Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  CHASTEN’S LIFE AND MINE had become so fully intertwined that I was completely unprepared for the jolt of a winter afternoon text, which led to seven minutes in which I doubted I’d see him again. He was abroad, getting an early start on a winter vacation in which I was to catch up to him a couple days later. I was working when the unreal-seeming text message lit up my phone: “Problem on plane—lots of commotion—don’t know what’s going on. Captain said making landing for ‘secret reason’—love you love you love you.”

  I texted, paced, and waited, for seven inordinately long minutes, until another text came. He had landed, he wasn’t sure where. (It turned out to be Bucharest.) There had been a bomb scare on board. He was fine, but shaken; passengers had been crying, shouting, and a few were running in the aisles even as it landed.

  When I finally caught up to him in Berlin, he asked me to walk with him to the Brandenburg Gate. Lit splendidly in the cold night, it was one of those landmarks that looks exactly the way it is supposed to. It was also, Chasten explained, a place he came to while he was figuring himself out as a teenage exchange student, watching the people come and go and fitting himself into a bigger world.

  He described the terror as the plane made its steep and sudden descent. “All I could think about was how unfair it was that I would lose the chance to have a life with you,” he told me, and reached into his bag. “I’m not going to get on one knee, but . . .”

  Now I was afraid again, for a different reason. I really did love him, and no other attraction or relationship had compared to the feeling of wholeness I had with Chasten. But it had been less than two years, and I still felt new at this. Our first date wasn’t just our first date; it came at the beginning of my dating life altogether. Now, it seemed, my boyfriend was proposing—and I wasn’t sure what to say.

  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.

  A YEAR LATER, it was my turn to fumble for a box, and now it was definitely a ring. We were on another New Year vacation (the days between Christmas and New Year’s are the nearest it gets to a quiet time in the mayor’s office), and I had lured him to Gate B5 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, the spot where he said he was killing time between herds of exchange students when he first noticed my profile on his phone and began chatting with me. I had worked out what kind of ring he wanted—a platinum band with a little square diamond in the middle—and made sure his parents and mine knew about my plans. All that remained was to ask him.

  This won’t sound romantic to those who don’t know us, but I had selected the space behind the gate agent’s desk, a three-foot-wide zone against the window where you have something resembling privacy while looking out on the tarmac. In a way, O’Hare had brought us together. Plus, the halfway-secluded space in the midst of the busy concourse was symbolic for how our life together would be. “I can’t promise you an easy life or a simple one. And sometimes privacy for us will be like this, stealing away a quiet moment even with people all around us. It won’t always be elegant. But I promise it will always be an adventure, and I promise to love you forever.” I went ahead and got on one knee.

  Through the tears, he said yes.

  THE DAY BEFORE THE WEDDING, Terry Glezman sized up the parking lot outside the enormous building known as LangLab. This was not exactly your traditional wedding reception venue—a disused former furniture factory slowly being turned into a mixed-use arts and entrepreneurial space, complete with a chocolate maker at one end, a print shop in the basement, and on the far side, a makeshift office for student interns working on soil samples for water quality projects.

  It was quirky, but LangLab had ample space, a stage, and a bar. The price was right, and it perfectly captured the things we love most about South Bend: creativity, art, and transformation. We arranged for local art to be displayed in one room inside while a band and, later, DJ played in another. Dinner would be served outside, where guests could eat it in a tent or bring their tacos and sliders into the building.

  Sweating in the morning heat, as he assessed the scene, Terry scanned the ground and concluded that the parking lot was not sufficiently level. So, of course, he decided to fix it. He somehow procured a wheelbarrow and a load of gravel, press-ganged a couple relatives into helping, and spent that Friday personally leveling it so it would be ready by the time of our reception, while Sherri hauled in boxes of wine from Traverse City and wrapped gifts for members of the wedding party.

  Saturday afternoon, it was even hotter outside, but cool inside the Cathedral of Saint James. Chasten and I sat holding hands as friends gave readings, from poetry selections to the ending of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that, just three years earlier, had made this wedding legally possible to begin with. Father Brian Grantz, my pastor since I had moved home a decade ago, gave a moving sermon, assuring us that we were made for one another by God and reminding us to look for love in the spaces “between the divine and the mundane.”

  At the altar, my voice dropped by an octave as I fought to get the words of the vow out before my emotions could stop me. Then came the customary yet unreal sequence: the rings, the kiss, the applause and cheer of our friends and family, the bishop’s blessing, and the summing-up by the deacon as the service came to a close: “Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in peace to follow the good road of blessing.”

  Like most newlyweds, I remember the reception itself mostly as a blur. There is the face of my mother, the happiest I have ever seen her, dancing with me to the Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You.” There is Chasten savoring a victory after besting me in a lopsided contest of Skee-Ball, on a pair of machines we had rented for the occasion. There are our friends singing in unison on the dance floor, seamlessly picking up for Bon Jovi as “Livin’ on a Prayer” is interrupted by a short power outage triggered by the taco truck outside. And there is the note from Sherri that I had found in my room while getting ready, rolled up in a BEST SON-IN-LAW EVER coffee mug, welcoming me to the family and ending, “Take care of my baby, he may be on a permanent loan to you but he will always be mine.”

  18

  Slow-Motion Chase

  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. For all the reasons I’ve described, the challenges and the promise of communities like ours belong nearer to the heart of our national discourse. When swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan punished the Democratic Party for its inattention by voting for Trump, for better and for worse our part of the country forced itself back onto the country’s political center stage.

  To some, the 2016 election was a kind of revenge by “flyover country,” long ignored and misunderstood by the coastal elite in general and by the Democratic Party in particular. I certainly felt that our region had been ignored and misunderstood, but to me that did not have to lead to this kind of electoral outcome; our own story in South Bend showed that an honest and optimistic politics could resonate just as well in economically challenged communities. The 2016 election, it seemed to me, only made it more important for the national Democratic Party to take stories like ours on board, while better communicating shared values in terms that would make sense to people who live around here.

  I wasn’t the only one who thought this way, and said so, after the 2016 election astonished and traumatized my party. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised when more than one acquaintance in politics called after that election to ask if it had crossed my mind to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

  It had not. From the moment I had become mayor, and then even in the toughest weeks, it was easy to see why Governor Kernan had told me it was the best job h
e ever had. Every day was different, and everything mattered. Among elected roles the job is uniquely stimulating, compelling you not just to form opinions about issues but actually to craft—and implement—solutions. You are held accountable for results, and rarely have to deal with “alternative facts” because the good, the bad, and the ugly are plainly visible to everyone who lives in the city.

  I was in no hurry to be anything but mayor of my hometown—and even in moments of reflection about what might come next when my time as mayor inevitably ends, being a political party chair had never been on the list. It’s a thankless job in the best of times, balancing tough customers, big egos, political jostling, and constant fundraising in order to hold the party together and meet its mission of supporting candidates. By definition, the chairmanship also represents an extremely partisan existence—the opposite of a mayor’s typical experience, in which working across the aisle is a critical and often gratifying means of delivering results for residents.

  But, looking at the landscape of the party as it now stood, I also recognized a moment in which I could make myself useful. Like South Bend in 2011, the Democratic Party in 2016 was in need of a fresh start. And many of the party’s greatest weaknesses were in areas where it seemed I was uniquely able to help. The party was struggling to engage young people, it was out of step with areas like the industrial Midwest, and it was failing to prioritize the hard work of government and party-building at the state and local levels. Who better than a millennial, Midwestern mayor to try to guide the party in a better direction?

  RUNNING FOR CHAIR MADE SENSE from a generational, regional, and structural perspective. And because I belonged to no faction, it seemed that I could help the party transcend an emerging internal struggle between its establishment wing and its new left. As I contemplated entering the race, the main candidates were increasingly coming to be seen as representing the two sides of the party. On one side was Keith Ellison, a Minnesota congressman who had the support of Bernie Sanders and some labor groups, cheered by many progressives but viewed skeptically by those who saw our party’s coalition resonating only in coastal states and big cities, our base shrinking at the moment when it most needed to grow. The other major contender was Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, who entered the race in December. Rumor had it that President Obama himself had persuaded him to seek the post, and as NBC News put it, once he got into the race he immediately became “the de facto candidate of the party’s establishment.”

  Though each of them entered the race with heavy-duty backing from major figures in the party, neither candidate managed to quickly assemble a commanding majority. Perez was weighed down by the fact that many Democrats who revered Obama as a president were nevertheless resistant to him as a party leader, perhaps because he had shown less interest in traditional party-building and fundraising than other Democratic presidents. Ellison, meanwhile, struggled to gain supporters beyond the most progressive precincts of the party’s leadership. And by refusing to defer to the forces in the party most aligned with Obama (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) he contributed to the sense that the race for chair would turn into a proxy fight.

  In my view, reliving the 2016 presidential primary was the last thing our party needed to do. Yes, we needed to debate some of the questions at stake in that race, like how to cement our core progressive values and still connect with independent voters. But a factional fight in which the party focused on its own inside baseball would be missing the point. From developing better infrastructure to navigating the toughest issues around race and policing, experience at home had taught me that the best policy and political solutions were emerging far from presidential politics, and far from Washington in general. Both leading contenders were impressive figures, but if the race were left to a member of Congress and a Cabinet Secretary, no one would be seen as speaking for the dynamic, hopeful communities whose stories could be distilled into an antidote to the prevailing cynicism about Washington-driven politics.

  To gather my thoughts, I wrote an essay on the future of the party, called “A Letter from Flyover Country,” and published it online. Seeking to offer a Midwestern, millennial mayor’s perspective on where our party had gone wrong and how we could do better, the essay suggested a values-oriented approach and a much greater concentration on the stories and lived experience of Americans getting through life in our hometowns. I also believed that this kind of approach could move us beyond a superficial political strategy based on capturing constituency groups individually, with no unifying theme. I wrote:

  The various identity groups who have been part of our coalition should be there because we have spoken to their values and their everyday lives—not because we contacted them, one group at a time and just in time for the next election, to remind them of some pet issue that illustrates why we expect them to support us.

  The article circulated quickly, and the response was tremendously encouraging, enough that I felt it was time to look at a run. But the vote was just weeks away, and I would have to decide quickly.

  To gauge if the idea was crazy or not, I needed to talk to someone who had actually done the job. Howard Dean was among the most effective and well-regarded former DNC chairs, and someone passed me his number so that I could reach out to him. Dean had briefly gotten into the race for chair himself, but then made clear he was mostly just interested in making sure of a break in the business-as-usual pattern of the party, preferably in favor of a newer generation of leadership. (An established elder who nonetheless craved change, he made me think of some of my earliest supporters for mayor of South Bend.)

  “It’s a long shot,” Dean told me. “But it’s not a ridiculous long shot.”

  A CONTESTED RACE FOR NATIONAL party chair is unique in American politics. Highly personal and idiosyncratic, it in some ways has less in common with other contemporary elections than with the bygone era of brokered political conventions we read about in histories of the 1960s—or 1860s. In a sense, vying for the votes of committee members is a consummate insider’s game that calls to mind the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of old-school politics. But in 2017, this setup collided with the transparency created by social media and Internet organizing, giving party activists across the country an unprecedented level of visibility in a race that would come down to the votes of just a few hundred people.

  The race was nationwide in scope, with appearances on national television and in person from coast to coast. It would require heavy-duty fundraising, at a pace at least on par with a congressional race. But the whole process would play out in a matter of weeks, and the vote itself was completely in the hands of the 447 members of the committee, an electorate not that much bigger than when I had run for class president at Saint Joe High.

  I got a list and started calling the members one by one, pacing in my South Bend dining room as I asked for their views on the race. Most were encouraging, or at least not discouraging. Surprisingly few said they had committed to any candidate just yet, and many said they believed the race remained “wide open.” The more people I called—from freshly-voted-in Bernie delegates in California to dyed-in-the-wool Washington operatives who had been in the party for decades—the more I sensed that people were looking for something different. And as I made the case for more attention to the struggles and successes of communities like mine, I found that even coastal members were coming to understand why this was an important perspective for the party to better take on board.

  In the course of the conversations, as I tried to engage national party officials on the perspective of my hometown, I also found that my own viewpoint widened into a broader account of where our national party needed to go, and several changes that would need to happen.

  First, it had become clear, we needed to stop treating the White House like it was the only office that mattered. By the end of 2016, Democrats were shockingly at the lowest level of congressional and state capitol influence in nearly a hundred years, having lost over a thousand state and federal
seats in less than a decade. As the Obama White House learned to its great frustration—and as I was experiencing firsthand as a mayor in a state with a Republican legislative supermajority—even when you are in power you can only get so much done without control of legislative seats and governorships. Much of the anguish in Democratic circles at that time understandably focused on the disaster of losing the presidency, but for these reasons it seemed clear to me that the party would have been in serious trouble even if we had won the White House in 2016.

  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.

  I pointed to the example of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Funded by the Koch brothers and other conservative and corporate interests, it has grown to become one of the most influential think tanks in America—yet it doesn’t engage on federal policy at all. Instead, it generates model legislation for adoption in state legislatures and finds sympathetic state house and senate members to carry the bills. Legislation is often nearly identical from state to state—so much so that journalists sometimes find copy-paste errors where the wrong state is mentioned in the text of a bill. Tellingly, by 2014, ALEC had decided to expand its model beyond the state level—not by going federal, but instead targeting local policy through a new offshoot called the American City County Exchange. Those on the left were belatedly catching up to this kind of organizing after realizing the cost of shortchanging state and local policy work over the years.