, right? Which means you've got just a few weeks to get everybody on the same page. I want to be part of that. And so, the less I run my mouth about how I'm going to vote, the better role I can play afterwards and bring everybody in.

But it sounds like you have decided; you just don’t want to say.

Yeah.

Fair enough. Is it just me or is this race like a continuation of the decade-long Bernie versus Hillary primary? Are you guys ever going to get rid of that primary dynamic? 

There's always going to be some flavor of that, and that's not just since Bernie versus Hillary, but it's before Bernie versus Hillary, too. I think the only big difference is there were some seasons where that dynamic was playing out within the party. I remember Bill Bradley, but also sometimes then it kind of pulls all the way outside the party, because I remember Ralph Nader. And I'd rather have those fights within the primary, within the party.

So you want to play a role and bring the party back together. But let's be honest, though, this could be a tough general no matter who wins the election because Mike Rogers is sitting on a pile of money. He’ll have even more money, especially if Abdul wins the nomination. Is there a scenario where you guys get close to the Senate majority and you lose because this is the one state in the country you lose? 

It would definitely be a big mistake to take the state for granted. I mean, obviously, it's known as a purple state — it’s a swing state, it's a close state. There's a reason Mike Rogers was defeated last time he ran for Senate, but that also means he has all the batting practice of having just run a very tight and intense Senate race, and we've got to be prepared to compete with that. Look, I think that we will win because he's disqualified himself with his votes. This is a state full of working-class people who I think were hurt by the agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and service cuts for everybody else. He voted against the Affordable Care Act. A lot of voters here, a lot of my neighbors here, members of my extended family here, get their healthcare because of something that he voted against. So I think the message is strong, but obviously it's gonna be close. It's gonna be a very close race.

Somebody told me that your friend Debbie Stabenow — the former senior senator, the person who beat the last Republican to win a Senate race here, she beat Spence Abraham, of course, in 2000 — encouraged you to run for the Senate when she was stepping down. Of course, Sen. Slotkin ultimately ran and won. But tell me about that. And were you tempted to ever leave DOT to come back here and run for the Senate? 

You know, there was a second where I thought about it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't.

But she encouraged you, right?

I don't want to get into the inside baseball stuff. Let me put it this way: She's always been encouraging in my development as a Michigan Democrat since we became Michigan residents. What I realized pretty quickly was that I belonged at the DOT. That's what I should be doing: doubling down on the work there. But when those seats opened up last year for governor and for Senate, I took a hard look at each of them and decided for overlapping but different reasons that I shouldn't run.

Which was more tempting for you, the governor race or Senate race?

I cut my teeth as an executive, right? And I think when you have the mentality of a mayor, it is more natural for you to imagine what you would like to do as governor. And the governor of Michigan works on a whole set of issues I care about a lot, from the future of the Great Lakes to the trajectory of our cities, to infrastructure, transportation technology — the whole picture of the industrial Midwest.

So why not do it? 

I was pretty new here. I had some humility about that. I didn't see myself standing up on a stage.

You had humility as a politician? Wow!

This is the Midwest!

There you go. That's true. 

We've been residents here for a few years, but obviously a lot of that was spending a lot of time in Washington. I'm here because of family; I married into Michigan. But the idea of being on a stage so soon after having moved here and trying to explain why it's gotta be me and not these other folks who've been doing good work in the state for a long time, it didn’t [feel right].

From a bigger picture standpoint: What does this Senate race tell us about the party and the sort of insurgent forces in the party, and really the power of populism, but also just the power of being fed up with institutions and the establishment? It reminds me an awful lot of the 2010 cycle in which Republicans were so mad at their leaders for losing to Barack Obama, and they just wanted to burn the whole place down. 

I think there's something really important at stake here that is only imperfectly captured by the left versus center, or insider versus outsider, or establishment versus insurgent, or even the generational cuts. All of those are there. They layer on top of a lot of these races. But to me, the most important thing is — are we demonstrating a readiness to be focused on building what's next or are we basically preaching some version of “return to normal”? “Return to normal,” in my view, won't work. One way to say I'm not a “return to normal” is to present the idea that looks furthest left, because that makes you, in a certain way, seem bold. I don't think it's the only way to be bold. And so, I think it is really important to not let it lapse into a “left versus center” thing, when the most important question to me is, are we gonna try to sell some version of a previous status quo? If MAGA is about getting us back to the 50s, or some moment when they feel America was great-

1850s? 

I mean, some of them. There's a risk that there's an unspoken Democratic assumption that we're trying to take us back to … I don't know what, is it 2012, is it 1992, is it 2021? Whatever it is, we can't go there. We shouldn't try, we shouldn't want to. What I really worry about is if we win — or when we win in November, which I'm working hard to make sure I support — is there this kind of muscle memory in the party? This powerful inertia that immediately puts us in the mode of “reverse the damage”? And I'm trying to purge my vocabulary of anything with the prefix of re- in it, anything with the word “back” in it. I don't think now is the time to be talking about Build Back Better. Build Better — I don’t want to even talk about “back.”

Well, that was the slogan of Joe Biden in 2020. You think the world has changed, the party's changed since then?

Yeah, I mean, if that could have worked, it would have worked.

And what does that tell you about the possibilities of incremental progressive change? I mean that's a pretty remarkable thing you just said. The Biden experiment — that the country wants to go back to normal and that accomplishments and progressive incremental gains will bring folks back to the coalition — didn't work. 

When I ran for president in 2020, competing against that vision, I was arguing for something that was more about bigger swings and a bolder outlook.

You were.

I didn't win, right? Joe Biden defeated me and 20 other people in the primary. But I actually think, even more now than what I thought eight years ago, we've got to have an approach that recognizes all the ways in which there's no going back. And many of the things that they demolished, from USAID to the Department of Education, I don't think it's possible or desirable to just try to reconstruct them just the way they used to look.

Let me ask about your future. The DNC has released what we think will be a version of the calendar that you would have to run through if you run for president again. It appears to begin with South Carolina and Nevada, two states that have large populations of working-class Black folks, working-class Hispanic folks — the kind of voters who you struggled with when you ran for president in 2020. Do you think you'll do better with those kinds of voters if you run again, and if so, why?

First off, I'll say, because I don't want to get right into punditry, even with you….

I can handle that part.

First of all, I think South Carolina coming first — it represents a really important response to the systematic effort to demolish Black power that we've seen going on, especially after the Voting Rights Act, the Callais Supreme Court decision.

And I also think the way you phrased the question is part of what excites me. I think whoever wants to run for president, and basically whoever wants to pull together a national movement of any kind, should be focused on appealing broadly to working-class voters in ways that speak to the Black experience, speak to what Latino voters are going through, but also is not trying to just treat one constituency group like it is a completely separate group from another group. I think that style of politics in our party peaked in 2019-2020.

Would you call that “peak woke”?

Woke makes it kind of left to center; it's not just that. I mean like a style that just tried to carve people up into constituencies and get to them one at a time.

Right, slicing and dicing. Barack Obama in ’04 called that, in his speech, “slicing and dicing” Americans. 

Part of what will happen in 2028 is that a lot will depend on candidates for president — the party as a whole — showing they have a message that resonates with different specific experiences that people have for specific reasons but has kind of a cross-cutting effect.

But why would you do better with some of the traditional core groups of the Democratic Party that you struggled with in the previous campaign for president? Are you a different person now, do you think? Do you have more to offer?

I'm the same person, but I think anybody who runs for president, who has run for president before, will show or need to show how they've grown and what they've learned since last time. Whether I run or not, one thing that's true for me that wasn't true eight years ago is that when I go into any state, certainly a state like South Carolina, I now go with experience and relationships based on what I've delivered for that state.

The first time I showed up in South Carolina, I was in uniform. But the first time I showed up there as a politician, it was asking for something, right? The last few times that I've shown up there as an officeholder, it was offering something, engaging everything from the port in Charleston to the road work in Orangeburg, and I just have a different relationship to every state in the country now than I did before. And as I'm doing my work now just as a surrogate, I've been to 30 states since leaving the Cabinet. I have just a different way of connecting to folks who were there because now it's not just looking around or offering myself up, it's following up on the things we delivered. Even here, the town where I live, there's road projects here that I help bring about that connect me to the community in a different way than before.

Do you ever have moments of reflection where you say, "You know what, I may have caught lightning in a bottle in 2019 and 2020. That could be hard to get back, and this is going to be a difficult campaign." Or do you think that you've learned so much from that campaign that "No, the second time, the third time, this is gonna be easier for me"? 

Well, you only get to explode onto the scene once. So much of what that campaign was like in 2019 and 2020 was, on one hand, capturing the magic of just being this person who nobody really knew about or cared about, and then developing the movement that we did. But also, of course, that meant we were laying the track in front of the train as we went.

It is different when you know what it's like to run for president, and when you've had that experience before. Does that make it easy? I don't know that it's ever been easy for anybody to seriously contend for the presidency. But it's definitely different when you're not tasting all of those experiences or going through all of those motions or visiting all of those communities for the first time.

Looking back at your political rise, has being gay net-helped you or net-hurt you? 

I'm probably too close to it to be somebody who can really say. I know that there were times when I thought it would be the end of my political career, or that I wouldn't have one at all. And then there were many times when I felt I could walk into a room or walk into the state and have it not matter at all, and obviously what I would like to get to–

At times where it helped too?

I mean, it definitely helped people recognize or care about what I was trying to do in a different way.

It gave you a newness. You were something different, right? 

I mean, I was something different in lots of ways, right? I was the mayor from Indiana in his 30s.

And not Indianapolis!

And not in Indianapolis, no, the fourth largest city in Indiana. But, yeah, I'd like to think there are a lot of different dimensions to the newness of what I had to offer. But I think it helped explain … so much of my story then and now is about belonging. And it can sound a little touchy-feely. I actually think the hunger for belonging is a huge part of what drives the Trump-Vance energy too. I think Vance is all about belonging, which is mostly in terms of who you can exclude. But still, there's a lot of that, right? And when I talked about belonging, it was easier for some people to know what I meant or to know that I meant it because I could share what it was like trying to belong everywhere, from Democratic politics to my own Indiana community, as somebody who was gay.

It gave you a way, but more importantly, it gave you a connective tissue to people who, maybe they were straight, but they were having their own issues with connection and trying to fit in and trying to find their way forward. 

Yeah, because the story I told wasn't just about what it's like to be gay in Indiana. It was about what it’s like to know that there are some things that just put you on the outside, and try to work through those or across those or against those to belong. And that's something that I think affects people in so many different ways. There’s a struggle for belonging for a lot of workers who have been thrown out of a certain career halfway through it and are trying to adjust to a new professional identity.

If you ultimately don't become president and still have a sterling political career, do you think that'll be just because the country wasn't ready? 

There are so many reasons that any given person is not the president of the United States. I don't think you can pick one. I don’t even know how to come at that.

You recently had this awful incident here in which somebody who — I think we have since found out — is sort of mentally ill, called the authorities, and you and your husband had to be separated from your kids for a terrible period of time. I think most folks watching know about what happened, and I don't want to relitigate it. What does that tell you about the state of American politics today?

As I've talked about and written about — it's the most messed up thing that has happened to us as a family since I got into public life, or to me since I've gotten into public life. A lot of incidents that have happened, including ones where the kind of political climate we're in overlaps with somebody being disturbed, it's this toxic brew that I'm worried we're kind of used to. But I'll tell you the other side of it, which is a lot of people spoke out and reached out, not just political allies, but people I campaigned against, in a way that I hope can validate the idea that most of us, obviously not all of us, but most just believe in some basic boundaries. If leaving people's kids out of it can't be a basic boundary, then we’ve got nothing.

I do think it's symptomatic of where we're at, and we've seen so many forms of politics getting uglier. I think that's part of what people are really ready to get beyond, in a way that's not terribly partisan. Obviously, I can tell you all kinds of reasons why I believe the Trump era has produced an extra ugly level of ugliness. And I think most people — Democrats, independents and Republicans, including Washington Republicans — once you turn the camera off, will agree to that. But this is not just a partisan plan. It's just a thing about what it's like to live in America. That can change. That has to change. I think we're ready to change.

We haven't reached the bottom yet, you don't think?

God, I hope so. I mean, I don't know what else it would take. How long has it been since it came down the escalator now? Eleven years, 12 years?

June of 2015.

So 11 years. And I mark that as, again, he's as much symptom as cause, but I do mark that as the beginning of this era where the ugliest things have become normalized, and it can't go on like that.

But don't you think ’28 is still an election about him and about this moment?

It’ll be a response to him, for sure. But I think it will represent a chance to fully turn the page and have something different. It doesn't mean that's what we're guaranteed to do, but it means it's what I'm trying to get at.

But he's the best unifier you guys have. I mean, if it was up to a lot of folks in your party, you guys would keep running against Trump for 20 years; he'd be Hoover. 

Yeah, but that's pretty thin, as his popularity sinks. I know there's some political advantage to that, but in many ways, that very fact can cause a problem by making us think we're relieved of having to generate ideas.

You’re talking to a lot of Democrats out there. Do they want to move on from 2024? It wasn't a great year.

And we definitely don't want to go back to reliving it.

Would nominating Kamala Harris effectively be reliving 2024?

Not necessarily.

It wouldn't? She was the nominee in ’24.

Yeah, but like I said, there are plenty of cases where somebody's run for president more than once. I don't think anybody views the two times John McCain ran for president or the three times Joe Biden ran for president — I don't think anybody viewed one of those as reliving another one of those. The world changes, politics changes, people change, we all grow.

You don't think 2024 was uniquely traumatic for the Democratic Party?

Oh, it was. Of course it was.

I think you're being nice and polite to somebody because you're trying to be a good soldier, but I don't totally get it because she used her book to throw an elbow at you and didn't give you a heads up about it, I don't think. I mean, you know what she wrote in the book about you. She said, "I couldn't pick him. I thought he wasn’t ready for that. If I was a white guy who was straight, I would have done it, but I wasn't."

So you're doing her a solid when she didn't do you many. 

Look, this is about bigger things than whether somebody gets their feelings hurt by a page in a book somewhere. This is about the trajectory of Western civilization.

You sound like Stephen Miller now, Pete. “Western civilization”? Wow.

Yeah, with a little less ideological gibberish, maybe. But one thing I'd say about Stephen Miller, whose politics I think are grotesque–

I assumed so.

But he appreciates the stakes of the moment. Right? I think maybe to a fault. I think that's why he's so hardcore as an ideologue. But some of the stuff that's going on right now is a test of, not just right or left, not even just the democratic model. Some of what's going on right now is a test of the Enlightenment, which has been a pretty important thing for the last four or five hundred years.

There's bigger stakes, right.

The reason I ask about the Kamala question is because, you know the history of your party, Democrats tend to move on. And they can be pretty bloodless about it. They tend to go forward, not back. What I'm getting at is that, when it comes to you, your bet is you're going to be tomorrow and not going to be caught up in yesterday. Because that's the history of the party, right? They tend to look for the new, the fresh, tomorrow, at least when they win, whether it’s Obama, Clinton, Carter or JFK. Biden ’20 being the exception, you lived through that because the whole point was to stop Bernie, beat Trump and Covid-19 — a bit of an exception that proves the rule. But I guess your bet is that "I'm still part of the wave of the future. I'm not gonna be calling up in the party that 'was,' and I'm not a part of the bad ol’ days that were the Biden ’24 debacle.’" 

I remember the first moment (maybe two or three years into my time as mayor, I was maybe 31 or 32) when I began to realize that when people were talking about storming City Hall and taking on the Man — which was kind of my energy coming in — some of them meant me. If you have a mentality sometimes of an insurgent, and then sometimes you're an incumbent, you're trying to square those things and make sense of it. I think that I have a much better grasp of just how much things need to change from having spent four years working or trying to work within the system as it is. There's no question that when I ran for president as a sitting mayor, I was, frankly, using my imagination to understand some of what was going on in Washington. Now, I went there for four years. I wasn't sitting behind a desk in Washington for most of that time, but I was in the federal government. I saw what worked; I saw what doesn't. And obviously that gives me, not just as a matter of political positioning, but in terms of how I think about the world, a different outlook.

Pete Buttigieg, on that note, I think we're gonna go find some cherry ice cream here in Traverse City.

Yes, we are.

Michigan, most folks who aren't from here, they think Detroit. Here's the thing about Michigan though, it is sprawling and it's really an ag-heavy state. Traverse City, this is known as the cherry capital of the world, and they have made that into what may be some of the best ice cream in the country, at least the Midwest, here at Moomers. 

So you guys came out here winter of ‘21, straight after D.C., right? 

Yeah, we actually got the place in the summer of 2020. And we didn't think of it as home until after the kids came on the scene. We began to understand how important being close to Chasten’s family was going to be to us. And by then, I'd sold the South Bend house. So this became home.

And that was the idea, right? That Chasten grew up here, his folks are here. So you guys kind of put down roots here. Kids are here, yeah. So you're here, man, you're a Michigander now.

This is home. It was great. It was different. I was a mayor. I'm an urbanist. Even a small city is a city, and I'm a creature of that world, but this is pretty easy to get used to. Folks here have been great. It's a great community, a great place to have our kids.

Well, and obviously as a former DOT secretary, the important question is: Are you gonna get more nonstop flights out of Traverse City? There's seasonal flights here now during the summer.

So far, so good. When I was secretary, this was one of the hundreds of airports in the U.S. that got improvements, including new jet bridges, because they're growing, getting a lot more traffic. One airline official told me that the Chicago to Traverse City route at one time was the fastest-growing domestic route in the country. I don't know if that's still true, but lots of people want to be here. It's a really great place. And of course, I'm too new to grumble like a local about all of the newcomers, but you do hope that the community can accommodate a lot more people coming here. But the population of Traverse City is about 15,000 people, so it's a small community surrounded by rural areas. We love it.

Well, Pete, thanks for the tour. Thanks for the incredible selection of ice cream here.