Pete Buttigieg, born in Indiana in 1982, is currently serving his second term as mayor of South Bend. A dynamic national lecturer and TEDx speaker, as well as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy veteran, Buttigieg was educated at Harvard and Oxford. He and his husband, Chasten Glezman, live in South Bend, Indiana.His new book is Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future.
From Buttigieg's Q&A with David Remnick for The New Yorker:
David Remnick: Mr. Mayor, I have to begin with a kind of good-news, sort of bad-news question. One day after Barack Obama met, that one time, with Donald Trump, I had an interview with the outgoing President, in the Oval Office. It went for a couple of hours. The White House was like a funeral parlor. We talked a long time about the election just past. And, at one point, I said, “Mr. President, what do you have on the bench? What does the Democratic Party have on the bench?” And he did a long kind of Obamaian pause, and then he said, “Well, there’s Kamala Harris, in California.” And I think he kind of made a routine mention of Tim Kaine, and then he said, “And then there’s that guy in South Bend, Indiana. The mayor. I think he was a Rhodes Scholar,” he said, and then he couldn’t quite place the name, or maybe he didn’t dare try to pronounce it. What’s been your relationship with Barack Obama?--Marshal Zeringue
Pete Buttigieg: You know, I first spent a little time with him when he travelled to South Bend. He was on his way to Elkhart—Elkhart County, as you know, the R.V. capital of the country, and something of a bellwether economically, and went through horrible circumstances in the Great Recession. And so he was coming toward the end of his Presidency, to take a bit of a victory lap and remind everybody how successful the auto rescue had been, because Elkhart was doing great by the end of his term, and they had arranged for me to spend some time with him in the vehicle as he went from South Bend airport over to Elkhart—about a half-hour that we got to chat. It’s the only time in my life I wished that commute would be longer instead of shorter. And that was the first time, other than a handshake or a photo, that I’d really visited with him. But really, you know, obviously, I admire him, and really admired a lot of...[read on]