President Pete?

Packages by Expedia.

You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

We were made to easily bundle your trip.

Expedia.

Made to travel.

Flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This time, 12 years ago in 2007, there was a big Democratic Party dinner in Iowa, and all the candidates running for president spoke, but the breakout performance was by a guy named Barack Obama, whose candidacy quickly started to take off from there.

Well, this time around, there's a guy named Pete Buttigieg, also young, also inexperienced in the way that you'd think of traditionally for presidents.

Also, seemingly on the cusp of a breakout moment.

This Friday, he'll be one of 14 candidates headed to that dinner.

But we caught up in Washington at the beginning of the week.

I wanted to get to him before Iowa to talk about this crazy candidacy that he has.

I was there that first day when he announced his exploratory committee.

No one, including him, could have guessed that it would have gotten to this point.

But here we are.

Take a listen.

So Pete Put Judge, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Cool.

So

coming here today, I was thinking about the day that you launched your exploratory committee, which was a couple of blocks away,

third floor of a Hyatt Place hotel that you

went to basically because it was close to the White House so you get reporters to pay attention to.

But that happened in the middle of a really difficult week in your life

with your father.

And you'd left your father in the hospital in South Bend, announced your exploratory committee, went back,

and then

he died that weekend.

It's been a wild campaign.

That was not that long ago.

It was January.

What was that week like?

Well, it was,

I guess I could best describe it as a kind of out-of-body experience a lot of the time.

My dad had been ill, I think it was over the weekend before I announced that he went into the ICU for what would prove to be his final hospitalization.

But we were also communicating his mind was there and he wanted to

see me do this.

I considered delaying the trip or delaying the announcement.

It was intended to be at the U.S.

Conference of

that I was going to be at anyway in Washington.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And that was the other trick of it: it was the conference of mayors was going on a block away, so that's how you made sure the reporters would pay attention to this guy announcing.

Yeah, well,

we made sure we were in the right place at the right time.

But also for him to be able to see that, to follow along, as family members were filling him in.

But it meant, of course, that as soon as I'd made my announcement, we headed back and

we lost him a few days later.

And it's been pretty non-stop since.

So

many things changed in my life this year.

Losing my father, maybe the biggest personally,

but also in the middle of a new marriage.

I think six months passed between our wedding day and when I announced the exploratory.

And then all of the things that go with running for president.

It's tough to say what it's like with any kind of meaningful critical distance because you're just in it.

You're just going.

But what I will say is that it I think helped me see the meaning of what I was doing too.

You know,

health is one of these things that is an abstract discussion in policy until you're thinking of somebody you love in the middle of an experience with our health care system, good, bad, or indifferent.

And it was one of many things that reminded me that the ups and downs of our lives are tied up in the ups and downs of political decisions, not just for somebody running for office, but for everybody, for Americans.

And it put me in touch with why all of these things matter.

And I think that's how I tried to make sense of these two very big and very different things going on in my life.

Aaron Powell, you got a chance for him to see the coverage of the launch and for him to know my son is running for president.

What was the reaction from him to that?

I mean, it wasn't a surprise to him that you had announced.

No, we'd been building up to this effort.

But, you know, like any father, he was proud, he was excited.

And

I'm glad he was at least able to see that.

You told me in the spring that there were days where you still felt like you wanted to email him an article.

Yeah.

And that was a couple months after, three months maybe after he died.

Do you still feel that?

Yeah, I still feel that.

And there's still moments where I run into somebody and I'm like, oh, I got to tell dad about that.

Or just wonder what he would think of some development or something going on in the news.

And of course, in many ways,

he's still

there, just a different way.

Yeah.

The unreal last eight months that you've had

makes me think about the the way that you have cast forward to what would happen if you were the president or if anybody's the president.

You have this line that is imagine that day when Trump's no longer president and the sun will come up and

we'll still be divided as a country.

We'll be more divided as a country and that

let me see, the way you say it is that like we'll need somebody to pick the pieces up.

Right.

To me that leads to the question of why anybody should think that a guy who has been the mayor of a small city and doesn't have a lot of experience could be the one to pick the pieces up.

Well, that's sort of the point,

is that we're going to need the ability to turn the page,

a certain level of,

frankly, immunity from

years and years of being in the Washington way of doing things, because

that's part of what got us here.

The failures of our political establishment

that were very cynically exploited by this president helped bring us to this point.

And one of the reasons I ask Americans to picture that day, what it will be like when the sun comes up over this country after Trump, is not just the hope associated with the idea of the Trump presidency ending, but also an awareness that the Trump presidency ending doesn't fix any of these big problems.

It fixes one problem, but

Trumpism will still be with us.

The issues around getting everybody health care and preparing for the climate crisis and ensuring the economy actually works for everybody will still be with us.

And we'll be that much more divided as a country.

This is going to take a lot.

And it's going to take a new approach.

And

we can walk through why I believe my experience as a mayor and the experience of a mayor of any size, a city of any size, is actually highly relevant compared to experience on Capitol Hill to being president.

But the bigger point is that it's going to take something a little different from what we've been used to in Washington.

But this is, it would be crazy to

make a mayor of a small city the president in normal circumstances.

This is an abnormal circumstance.

This is when the government,

if a Democrat is elected, will need to be restructured and rebuilt in a way that is more in line with what Democrats believe in.

Probably that would be true if a Republican after Trump were and just in the...

Yeah, and it needs to be restructured in line with what Americans believe in because we're not really seeing that reflected in the, frankly, a lot of the approaches and structures that have built up over the course of my lifetime.

I mean, to me, what we're dealing with is the failures of a Reagan era that I think continues almost to this day, that it started in 1980 and it continued all the way through the election of Trump.

And now we've got to decide what the next turn of the page is going to look like.

And frankly,

why?

Because of

that government?

We started seeing this dismantling of

institutions that really

not only lift up our economy in terms of the investments that we made and ought to make in education and health and infrastructure, but also it turns out had a big cost for our social structures.

The attack on organized labor, the beginnings of the attack on public education, have not only had direct economic impacts, they have deprived us of sources of commonality that used to cut across political boundaries.

I guess my bigger point is these kinds of moments where we need to reimagine where we are are very often led by new generation leaders in American history and in world history.

And I think it's very much a moment that calls for something besides the idea of a return to normal, because we're going to have to design a whole new and much better normal than we've had.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, you know, the line on you is the most votes you've won is 10,000 in your first election.

You're a little bit lower than that in your second election.

I got hundreds of thousands of votes when I ran for treasurer.

I just didn't win.

That's right.

But in a winning election,

between your two races for mayor, you got fewer than 20,000 votes.

That is to people, they say, okay, well,

you are the epitome to some people of white male privilege saying, oh, I haven't done bigger things and now I want to be the president.

Well, I think, first of all, the idea that it's about previous elections is an exquisitely Washington mindset.

And

when it comes to identity, I am very mindful of the privileges that go with being white and with being male.

I also

have the experience of belonging to a category of people in America that would have been assumed to be effectively ineligible for the presidency as recently as five years ago.

And I also know that my rights were brought to me by not just the activism of LGBT people like me, but the allies who are not at all like me.

It's one of the things that propels me to make sure I'm a good ally to people who are different now.

But I'm not running for president because I got up one day and thought it would be nice.

I'm running because our country and our presidency need something different than what is being offered by the figures who have cut their teeth in Washington.

And I'm mindful that there's probably not been any time in the history of the Republic when somebody like me doing something like this would be a fit or would be taken seriously.

But I think the fact that we have built the kind of support that it takes to go from being the mayor of South Bend with an exploratory committee in January to being among the top handful of presidential contenders reflects that what I have to offer meets this moment.

And it's the same

understanding and belief that makes me, I believe, suited for what the presidency is going to require in this moment, which is the ability to pick up the pieces, the ability to turn the page, and a certain freedom from the temptation to go back to an old normal that was not serving us very well.

Yeah, I had a conversation with John Kerry about a year ago where I said to him, listen, you were Secretary of State.

There must be some things that you thought should have been changed in the State Department.

even though you don't agree with anything that Trump is doing.

And he said, well, we produced a big report when I was Secretary.

And I said, okay, but you didn't do anything with the report.

Now maybe there is an opportunity to change things up.

Even for people who dislike the Trump presidency so much,

that's maybe the silver line.

Absolutely.

Look, they blew everything up, which means that there is a chance to build something new and better on the rubble.

I mean, not to over-dramatize it, but I think about

areas where

buildings have been destroyed in the world and then architecture of a new kind flourishes on top of it.

I think especially in things like the ranks of

our civil service, the State Department and DOJ probably being the ones where people are the most demoralized, but really across our government, there is a chance to redesign things because they've been smashed to bits.

It doesn't mean it was good that they were smashed to bits.

It means that we have a responsibility to be a little more creative than saying, okay, let's try to put it back, glue it back to just the way it was.

But I was talking to someone who has been a governor more than one term who said

to me,

you know, I'm so much better at being a governor after that first term than I was at the beginning, right?

Doesn't it seem daunting to you that you'd come into the presidency with all of that?

Look, any human being ought to be daunted by the presidency, even in the best of times.

And I'm very mindful of how much more skilled I became at being a mayor in my second term than in my first.

But

this is not like any other job.

This is a job that is about setting a tone not only for the American government, but for the American people.

And it's going to require a level of imagination and a level of humility, frankly,

that makes it possible to see forward.

Look, nobody is going to have an easy time wandering into the Oval Office and assuming these responsibilities.

But I also think among the people seeking this job, I have presented the right vision and I've established how my life prepares me to do this.

We're going to take a quick break.

We'll be back with more with Pete Buttijudge in a moment.

CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships.

Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much.

Which means you may have sunk a fortune into software software that just bounces customer issues around but never actually solves them.

On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.

With AI built into one platform, customers aren't mired in endless loops of automated indifference.

They get what they need when they need it.

Bad CRM was then.

This is ServiceNow.

When we sat down down at one point in the spring, you told me that you didn't think policy mattered that much, that you had written an economic plan.

That's exactly what I said.

You said that you'd written an economic plan when you were running for mayor, and basically nobody read it.

That's true.

But people wanted to know that you had an economic plan.

Now policy has become a big part of your campaign.

Yeah, I'll actually say one of the pleasant surprises of this campaign and this campaign season is that people have responded

to policy ideas and to our policy ideas.

I'd say with a lot more seriousness and interest than I'd expected based on my experience.

So we always knew that the sequence had to be, first I lay out the vision and values and then we develop an explanation of what it means in terms of policy.

But I'll say that actually there's been more

serious grappling with policy questions in

this election cycle than I would have expected based on what's happened in previous years.

And that's a good thing.

Aaron Powell, sometimes it can feel like the policy is

crafted toward the vision that you're toward the way that you're trying to sell it.

And I think that that's something that people respond to well about you and they respond to also negatively about you.

And sometimes the negative is like, oh, this just feels like a McKinsey type thing fitting in.

And

your healthcare plan is Medicare for All Who Want It, which is a really catchy name.

There is a full plan behind it.

But to people who say that's just a slogan, essentially, it's not a plan, what would you say?

I'd say it's the best policy and compare it to the other policies and we can have a debate on why it's better.

I mean, yeah, I figured I had to give it a name, right?

Because

you start with the name?

What's that?

Do you start with the name?

I think I knew what I wanted to do broadly before we had a name.

But the reason it turned out to be very important and now serves us well to have a name is that we've evolved from

where things began in this debate.

I think when Ted Kennedy first popularized the term Medicare for all, describing something pretty similar to what I'm doing, to the current environment where now,

especially this year,

somewhere along the line, Medicare for All has come to mean you have to eliminate private plans.

And I'm not for eliminating private plans.

So I'm glad that we found a way in a headline to explain it.

But really, what's important is for people to know what our policies are.

Because even now, I think it's kind of murky murky out there.

And a lot of folks who

agree with the idea of Medicare for all, if you ask them what it means, they're describing what I'm offering and not a vision where you eliminate the private plans.

You're getting people saying, oh, he used to be a bold guy out there taking big stances on things, and now he's tagging to the center.

He wants to be the Biden alternative.

Is that right?

Aaron Ross Powell, I would be the most progressive American president in my lifetime.

Aaron Trevor Brears, but you would not be the most progressive, and however we're going to define that in this field.

That is true.

Bernie Sanders is definitely to my left.

Elizabeth Warren is proposing things that are more expensive and, in my view, sometimes less workable than what I'm proposing.

So I don't think it fits as neatly on the left's right-center spectrum as

a lot of folks in the press want it to, because I think I've been leading the field in boldness in areas around democratic reform, for example, and the positions I've staked out there.

Whereas my view on

just how far we should go in making things free around education or how to approach healthcare would be considered to be more moderate.

So it's never as simple, right, as people want to pin it.

But it is certainly the case that if you want the most left-wing presidential candidate running today, you have a choice and it's not me, even though I consider myself a very strong progressive.

But

that way that people have responded in the last couple of weeks to your candidacy, and certainly it's people who support Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but others I've seen out there make this argument.

Oh, he wanted to be bold and out there and now he's

tacking back.

He's trying to make himself acceptable to people.

Your Supreme Court plan, when you announced it in the spring, got a lot of people on Twitter excited, a lot of other activists excited.

and you want to expand the court.

Then you had said a comment about how you'd want to have there could be somebody in the Anthony Kennedy model who was on the court.

Then it seemed like the exact same people who were so excited about you on the Supreme Court issues in the spring felt like you'd turned on them.

And now, okay, you were saying Anthony Kennedy could be on the court.

It's not well, especially because they were falsely making it sound like I was saying I would appoint a justice like Anthony Kennedy into the Supreme Court in its current structure, which is, of course, not true.

What I was doing was reminding people that there used to be such a thing as a swing justice.

But look, my positions have been consistent.

Some of the takes seem to be changing.

And that's just politics.

But

I do believe that democratic reform is critically important.

It's why I stake.

Look, it's not always

maybe

politically easy to sell national popular vote in some of the states that I go to, for example.

But I think it's the right thing to do.

And I think we can build support for it.

And so

the moment right now, I think, and the reason this is so important to stake out the ground that I'm on, is we have to overcome this idea that you can either unify a strong American majority or you can be bold.

If we pick one or the other, if we pick one and skip the other, I don't think America is going to make it.

We cannot deliver the bold solutions we're talking about unless we hold a strong American majority around them.

And we cannot unify the American people, even loosely, if we're not solving these underlying problems.

And so my candidacy in many ways is a rejection of this idea that

you have to be polarizing in order to be bold or that you have to be weak in order to be unifying.

I just don't buy that idea.

America's not going to make it.

You said over the weekend of the line that I've heard you say before that if we don't deal with white supremacy in a real way and

racial injustice.

It could undo the American experiment in our lifetimes.

How close to the brink do you think we are?

Closer than we think.

I mean, the President of the United States is guiding a criminal investigation into a corruption investigation into him.

That's happening right now in America.

You know, political violence is being talked about casually

by people nearer to the mainstream than you might like.

And by the way, it's increasingly starting to feel like the world is on fire from Chile to Baghdad.

We don't know what's going to happen in the UK.

A lot of instability and destabilizing things going on in the Middle East, even in China.

This is a really precarious time.

And half measures aren't going to get us there

when it comes to establishing U.S.

global leadership and when it comes to making sure that we're actually the the democracy we think we are but that being said

uh i think the solution to that is not uh sort of arm waving i think the solution to that is to talk about what it'll take to fix it and try to have a sober and disciplined outlook on how to get from where we are today to where we've got to be to be further from that brink but does that mean like a second trump term if he were to win it would

that would be the end of the American experiment?

It is hard to see how America, as we know, recovers from a second Trump term.

I think if,

look, America will still exist in some form, but I think that at that point, we really will become just another country out there, just one more country, scrapping for advantage, trying to get ahead,

and not what we have known America to be globally and domestically.

And that's what America will be on the world stage.

What do you think it would mean for America itself?

Well, I think we'll continue to see a pattern of those who have the most power consolidating their power.

We already see a consolidation of wealth, the likes of which we haven't had in modern times.

We see how

inequalities in wealth are being laundered into inequalities in power.

And I think that continues.

But those are sort of abstract ways of thinking about it.

For an average American

And you can pick what that is about that American American.

Well, here's some things that will probably happen.

Your wages will stay low.

At least they won't grow on pace with the economy.

And eventually we'll have a big economic correction around the explosion of debt and other unsustainable things that are happening.

You will find your community to be more and more divided.

You will be no better off in terms of getting health care and may lose ground if you rely on the ACA and they continue to undermine it.

There will continue to be underinvestment in your school, your streets, your airport,

the quality of your water.

A lot of concrete things that have gotten worse will get much worse if this president stays in office.

I feel like if you were up against him in the general election, if you were the Democratic nominee,

the way that he would campaign against you would largely be by sort of dismissing you as a young guy, as a child.

We got a preview in the spring when he called you Alfred E.

Newman, and you had your response that I don't know if I really believe you said you didn't know who that was

but that seems like what this election would be

you have a line that you have used when you've been asked how you would respond to Trump that you say I've taken worse incoming than a tweet full of typos right that's the line

can you talk about that when you have

when you took worse incoming yeah well uh anytime the rocket alarm went off when I was posted on a base, that was uh a different kind of incoming.

Um

and uh the alarm goes off.

It sounds like the alarm tone on an iPhone.

And I have actually had this experience with you when you

don't remember this.

Maybe.

Yeah, well

we were in a car and an iPhone alarm went off.

And I don't care for that sound.

And

the way it typically worked at Bagram was,

well, in a way it it was reassuring if you heard a boom a few seconds later.

You only really have a few seconds.

This is mortar fire.

It's very imprecise.

You don't know, as

a friend of mine put it,

if it actually hits you.

You know, that means God's made a decision.

But the problem is it could hit near you and there's a lot of shrapnel.

And I never had one impact close enough to me that shrapnel came near me.

But you have a few seconds and then if you hear a boom, then you know it landed and you know you're alive and you get back up and go back to work.

It's actually scarier if you don't hear one, although it turns out that often means that it's been shot out of the sky because they've started developing countermeasures on this stuff.

I guess my point is you come home from a war zone with a certain sense of calm about this kind of political incoming

and

a certain sense of perspective.

about the kind of BS that comes from this White House.

But when you were, that's what being shot at was?

Yeah, I mean, I remember a couple times too that there was, I heard small arms fire.

Never landed terribly close to me, thankfully, that I knew, that I noticed.

Because

I've also heard people say, okay,

you know, he wasn't in the front lines.

He wasn't taking a lot of fire.

Yeah, it's not like I killed Bin Laden, right?

I was an intel guy.

Most of the, to be honest, if I had been killed in action, it almost certainly would have not been from indirect fire.

It would have been, I never would have known it.

It would have have been an IED on one of the times I was driving.

And

I had a couple of scares, but my vehicle was never, to my knowledge, was never targeted.

So I don't go around acting like I, you know, was

out in the Corongall Valley.

I'm somebody who did my part.

But I think it's an important contrast to draw with somebody who avoided doing his part when it was his turn.

This weekend is the big dinner in Iowa.

That for Obama in 2007 was a big moment.

I watched that speech recently.

It's 20 minutes long.

You won't have that long to speak.

Do you think it's more ridiculous or less ridiculous that Barack Obama went from being a state senator, senator, president, than it would be for you to make the pathway that you want to have happen over the course of this time?

I would like to argue that neither is ridiculous.

He had more national exposure sooner than I did.

But then I have the benefit of executive experience.

So I guess they're just different.

But again, I think more than ever, this is an election about vision and where we're going to go.

And this comes back also to how President Trump is likely to try to attack me, right?

Which is that

he might make it about age and experience.

But really, that's

fundamentally, that's an argument about judgment and wisdom.

And I think in a judgment and wisdom contest, this president's on pretty shaky ground.

I want to close with this.

You don't wear a jacket.

You have your look, jacket, tie.

Where did that come from?

I don't know.

I gradually dressed down over the years as mayor.

I used to wear a suit every day, pretty much.

And then I realized, I don't actually need a tie on unless I'm...

cutting a ribbon or something very mayoral.

And then I realized, you know, it was really important that the jacket be part of a a suit.

And I don't know, I just feel more comfortable with my sleeves rolled up.

Although, as you know, I'll go on to debate the best.

The brand is

white shirt, tie, no jacket.

That's not a mistake.

That was

just how I dress.

Yeah, it also means I have to think less about it any given day.

I mean, the only question is, is there something fancy enough I got to have a suit on, or can I just do my thing?

Now you've got people dressing up for Halloween as you.

So I hear.

All over Twitter.

All right.

Well, let's end it there.

Pete Buddhaj, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Good to be with you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by John Baptiste.

You can find show notes and past episodes at theatlantic.com slash radio.

If you like the show, rate and review review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next week.