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

by Pete Buttigieg

The company lumbered along as though nothing had changed, producing some of the best-known pocket watches of the early wristwatch age. Their failure to innovate was fatal; the firm did not survive the Crash of 1929.

But you could find a more nuanced moral of the story: that keeping up doesn’t always mean making something completely new. To survive, South Bend Watch wouldn’t have needed to start making radios or computers. They just needed to adapt a good thing they already had, and refine their business.

By junior year, hearing the same sort of thing, you would have matured enough to realize you were the recipient of a kindness, the treatment that is instinctual to a politician who knows that you will be best to work with if you have first been made to feel good about yourself.

The American Jeremiad described a distinctly American form of rhetoric that goes back to Puritan sermons and persists in our culture even now: a way of castigating society for failing to live up to its sacred covenant, while reinforcing the sense of promise in what we could become. The threads of influence are easy to find, if you know what to look for. Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy each used the same phrase, “city upon a hill,” to describe America’s destiny among nations. In doing so, they used imagery that traces back to John Winthrop and the sermon he gave using that same phrase almost four hundred years ago, aboard the ship that would bring him and his followers to America. Bercovitch explained how Winthrop’s image of America as a beacon of virtue would become the basis for an American exceptionalism that helps define our country to this day.

The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority.

We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.

This time around, it seemed that the war effort was wholly outsourced to those few Americans who served in uniform. America tripped over itself to salute them, without seeming to consider the possibility that civilians, too, could accept some risk or pay some contribution into the cause of freedom.

ironically, taught at Harvard). Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course. Like most good philosophy

something about the word “bailout” makes voters allergic—and the Senate was loath to vote for the package. When Congress refused to authorize funds, Bush acted unilaterally, rewiring money that Congress had authorized, with other purposes in mind, as part of the TARP bank rescue.

And it worked. The newly formed, post-bankruptcy version of Chrysler was able to crawl, then walk, then run, and eventually the company exceeded expectations for sales and growth. And the auto industry comeback helped lead the overall economic recovery of the country. By the fall of 2010, all of the laid-off workers had been called back, and unemployment started moving back to normal levels. And with remarkable speed, the government had recovered most of the taxpayer money that had gone into the deal.

You might wonder how such partisanship could possibly play into a job as technical and non-ideological as state treasurer, whose main role is to manage the state’s pension funds for government employees and teachers. But someone with a deep enough ideological worldview, coupled with strong ambitions to run for something bigger, can always find a way to use an office—any office—to make a name for himself.

To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.

An introvert by nature, I slowly became comfortable

Well trained at the Firm in performance management and economic development, I could envision an administration that ran on business principles without abandoning its public character.

Like all good public art, the “Bean” in Chicago being the best example nearby, it has a charismatic quality that invites people to come up close to it, and to mix with others not like them.

Across the water from us is the Crooked Ewe, once a VFW hall and now one of the best restaurants and breweries in town.

level of the rapids. The East Race embodies our community’s style of development: a healthy city can take things that seem like liabilities and turn them into treasure.

Growing into the job of mayor entailed grasping that the symbolic role given to me was no less substantive than the power of policy—if deployed wisely. It was a gradual conversion that began, like most important growth, in a moment of pain: the aftermath of a murder.

But this was the point: you do not necessarily console through the wisdom of your words, especially as a public official. It was a powerful, if grim, early lesson in the fact that as an elected official, I had become a symbol. What mattered to her was that I showed up.

learned of the Boston Miracle. In the late 1990s, during a similar crisis, community leaders tried a new approach to dealing with the gang-related violence that was causing an epidemic of youth homicide. Using rigorous analysis to map group associations, a team of researchers joined with prosecutors, law enforcement, social service providers, and faith leaders to identify and contact the people most likely to kill or be victimized. The young men (nearly always men) were gathered, in person, for a “call-in.” Here, officials and community members would promise to concentrate all law enforcement attention on anyone involved in the next group or gang to be involved in a killing—and also offer social services for those prepared to make a change before it came to that. Sometimes misunderstood from the right as an amnesty or from the left as a crackdown, the strategy’s true core is in recognizing that would-be shooters are also people. Leaving aside the handful of people who are actually pathological, most of them just make decisions based on incentives and influences around them.

It worked. At least, it seems to have worked. Like economic development, our understanding of violence prevention remains primitive, partly because so many overlapping causes are at play. It almost resembles the state of medicine in the nineteenth century: finally advanced enough to do more good than harm, but only barely and not always.

Instead, it is a statement of our city’s belief in racial and social justice and a measure of pride in the diversity of our past and present.

Uh huh.....

Leonard Bernstein printed on its side: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

can be. The possibility of highly visible failure has an exceptional power to propel us to want to succeed, and that power can be harnessed to motivate a team or even a community to do something difficult.

When I took office, it was clear that too many decisions were still made based on gut feel, rather than data—and some operations never got rigorously analyzed at all. Old-fashioned local government is notoriously full of seat-of-the-pants operations, even as financial pressures and resident expectations should be forcing us to become hyper-efficient.

First, know the difference between reporting an issue and resolving it.

sufficient, for resolving it. A second rule we learned quickly was to recognize that responsiveness and efficiency are not the same thing; in fact, they can sometimes pull against each other.

Local officials often feel pressure to deal with a squeaky wheel right away, when stepping back and considering a big-picture solution would serve people better.

At other times, the reverse is true and responsiveness really is more important than efficiency, as in the case of graffiti. It might seem that the most efficient thing would be to treat graffiti like snow—take whatever resources we have for repainting, and have them work the city, street by street, systematically. But if a stop sign gets tagged with graffiti, leaving it there even for a couple days might motivate someone to tag something else nearby. Whether it’s a gang sign or a cartoon bunny, what shows up on Falcon Street may soon be copied on Walnut, and the longer it’s there,

But the more I looked into the issue, the clearer it became that low-income residents who did not have bank accounts relied on the facility so they could pay in cash.

A fourth data lesson came from the ShotSpotter experience: follow the data where it leads, and recognize that it could show you the answers to questions you never even asked.

As our police chief at the time, Ron Teachman, explained, “Law enforcement projects an air of omniscience. If residents hear a gunshot and don’t see an officer coming to the scene, they don’t think it’s because we don’t know about it. They assume we know about it, and that we’re not there because we don’t care.” With the new technology, officers appeared on the scene of shootings we simply didn’t know about before. And gains in police legitimacy could be achieved by using the community policing method of “knock and talk” in concert with the technology. When the system detected gunshots in a residential area, officers would work that block the next day, letting residents know they were concerned and leaving door hangers for those who were not there, explaining why they had visited and how to follow up.

Sensibly, some metro areas have entered into economic nonaggression pacts, in which each city promises not to use incentives to lure employers away from its neighbors.

Democratic crowd was not standing to cheer; now, with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like a sign of her campaign’s fatal lack of enthusiasm among workers in the industrial Midwest.

attention, including a feature on 60 Minutes, many responded judgmentally toward anyone, especially Helen, who could vote for Trump and then be surprised by this sort of outcome. But to do so is to assume that voting is about ideology and policy analysis, rather than identity and environment. For a hardworking and devoted woman like Helen with a small family business in a conservative Indiana community, most of the people she dealt with—neighbors, customers, and acquaintances—were people for whom voting Republican was simply a matter of course.

after Mom looked at me, with a little light in her eyes, and asked, “Is there someone?” Only after answering no, and seeing the light fade a little, did I realize that the tone of her question had been one of hope. As moms go, she had been pretty sparing with any pressure to produce grandchildren, but I still knew that nothing would bring more joy to her life. Her hopeful question, and my disappointing answer, made for one more reason that I had to figure out a way to go public, so I could begin adding this dimension to my life. No, there wasn’t someone at the moment. But I wished there were, and if I could figure out the process of coming out publicly, then one day there would be.

When a conservative socialite of a certain age would stop me on the street with a mischievous look, pat my arm, and say conspiratorially, “I met your friend the other day, and he is fabulous,” it was not the time for a lecture on the distinction between a partner and a “friend.” She is on her way to acceptance, and she feels good about her way of getting there; it feels better to grow on your own terms than to be painted into a corner.

Eventually a message came through, thinly veiled but quite clear, from federal prosecutors: the people responsible for the covert recordings needed to go, or charges might be filed. Why did they send me that signal, instead of just acting on their own? Was the intent to do me a favor, giving me a shot at resolving this quietly and helping my young administration without getting bogged down in the scandal of indictments just a few weeks after we got started? Maybe. Or perhaps they just understood the politics of all this before I did. Why should a U.S. attorney shoulder the responsibility of taking down a beloved African-American police chief, if he can get the mayor to do it for him by removing him from his position? Justice would be served and compliance would be established, while charges and a messy trial could be avoided. In

the fact that many of the worst historical injustices visited upon black citizens of our country came at the hands of local law enforcement. Like an original sin, this basic fact burdens every police officer, no matter how good, and every neighborhood of color, no matter how safe, to this day. To the many people in the community who rose up to demand that the tapes be released, this wasn’t a question of whether I was right or wrong in fearing that doing so would violate state and federal wiretap laws. It was about their belief that not everyone in the community could trust the men and women sworn to protect them. Like so many police officers and Americans of color dealing with the long reach of such past wrongs—and the present-day wrongs that flow from their legacy—I found myself answering not only for myself but for history. ANOTHER

The two main north-south roads in town had been converted, decades earlier, into a pair of four-lane, one-way streets that shunted traffic as quickly as possible through—and out of—downtown. The result was a quick commute through the heart of the city, but also a central business district that felt hostile to pedestrians. Going between my office and a restaurant a couple blocks away felt like walking alongside a highway, which is technically exactly what it was. The roads functioned to evacuate the very area I was trying to fill in. Other

I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare.

What he said next made it clear he knew me better than anyone. He opened the box. “I know you’re not ready for marriage, but I want you to know how I feel. So instead of giving you a ring, I’m giving you . . . time.” In the box was a watch.

I wish it had not required a victory by Donald Trump for the political class to renew its interest in the industrial Midwest. Still, better late than never.

Conservatives, by contrast, had patiently and cleverly built majorities around the country from the bottom up, fortifying their state and local power bases over the decades while presidencies from either party came and went. Partisan gerrymandering made these legislative majorities self-reinforcing, all but locking them in, a decade at a time. Meanwhile, in parallel to their campaign work, the right’s think-tank apparatus also paid careful attention to the power concentrated in offices from school board to state senate.

This strategy served him well, even—or especially—in those counties he couldn’t actually win, because losing them 60–40 instead of 80–20 helped make it possible for the bluer counties to put him over the top.

Worse, a culture had begun to take hold in some Democratic circles that addressed our part of the country with condescension, bordering on contempt. A party once built on looking after ordinary Americans was now beginning to feel like the preserve of comfortable, educated, upper-middle-class city dwellers.

As I looked out at the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway, it hit me that we were enacting a highly metaphorical version of what was going on with the party at large. Here was a young mayor, a former Cabinet secretary, and a state party chairman, with their respective campaign entourages, all in hot pursuit—rushing into a comically slow-motion car chase, trying to catch up to a group of activists and citizens organized just hours earlier by a twenty-six-year-old restaurant server using social media.