Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  The “fix” was not exactly a leap forward in LGBT inclusion. An effort failed the next year to actually establish a civil rights policy, which meant, going forward, that in many parts of Indiana people could still be fired for being gay. Embarrassingly, we also remained one of just five American states with no ban on hate crimes. But the whole episode showed that trying to appeal to radical social conservatives no longer worked in Indiana, because it would run afoul of what most people believed, including typically conservative groups like the business community. The controversy crippled Pence’s reputation as governor, and created an opening for his Democratic challenger, John Gregg, to mount a credible campaign against him for the governor’s office in 2016.

  What no one could have known then was the future benefit to Pence of establishing himself as a hero to the religious far right, a political martyr almost. It made him into a brilliant, if cynical, choice of running mate for Donald Trump. Nominating an evangelical heartland governor was the best way for a thrice-married, formerly pro-choice, philandering ex-Democrat like Trump to reach out to religious conservatives and begin unifying the fractured right around his candidacy. And while Trump’s life story was anathema to everything Mike Pence believed in, this was the right move for Pence, too, if viewed in the cynical light of raw politics. The governor had lost respect on both sides of the aisle in his home state, and was now widely expected to lose his reelection. Strange bedfellows though they were, Mike Pence and Donald Trump needed each other. Win or lose, teaming up with Trump could give Pence a second political life.

  13

  Hitting Home

  It was mild and hazy on the morning of June 1, 2016, as I stood on the tarmac waiting for Air Force One. I had shown up for what I thought would be a perfunctory handshake and photo opportunity. President Obama was to speak in Elkhart, about forty minutes east of South Bend’s airport, which was the nearest place where you could land a 747. As mayor, I would have the honor of welcoming him as he stepped off the plane and walked over to the limousine. Standing alongside Senator Donnelly and the president of the county commissioners as the jumbo jet descended for its final approach, it was easy to be awed by the spectacle of America’s presidential security apparatus. As soon as the big aircraft landed, chase vehicles appeared on the runway seemingly from nowhere, SUVs racing along its sides for some reason as it slowed to a taxi. Innumerable Secret Service and military personnel crowded the apron as the mighty white-and-blue aircraft swung around. Off to the side was a C-17; it had probably delivered the limo earlier along with who-knows-what military equipment and personnel to be at the president’s side, just in case.

  I thought of the day in 1988 when my father took me to peer through the chain-link fence at Ronald Reagan’s plane and reflected on the nature of American strength as symbolized by the big jet, the vehicles, the personnel. The arrival of a presidential aircraft is somewhat light on ceremony, but heavy on equipment and personnel—less a show of elegance than one of power. In a sense, it was also proof of the great faith and optimism shown by our cautious Founders in placing this much authority in the hands of one democratically elected human being. Imagine the implications, I thought as I eyed the SUVs, the security men, the big graytail military jet in the distance, if all this were to fall into the hands of someone unfit to wield it.

  The president descended the familiar staircase, did his requisite handshaking with the three of us smiling officials, and walked past us to greet a small gaggle of locals who had been invited for one reason or another to view the landing from the tarmac. Then an aide tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to step toward the limo nearby. Moments later, I was sitting inside, facing backward, and looking eye-to-eye at a smiling Barack Obama. I glanced down to make sure my feet did not accidentally tap the president’s shoes.

  President Obama was in a buoyant mood. “How are the Irish looking for this fall?” he asked me and Senator Donnelly, seated next to him. The conversation hovered on football for a while, and then ranged through what was happening in South Bend, how the auto industry had come back, how our city was positioning itself relative to the economy of Chicago. It was not a business session, though at one point Obama turned to Donnelly and pointedly mentioned that he needed the Senate to come through with funding for his opioid package.

  We compared stories on throwing out the first pitch—admittedly a little different at a South Bend Cubs game than opening day at Nationals Park, but it was nice to be able to have something in common, sort of, with a president. He volunteered that one of the moments when he truly admired his predecessor was when Bush, not long after the 9/11 attacks, nailed a perfect strike in his first pitch at game three of the World Series at Yankee Stadium.

  Wishing for the first time in my life that the commute to Elkhart along the U.S. 20 Bypass could somehow grow longer, I alternated between enjoying the conversation and disbelieving that it was happening in the first place. I felt I was comporting myself reasonably well, taking the opportunity to explain what was happening in our city and what our greatest needs were for support. Then, after the conversation had turned to something about my time in Afghanistan, the president interrupted me to ask, “Wait a minute—how old are you, anyway?”

  And for what felt like a minute, I had no idea.

  A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, I had met for the first time the person most of us assumed would be the next president. Chasten and I were at my parents’ place for Sunday night dinner, as usual, when a phone call came from a friend involved with the Clinton campaign. “Hillary wants to do a campaign event in northern Indiana.” Could we find a good place for her to speak? She would be here on Tuesday.

  I knew right away where to send her. AM General, one of the largest employers in our community, had a great story to tell. Best known for producing Humvees for the military, it had also manufactured a number of commercial vehicles, including the well-known Hummer line and the MV-1, a new kind of vehicle for people with disabilities. Moreover, the company demonstrated how to keep with the times in ways that had escaped Studebaker. The company was in the midst of a three-year contract to manufacture Mercedes R-class vehicles, a luxury SUV sold exclusively in the Chinese market. Here was a brilliant example of how American workers could play a role, other than victim, in the globalized economy: right in our part of the industrial Midwest, we had American union auto workers building a German-branded vehicle shipped to customers in Asia. I made, as they say, a few phone calls.

  Two days later I was in a folding chair on the factory floor, watching Secretary Clinton give her stump speech to the assembled auto workers and various chosen community members in attendance after a tour on the shop floor. It all went as it was supposed to, except for one oddity at the end, which amounts, in retrospect, to a major warning sign: polite applause. After Clinton spoke, everyone clapped in their seats. Then she shook hands along a rope line, and was off to the next event. This might sound normal, but I had been at enough campaign events over the years to know that a presidential campaign appearance this late in the game should never end with anything but people on their feet. At the time it just struck me as a little peculiar that a union-heavy and typically 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.

  Other candidates had plenty of energy and motivation that spring, and they brought it with them to South Bend. On consecutive days in May, our Century Center downtown saw visits from Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The venue was the same, but atmospheres around these two visits could not have been more different. Mingling with the folks in line around the Century Center parking lot to see Bernie, I felt like I was at a party, or maybe a rock concert. Attendees were clearly serious about their values, but had also come with a cheerful, even playful spirit. Walking up and down alongside the line to get in, hangers-on hawked FEEL THE BERN T-shirts and buttons picturing the hair and glasses, Bernie with the finch, Bernie rid
ing a unicorn.

  The next day’s Trump rally felt like a party, too, but one of those edgy parties where you’re not totally sure if a fight will break out. Bernie had drawn about forty-two hundred spectators to his event; the Trump crowd was over ten thousand. As the rallygoers waited all afternoon to get in, protesters lined up to face them across Saint Joseph Street (soon to be renamed for Dr. King). There had been enough cases of violence around other recent Trump rallies that I was worried. Our safety strategy was twofold. Publicly, I focused on calling the community to its highest values, telling a TV crew from WNDU: “We welcome anybody who’s here to express their free speech rights, even if we have vigorous disagreements. I expect the community to demonstrate our values of welcome and inclusion when it comes to responding to this campaign’s arrival.” Behind the scenes, I wanted to leave nothing to chance, and asked the police department to be as vigilant as possible without undercutting the freedom of attendees and protesters.

  Police set up a temporary command post in a nearby building overlooking the area, tracking online threats of violence and eyeing the parking lot for trouble. Visiting both to thank the officers and gauge the temperature of our first responders, I passed a huddle of fully-geared-up SWAT officers, there just in case, and reflected on how suddenly times had changed. This was not what it had been like when Harry Truman’s whistle-stop tour came through, or Reagan or Obama, for that matter. For the first time in the modern life of South Bend, a mayor had to approach the arrival of a major presidential campaign in his city primarily through a sobering lens: not that of civic pride, or even partisan politics, but rather the possibility of political violence. Accustomed to sizing up presidential rallies for their political impact, I now had to approach this one mainly from the perspective of safety.

  The rally itself was in keeping with most of the others; nothing happened that was particularly unusual by the standards of that spring. Trump was close to clinching the nomination, and his speech contained all of the greatest hits that he would repeat throughout the summer and fall. He promised to build a wall, and that Mexico would pay for it. He took jabs at his rivals, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz. He attacked free trade and globalization, and vowed to deliver the most successful presidency ever: “We’re going to win so much you’re going to beg me, Mr. President, please, please, it’s too much winning.”

  As a mayor, my idea of winning that day simply consisted of getting through the afternoon without incident. Checking in periodically for signs of trouble, I was reassured by our police department that the rallygoers and protesters were keeping it peaceful, if passionate. The day’s last situation report from the police chief let me finally breathe a sigh of relief: “No injuries, no arrests.”

  THE CLINTON AND TRUMP CAMPAIGNS swapped fortunes repeatedly, up and down, through the summer. The last few days were marked by uptight but sincere confidence on the part of the Hillary campaign, mixed with a widespread sense that she was nowhere near as strong as she should be. The County-City Building is an early vote site, and as I crossed the lobby on my way to the office each morning in those last few days before the election, I wondered if this would be a close one even in our county. With its strong blue-collar tradition, St. Joseph County is normally one of the most Democratic in a mostly Republican state. But when Election Day came, she won our county only by a hair—a sign of major underperformance overall.

  In the elevator the next day, I greeted my colleague Christina Brooks, and saw her face wet with tears. When we got to my floor, the staff looked bewildered. I called a staff meeting, telling everyone around the table that the most important element of our job had just become more difficult and more pressing: to hold the community together. Christina then described the experience of trying to reassure her daughter that it would be safe to go to school that morning. When her daughter showed her KKK-themed social media memes that her classmates were sending her that night while joking about Trump’s victory, she thought of her own upbringing as an African-American woman and realized it wasn’t just her daughter she was trying to reassure—it was herself. Another colleague, Cherri Peate, said she feared for her brother, simply because he was a tall young black man. Was he in more danger now? And also, exactly what was it this new president was promising our country? “Make America Great Again”? she asked, looking around the room as if any of us could make it less threatening for her. “When was America ever great for us?”

  Later that day, I went to meet with the College Democrats chapter at Notre Dame. Some of them were also tearful, and for many of them, this was personal. Grace, the student co-president who was a survivor and an outspoken advocate on campus sexual assault, described the effect this was having on students in a similar situation. She had gone, concerned, to check on one student she knew who was struggling with the ways the election had compounded the trauma of her own assault—and found her suicidal.

  LIFE WENT ON, BUT IT BEGAN to be punctuated by interventions from national politics of a kind I had not seen before. One day, my phone started to blow up with texts asking if there was any truth to rumors of an ICE raid on the West Side. I asked around to see if there was something going on. There wasn’t, but by the time I knew that for sure, several of the small businesses in the Latino-heavy West Side of our city had shut down for the day, and families were taking refuge in St. Adalbert’s Church.

  Stepping into St. Adalbert’s, you are immediately struck by its magnificent proportions for a church in the middle of a neighborhood. It was built in 1926 with the original intent of becoming a cathedral, only for the diocese to decide to seat the bishop elsewhere in what many considered to be a snub of the Polish immigrant community. On one interior wall, a mural depicts Christ with a background of immigrants beating swords into plowshares; an inscription above his figure reads, in Polish, “By the sweat of your brow you have earned the bread of life.”

  Nearly a century later, it’s still the spiritual home to large, Catholic, immigrant working families—only now they mostly speak Spanish, not Polish. Father Ybarra has succeeded predecessors with names like Gapczynski and Kazmierczak. And in this first scare of the Trump era, it now became a haven for families unsure if they were safe in their own workplaces or homes. Parents had grabbed their kids from Harrison Primary Center and small shops closed for the day. After that day working the phones to verify this was all a false alarm, my staff and I added to our mayor’s office to-do list the creation of a phone tree in the event of immigration raids.

  One evening soon after, I walked through the doors of the Harrison school, a place I sometimes visited in order to read to second-graders. This time I wasn’t there to introduce them to “Pete the Cat,” but to address a “Know Your Rights” event for neighborhood residents. Hushed voices of hundreds of parents echoed off the lacquered basketball floor of the gym where they gathered. A legal nonprofit had set up a projector with a slide show. I rose to reassure the parents, in my rusty high school Spanish, that we were a welcoming community. “Our police are here to keep you safe, not to practice federal immigration enforcement,” I insisted. And not to tear your family apart, I thought. The last thing our law enforcement needed was for Latino families to be afraid even to speak to our officers, especially if they had information needed to solve or prevent crime in their neighborhoods, all because they conflate local police with federal immigration authorities.

  As I got ready to leave, a volunteer came up to me in the hall of the school and said there were some high school kids who wanted to meet me. I wasn’t sure why high school kids would be around, since Harrison is an elementary school, but I said I’d be happy to and followed her into the glass-walled school library. There, I saw a group of mostly white students from Adams High School, which is over on the East Side. One was helping a group of small kids figure out a puzzle; another was distributing pepperoni pizza from boxes lined up on the side. A student explained that they were volunteering as part of their National Honor Society commitment, entertaining children while th
eir parents were in the gym.

  I choked up with a mix of emotions: appreciation on one hand for the work of these civically spirited students, and on the other hand, alarm at the world we were living in. When I was in high school NHS, our volunteer projects had to do with things like litter cleanup. Now, in post-2016 America, there were whole new categories of things you can volunteer to do—such as consoling and entertaining six-year-olds while their terrified immigrant parents gather in a school gym to get legal advice on how to keep their families from being torn apart by federal agents. It was another reminder that the reality of politics is personal, not theoretical. Tip O’Neill’s dictum was right: all politics is local. Especially national politics.

  For me, the politics of immigration came even more up-close and personal when I visited Eddie’s Steak Shed to meet the family and friends of its owner, Roberto Beristain. Roberto had been a fixture in nearby Granger, and so was Eddie’s, employing about twenty people. He had come to the U.S. twenty years earlier, without a visa, and fallen in love with an American citizen named Helen, whom he would marry. He got a job as a cook at Helen’s family’s restaurant, and eventually saved up enough to buy out his retiring brother-in-law. He and Helen were raising three kids, all citizens. He had been trying himself to become a citizen for years, but his path was complicated by a years-old paperwork problem from being detained at the Canadian border during a vacation to Niagara Falls. Still, he had a work permit and a driver’s license, he paid taxes, and for years had been visiting an ICE office annually to check in. Other than immigrating without permission, he was more law-abiding than most of us, with not so much as a traffic ticket against his name.