Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

The call time was the hardest. It meant reaching out to everyone you had ever known to ask if they would send you money. You have two minutes’ small talk, a quick windup about the state of the race, and the inevitable hard ask: “Sooo, I was hoping I could count on you for a two-hundred-fifty-dollar contribution.” Eventually I came to prefer calling strangers to calling acquaintances, since they took less time to realize why you were calling and were more comfortable giving a yes or a no. I spent hours on this daily, and often wonder if most Americans realize this is how many elected officials spend most of their time. It’s not unusual for a member of Congress to spend twenty hours a week doing this, and you have to wonder whether, like spending too much time typing or sunbathing, it does something unhealthy to you over the long run. In the car or at a desk in headquarters, I would go through page after page of calls that our finance director had prepared for me, based on lists of people who had a history of giving to Democrats.