Each week for one hour, he would sit in my living room and hone my technique. I’d play a passage for him, and he would lean back thoughtfully, bring his hands together, and say, “Okay, lots of beautiful things. Now . . .” And here he’d begin deconstructing my performance and putting it back together. He would say things that sounded strange at first, like, “Don’t play the notes—just play the music.” Explaining how to make one passage twinkle, he described the first time he saw an American Disney cartoon and asked me to evoke its characters. It seemed cryptic at first but began to make sense over time. After a couple of months I was dreaming Rhapsody in Blue. I could close my eyes, start at any point, and play the rest of the piece in my mind.
After two rehearsals with the orchestra, which were my first and second times ever playing piano with an orchestra, it was time for the performance. The whole program was Gershwin, with two talented vocalists teed up to do Porgy and Bess for the second half. My part would be before intermission. The date was February 16, the show called “A Valentine from Gershwin.” I did my best to stay calm in the dressing room as the maestro warmed up the orchestra and the audience with “Strike Up the Band,” then I hovered offstage as they turned to “An American in Paris.”
Finally, it was time. Wearing a suit instead of a tux (a concession to the reality that at the end of the day I was a mayor, not a professional pianist), I stepped out onto the blond wood of the stage at the Morris Performing Arts Center, a space that started as a grand vaudeville house in the 1920s and became a movie theater before the city took it over and renovated it. Through the glare of the spotlights I could just barely make out a sea of over two thousand faces. It was more than I’d ever seen for a symphony performance. I wondered if they were there because they loved Gershwin, or to cheer me on. Some part of me sensed that many had in fact come to see if I would succeed or not; beyond the unlikeliness of the spectacle, it was above all the possibility of failure that created the suspense.
I exhaled, took a bow, and walked toward the piano. I had decided at the last minute not to bring sheet music. It was just me and the instrument, the orchestra to one side and the audience to the other. I had given speeches to crowds this size with no discomfort, but this was terrifying. Lose your place in a speech, you can take a breath and resume. Lose the orchestra in a fast-moving passage, and you might never find your place again. But I had practiced this thing into the deepest furrows of my brain. I was ready. I settled onto the bench, breathed again, looked at the maestro, and gave a little nod.
The clarinet began with that famous trill, turning into a scale that bends into a high note, sounding just enough like a siren to suggest that the piece is in some way about the American city. The horns join in as the clarinet swingily pipes out the main theme, then the other sections begin joining in. I enter with the low notes on the piano, raising the tension in a slow crescendo up to the big moment when the orchestra arrives in full force. At first the piano is doing little more than punctuation, but then the powerful chords come, and the thrilling sequence of flying fingerwork, urgent yet disciplined, fast and precise, one passage supposedly inspired by the rhythm of an accelerating train as a panicking Gershwin sat on board and scrambled to compose the piece in time for the deadline of his composer’s commission.
I kept time with the maestro out of the corner of my eye, alternately working the piano and hanging back during the passages of rest, until the final, lyrical flight known to anyone who has ever seen a United commercial or Woody Allen’s Manhattan. The review in the Tribune later would say that “technique sometimes took precedence over expressiveness.” Still, “Although it looked like stunt casting . . . Buttigieg acquitted himself well,” the critic concluded. I muddled a couple runs but felt the thrill of nailing most of the hardest parts, all the while sensing the audience following intensely as the piece soared to its emphatic and muscular finale.
And when it was over, the crowd sprang onto its feet. Through the glare of the stage lights I made out a few familiar faces but saw mostly strangers, cheering, delighted. I’ll never know if it was the music that moved them most, or the spectacle, like the end of a tightrope act, of seeing someone succeed who might have fallen at any moment.
THE EXPERIENCE BROUGHT TO MIND a comment I had recently heard from former Baltimore Mayor and then-Governor Martin O’Malley about being a good mayor: that leaders make themselves vulnerable. It was an odd thing to hear from a mayor best known for data-driven performance management, not for emotional resonance. But that was precisely the point: using data in a transparent way exposes leaders to the vulnerability of letting people see them succeed or fail. Being vulnerable, in this sense, isn’t about displaying your emotional life. It has to do with attaching your reputation to a project when there is a risk of it failing publicly. The more a policy initiative resembles a performance where people are eager to see if the performer will succeed, the more vulnerable—and effective—an elected leader 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.
TWO WEEKS AFTER that Gershwin performance, I committed publicly to a more widely consequential effort: to confront a thousand vacant and abandoned houses in a thousand days. It would become one of the defining projects of my administration, but it also had the potential, like the symphony performance, to be my most visible disappointment. Previous administrations had torn down hundreds, but never seemed to get ahead of the contagion of blight. By the time I was campaigning for mayor, it was the number-one issue we heard about when knocking on doors and making phone calls. Despite years of work and millions of dollars, there always seemed to be more vacant houses than the city could deal with—so many that when I first took office, no one could confirm how many we even had.
It was clear that we would need to do something different, with more resources and an intense approach. Soon after taking office I convened a task force, which spent a year analyzing the problem. Mayor’s office interns were handed over to code enforcement to help count and classify properties. County, state, federal, private, and nonprofit partners came to the table. We debated the use of land banks, explored novel applications of federal funding, and explored the role of utility disconnections in speeding or slowing progress.
The result was an extensive report explaining the various conditions and issues to take into account. The sophistication of the analysis was at a level South Bend had never seen before. But I was also fearful that we had just done one more exercise in describing the problem, without actually solving it. And I knew the residents of our city had no use for a data-obsessed mayor who didn’t know how to turn analysis into action.
Without a different level of motivation, our administration and community might never get ahead of the issue, no matter how well we had assessed it. Worse, knowing the many nuances of the issue could actually make it harder; anyone who has sat on a big committee with lots of experts knows the feeling when people around the table display their expertise by mentioning one complication after another, admiring the dimensions of the problem in an ever-deepening discussion that cries out for some modicum of simplicity so that there can be action.
So, after a session sitting with my team over a draft of the report and talking through ways to announce our findings and begin moving toward an approach to actually fix the problem, I leaned back in my chair and took a breath before proposing that we use the richness of the report to back a goal of childlike simplicity: “Let’s promise to deal with a thousand houses in a thousand days.”
The faces of my staff immediately tightened with worry; they, after all, would have to do most of the implementation.
“It’s a little more complicated than that, Mayor,” someone piped up.
They were right, but it was also clear that a simple (or even simplistic) goal would create the kind of risks, and rewards, that could cut through the problem of
analysis paralysis. When I added that we should create a real-time online scoreboard to update how many houses we had fixed, demolished, or failed to deal with, the staff members looked simultaneously excited and terrified.
The announcement certainly made us vulnerable, even more so than when I had stepped out onto the stage at the Morris. The public would know if we succeeded or not, and would hold us—that is, hold me—accountable if we failed. But with that vulnerability came a kind of energy, too. People would be watching closely, keen to pick up on mistakes, looking to see if we could really achieve this audacious goal. And inside the administration, the team would have a sense of urgency and focus motivated by a desire to deliver for the public. Just as I couldn’t miss more than a day of practice, we couldn’t miss any opportunities to raise funds, prod bureaucracies, or persuade residents to help us meet the goal. The very difficulty of meeting the deadline would provide its own propulsion, making good on Bernstein’s adage.
It was through this effort that I began to understand the difference between my job and everyone else’s. The experts on the task force could evaluate the market conditions in the various neighborhoods and identify the legal tools for addressing neglected property. The council could allocate funds for dealing with the problem. The code enforcement staff could press landlords to address the condition of the houses. But only a mayor could furnish the political capital to get the project done, by publicly committing to a goal and owning the risk of missing it. I began to realize that the job was not about how much I knew, but how much I was willing to put on the line. The application of political capital, not necessarily any kind of personal expertise, was how I would earn my paycheck as a mayor.
The scorecard went online, along with a map, updated continuously so that it was easy to know whether we were succeeding. Checking our website on Day 500, you would have seen that we were nowhere near having five hundred houses addressed. Repairs were moving slowly, and the gas utility was taking its time in disconnecting houses set to be demolished. Environmental rules required us to inspect homes for asbestos at a more rigorous level than before, and inspectors qualified to do the work were expensive, threatening to increase the cost of the program beyond our budget. But being behind was energizing, rather than demoralizing. I didn’t have to give a locker-room talk at halftime; the team saw the same numbers that I did, and knew what they meant. Facing this pressure, the staff got creative—for example, the asbestos inspector issue was resolved by getting our own code enforcement staff certified as asbestos inspectors. Creative lawyering led to a partnership with the U.S. Treasury Department to use federal dollars, originally earmarked for mortgage workouts but now at risk of being sent back unspent to Washington, to help with blight elimination instead. And numerous community forums helped take in feedback from residents in areas from LaSalle Park to the Southeast Side on how their neighborhoods could be impacted.
Two months before the deadline, on a sunny September morning in 2015, I stood with the Jara family on the porch of their newly repaired home on Clemens Street. The gray ranch-style house had been on the affirmed demolition list when they bought it, but the family was repairing it with their own hands, and we celebrated their work as the one-thousandth home to be removed from the vacant and abandoned list, a reminder that repair was as important as demolition. By the thousandth day, our community had addressed not just a thousand but over eleven hundred homes, and was finally poised to pay more attention to preventing future abandonment than to dealing with the backlog.
In some ways, it was a classic example of data-driven management paying off. But the most important impact of the effort was unquantifiable. Hitting such an ambitious goal made it easier for residents to believe we could do very difficult things as a city, at a time when civic confidence had been in short supply for decades. As meaningful achievements can do, it raised the expectations our residents had for themselves and our community. I could feel it in the changing way residents talked about our neighborhoods—and in the higher expectations for city government. More challenges, of course, loomed in the future. But by that fall, there was a palpable sense that we could take control of our toughest problems.
The city was giving itself permission to believe.
10
Talent, Purpose, and the Smartest Sewers in the World
A short bike ride from my house, yet largely in a different world from anything in the city, sits the campus of Notre Dame. Its five vast and well-kept quadrangles are familiar turf, each a different geographic locus of memory in my relationships with family and friends. At the end of the South Quad is O’Shaughnessy Hall, where I used to toddle at my father’s side to the English Department office and where the secretary, Connie, would offer gumdrops from a glass jar on her desk.
Farther south is the Mendoza College of Business, which felt like the most modern building in the world when my mother worked in its airy, newly constructed halls in the 1990s. I would accompany her there as a teenager to take advantage of the Internet connection—mostly for the purpose of downloading MP3 files of Dave Matthews songs, which could be loaded at a rate of one per ten minutes or so via the university’s state-of-the-art network. Back a bit west from there is Alumni Hall, where I would hang out with old Saint Joe classmates whenever I was home on break from college, earning a decade-long distaste for gin after consuming too much of it, mixed with Mountain Dew, from a red solo cup one weekend during sophomore year.
By the time I became mayor, my father had migrated, across the leafy precincts known as God Quad, to a place I had almost never visited in my youthful romps around campus: the resplendent Main Building, topped by the Golden Dome itself, where the president sits in an oak-paneled office suite. The offices of the Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program, which my father directed, sat in a ground-floor corner with an outside window from which it is said Knute Rockne himself sold football tickets in the thirties.
Almost any week school is in session, there is an occasion to visit and speak—perhaps to a lecture hall full of a couple hundred engineering or MBA students, or maybe around a seminar table to the dozen or so seniors chosen for Father Scully’s leadership class, or the twenty or so aspiring reporters in Jack Colwell’s journalism course. It might be coffee with the College Democrats or pizza with a freshman dorm council or a full-on formal dinner with the naval ROTC midshipmen, but whatever the occasion, I always try to accept when invited there or to any of the other colleges in our area. I go partly because I just enjoy engaging students, who tend to ask the most urgent and penetrating questions, but also because they represent the key to a transformation now under way in what it means to be a college town.
I did not immediately recognize the meaning of this transformation. At first I thought of the town-gown dynamic in much the same terms as everyone else, a framework we might now call College Town 1.0. In this way of thinking, a college or university has significance that derives from its size, and the fact that it represents a certain community of people who are physically part of a larger community, the city or town. The student population is considered as just that—a population. Students are of interest mainly because they are a subpopulation with different attributes than the average resident. Specifically, they are younger, more transitory, and generally from wealthier backgrounds than the average city resident. They may also be whiter, more price-sensitive, and often more politically liberal. Taking this into account, a community deals with them accordingly. As an economy, the city will furnish less expensive food and alcohol (to accommodate students’ budgets) and more expensive housing (to align with the spending power of their parents). As a municipality, the city will have a police force that must decide how much to concern itself with student drinking, an urban planning policy that pays extra attention to pedestrian mobility, and an electorate that differs in profile from a non-college town.
Notre Dame has some attributes that make it a little different. Its religious character is of course central; more than once, a student meaning
to address me as “Mayor Pete” has absentmindedly called me “Father Pete” instead. The students and faculty, on average, are more conservative than at most colleges. And the university campus technically sits outside the city limits. Still, for as long as I could remember, these basic patterns of traditional city-university relations held up. If the city thought about students, it was mainly with regard to their spending habits and their likelihood of getting into danger or trouble. And if students engaged the community, it was likely to be as a place to occasionally eat, drink, or shop—or volunteer. At most, we might hope that a student would take a little time to serve food at the homeless shelter or tutor local students, just as I volunteered once a week to teach fifth-grade civics in Cambridge.
This was the framework I carried into office at first: the university as a large employer, students and other members of the university community as warm bodies, like any other resident except for a somewhat distinct economic and political profile. To be sure, Notre Dame was getting more engaged by the time I left for college. It supported a community organization that oversaw the transformation of neighborhoods south of the university without succumbing to fears of gentrification, working to make sure neighbors felt empowered rather than threatened by the school’s territorial growth. Under Mayor Luecke, the city had partnered with Notre Dame to build a mixed-use development south of campus with restaurants, bars, shops, offices, and apartments that were a short walk from campus but technically in the city limits, creating more options for students and employees while also adding to our tax base. And students volunteered abundantly on worthy community causes, from the Center for the Homeless to neighborhood cleanups.
All of this was meaningful, but it didn’t distinctively reflect the fact that Notre Dame is a university, not some other large organization. The volunteerism, the economic development, and even the neighborhood engagement could plausibly be something that any large organization, such a hospital or major corporation, might do on and around the campus of its headquarters.
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