The New Yorker Radio Hour - Can Mayor Pete Be a Democratic Front-Runner?

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

Six months ago, David Remnick interviewed a politician named Pete Buttigieg, who was just beginning his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. Buttigieg was an unlikely candidate: the youngest person to run in decades, he was a small-town mayor with no national exposure, and had a difficult last name to boot. But a smart campaign has made Buttigieg a contender, and a recent Iowa poll put him in second place, behind Elizabeth Warren. Gay, Christian, and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Buttigieg is running as a kind of centrist outsider. “If you really do want the candidate with most years of Washington experience,” he told Remnick, “you’ve got your choice”—meaning Joe Biden. Furthermore, “if you want the most ideologically, conventionally left candidate you can get, then you’ve got your choice”—between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But, he claims, “most Democrats I talk to are looking for something else. That’s where I come in.” Buttigieg spoke with Remnick in October, at the New Yorker Festival. They discussed whether he can overcome one notable weakness in his campaign: a lack of support among black voters, which would injure him in the South Carolina primaries. Plus, the New Yorker food correspondent Helen Rosner shares three current food-world favorites with David Remnick, including an ingenious cheat that blows the lid off of lasagna. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

from One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. About six months ago, I interviewed a young man who had announced that he was a candidate for the presidency. He was an up-and-comer in democratic politics. In fact, Barack Obama mentioned him to me back in 2016. But as the mayor of a small city in Indiana, he had had less exposure than almost any figure in the race. And while we were preparing for the interview, the hardest question my producers tackled was how to pronounce his name. But in the month since, we've all learned to say Pete Buda Judge. Budajedge, even Donald Trump has learned it. As a Midwesterner, Buttigieg counts on support in Iowa to lift his candidacy. And that tactic seems to be working out. Recently, an Iowa State University poll put him in second place to Elizabeth Warren, just a hair past Bernie Sanders and significantly ahead of Joe Biden.

I had a chance to sit down again with Pete Buttigieg, Mayor Pete, as the campaign calls him, in front of a lot of. audience at the New Yorker Festival in October. Let's start with the news. Let's get the D.T. stuff out of the way. Is Donald Trump's political goose cooked? That depends on the conscience of the Senate Republicans. And what that actually means is it depends on whether there is enough of a threat to the power of the Senate Republicans

that they would be reunited with their conscience, which obviously they've taken a holiday from. which is really important because in a moral sense and in a constitutional sense, this is about accountability when the president has admitted to an abuse of power. And I think this is one thing we need to be really clear on. There's going to be an investigation, there's going to be testimony, there's going to be records, but for all the things that might emerge then, he confessed on television to the abuse of power. So in addition to everything else that might emerge and the fact that more people might go to jail over this, there's the central fact that Congress has to weigh in on whether this is or is not a high crime. For all of that, we also know

that this is a political process. Of course, as a presidential candidate, you have no real part in that. And so my perspective is to focus on the day after Trump is president. It's one way or the other, this presidency is coming to an end. But I want to ask you to really picture what it's going to be like that first day when the sun comes up. I mean, at first it's a happy thought, for sure. But then you really think about it. What's it going to be like? The rubble of our norms and institutions.

And our population, our families, maybe, our communities, even more torn apart by politics than we are now. If you think about everything we've been through and everything we're about to go through. And the real question is, who among the candidates for president can lead us. And of course, I'm running to be that president because we need somebody capable of turning the page as well as winning the fight. But before the sun goes up, we have to acknowledge some realities that the Senate Republicans are where they are because we live in a very different environment, media environment and social media environment, all the rest, then we were living in

in 1974 during the Watergate crisis. You have a... a base that President Trump has not lost. What is it going to take, do you think, to change the equation that President Trump set out when he was a candidate and said, I could go down Fifth Avenue and shoot anybody I want or whatever the quote was and nobody would care? That still seems to be the case

when we're talking about his base, and therefore the Senate Republicans. Well, the day that Nixon resigned, I'm told, He had about 25% of the country with him. So I think we can assume that there's at least 25% that you're just not going to reach. That still leaves an awful lot of people. And we're talking about my neighbors. I'm from the industrial Midwest.

There are a lot of people where I live. They don't think he's a good guy. They're not stupid. But they voted effectively to burn the house down. And it's not just Republican, actually. I mean, this is kind of a problem of the era that we've lived in. I was born in 1982. That means that I've spent, I hear that murmur.

See, what that? It means I'm an elder millennial. I bought these shoes in 1982. I just want you to know. But I view that as meaning that for me and anybody younger than me, we've lived our entire lives in the Reagan era. So the Reagan era begins in 1980. And I would argue that that era,

or you could call it the neoliberal era, whatever you want to call it, continues almost to this day, and now it's collapsing, because none of the prescriptions that were offered in this so-called consensus around how to create growth. None of them worked. They worked to create growth in terms of numbers on a page, but they didn't work in terms of delivering the kind of security and prosperity to American families in a place like the industrial city where I live. But you use the term neoliberal, which is a term very often used by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, people on the left, understandably to describe your image out there is in fact somebody who's closer to what used to be called or is called the neoliberal consensus, somebody who's certainly more of a centrist or a centrist liberal. Do you reject that characterization? Yeah, I think those characterizations are only useful for people who try to align all of us on some left-right spectrum.

Why shouldn't they? Because it's outlived its usefulness. Look, I led the field in proposing democratic reforms that to this day, some candidates supposedly on my left haven't embraced. I also am a candidate who believes that Medicare for all is not as attractive as Medicare for all who want it that gives people to choice. So one of those you might say puts me on the center, another one puts me further out. There's a position on criminal justice reform that not only I and fellow Democrats hold, some conservatives and libertarians are starting to embrace.

And so we're living through a real scrambling of some of these ideological labels, and I think that's a healthy thing. Can I jump in on Medicare for All versus Medicare for all who want it? And I totally understand the point that you have, what is it, 150 million people that are on private insurance now, and likely, certainly in the beginning, they're not going to want to leap out of it into the unknown. That's the dilemma, certainly, that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders face. in the argument.

The dilemma that you face, it seems to me, is that Medicare for all who want it can come off to some audiences as a fancy way of having your cake and eat it too when you can't. Why not? Because if enough people don't want to be involved in Medicare for all,

will it be adequate to have Medicare for those who want it. Yeah, I mean, this is how public alternatives work. We talk about this, like, health care is the only place we've ever contemplated a public, alternative, but actually things like internet service providers, my fellow mayors have been doing it, and it's remarkable what happens in the private sector when you have a public challenge.

The way I come at it, I guess, is just rooted in a certain humility about what's going to happen, because one of two things will happen. Either there really is no private option that's as good as the public one we're going to create, which means everybody migrates to it, and pretty soon it's Medicare for all, or some private plans are still better, in which case we're going to be really glad we didn't command the American people to abandon them whether they wanted to or not.

And I'm neutral on which one of those outcomes happens because it's not the core principle for me is not whether or not the government is your health insurance provider. The core principle for me is that you get covered one way or the other. That's what Medicare for all who want it entails. Are you not among those

are you not among those who looks north to Canada or east to the obvious European countries and said, I wish we had that instead of this? Well, I certainly wish we had the improved economic efficiency of pretty much every other developed country, which spends less of its health care dollar on administrativeia relative to health care, back to actual patient care compared to us, and has better health outcomes as a rule to show for it. Look, I lived in the UK for two years as a student. They have, not only is the government in charge of health insurance, it's in charge of health care, right? If you're a doctor, you work for the government.

And even there, there is a system of private insurance and private care. So we're not really emulating a European system if we're saying that we're just going to order the private sector out of existence in the health care. What we're doing is something different, and I don't think it's a very attractive vision. Do you think the rhetoric of Medicare for All is when you hear AOC talk about it, or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, is pandering in some way? It's not for me to say what motivates them. Sure it is. You're running against them. I'll say this.

What sounds good on a debate stage isn't always the right answer. And we're obviously in the phase now where we're on debate stages a lot. But I think my mentality as a mayor is that you should only make promises that you're prepared to keep. There's no alternative facts when you're a mayor, right? If there's a hole in the road and you didn't fill it in and somebody calls you out on it, you don't get to say, that's fake news, it's a great road, there's no hole in it, because they'll look at the hole and they'll know. So even though on one hand, I am a big believer in bold solutions, whether it's on democratic reform or even on health care, where what I'm proposing, just to be

really clear, is the biggest, boldest transformation of American health care in more than 50 years. I also think it calls for a certain level of humility about how to get it done, instead of the arrogance of saying, I've figured it out, I know exactly how many years it will take to deliver. I'm going to put your health care at risk that I was right, and it's my way or the highway, here we go. I just come at it from a different perspective. It is rough, though, for a voter to know the granular detail of every politician's record, whether as a mayor or as a senator, congressman. Unfortunately, for your campaign, you got derailed because you had a controversy in South Bend, where you had a white police sergeant shoot, a 54-year-old black resident. You left the campaign trail to deal with that, and it was very rough.

People saw some tough footage of you being confronted in the rest. and rightly or wrongly, an impression deepened about you and race, and the polls suggest that you have very, very, very little black support. Do you think you've been wrongly branded in some way, and what can you do about it? Yeah, I think that people who actually come to South Bend will see how we are wrestling with tough problems. I mean, there are a few...

But they won't. Voters are where they are. It's very hard for them to... Well, part of my job, though, is to bring people to South Bend, even if you can't literally come. I can give you a sense of what it is like to sit down with activists, with community members, with pastors, and work through how we hold our community together. And we have faced issues around race and policing, as every diverse city has from my first weeks on the job. And I would not have seen my support in the black community grow over the years in our city if I hadn't found a way to include people, even without pretending that we were going to fix it overnight.

It's not that simple, of course. I talk about it with majority white audiences as well as with majority black audiences, but incredibly good response on the Douglas plan, which is designed to be as ambitious as the Marshall Plan, but right here in the United States for dealing with systemic racism. You should probably explain what the Douglas Plan is. Well, the idea is we've learned the hard way as a country

that just replacing a racist policy with a neutral one is not enough to deliver equality. And if we want to deal with inequity in this country, we have to invest. And we have to recognize it's systemic. So, for example, in South Bend, when we're at the table, working through an issue around racial justice in policing, by the end of that hour, we're not only talking about race and policing, we're talking about economic empowerment. It's why I'm proposing we triple the number of black entrepreneurs in the country and set a

25% goal for the federal government to do business with businesses owned by people who've been historically disadvantaged. But it's not just the entrepreneurship side either. It's health, it's home ownership, it's access to voting. Education, all of these things are connected. And so the Douglas plan is intended to be a systematic, intentional, and well-funded response. And I am now convinced that if we don't tackle that in my lifetime, it could wreck the American project in my life. Are you prepared to make reparations part of the process? of tackling that? Yeah, so I support HR 40, which is the bill to create the reparations commission,

but I don't think we have to wait for that process. But HR 40 is an exploratory committee. I think for a lot of people, that seems not enough. Well, that's what the Douglas plan is about. Don't wait for that to start taking steps that are reparative. And the thing you got to remember here is that this is not just about going back and trying to change something in a distant history. This is about how history has followed us.

That is why this is so original. I take your answer as entirely serious and sincere. The numbers are tough for you, though. You're getting 0% in South Carolina at the moment. And a narrative, rightly or wrongly, and I want you to answer it, has taken hold, certainly among your opponents or people who are skeptical of your candidacy,

that you are very popular, particularly among well-educated whites, And by extension, what's known as the donor class in American politics. Why are they wrong? Well, first of all, I'm doing as well as many of those opponents. It depends which poll you pick, of course. But there is only one candidate who has a commanding lead among black voters. Now, one of two things is true.

Either that candidate has such a masterful command of the issue of race in America that black voters will stay loyal to him no matter what. What? You're talking about Joe Biden here. Yes. Or things are likely to change as voters continue to sort through their options and see what we have to offer. And I'm betting on the latter. You're in the midst of what I've always thought is a pretty cock-eyed process. The way we get a Democratic nominee through the route of Iowa, New Hampshire, and all these steps and steak fries and all the rest.

Some of it's beautiful. Some of it's inspired. The deep fried done that is excellent, too. But how do you break through? Because your polling is where it is. It's a crowded field. Some of it's dynamic. Some of it's not.

How do you break through? What's the scenario? Well, there's kind of two phases to this. The first phase brings us to where we are now. So in terms of breaking through, I've advanced past roughly 20 of my competitors, which is not bad for somebody nobody had heard of in January. there are admittedly a few more big hills to climb and i think where this is going to shake out is

if you really do want the candidate with the most years of washington experience the most familiar face possible then you've got your choice and if you want the most ideologically conventionally left candidate you can get then you've got your choice most democrats i talk to are looking for something else. And that's where I come in. Pete Buttigieg is vying for the Democratic nomination and currently polling at second place in the state of Iowa. The Iowa caucuses take place in February. This is the New Yorker radio hour. Much more to come. Every now and then, I check in with one of our writers about what's on their minds, what's interesting them lately, and they give us a few recommendations. I don't mean to pick favorites, God forbid, but I will say this.

When Helen Rosner comes around, she brings samples. Lately, I have been irrationally and beautifully obsessed with lasagna. So I made you a lasagna. Oh, I'm so happy. Do you want to do the honors? Oh, my God, do I? Cheese-covered beauty. Why are we even talking?

Pick up a fork. We have for forks right here. You know, and I know that for Pick 3, one of the, they're supposed to be like, read this book, listen to this city. I'm just like, lasagna. It's one of my things. It's not a commercial product. This particular lasagna is a recipe from a cookbook that came out a month or two ago called lasagna. It's an entire book dedicated to lasagna by Anna Hazel.

And it's just delightful. And my favorite thing about this book is that she got a blurb for the book from probably the world's ultimate expert on lasagna. Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield is the world's foremost lasagna expert? I mean, it depends on how much we are going to buy into the fiction of a fictional. universe, but Garfield, I think, is the ultimate connoisseur of lasagna. Okay. And Jim Davis as the god of Garfield.

Here we go. Oh, you killed it. You killed it. Oh, that's really good. Okay, program's over. We're just going to eat this thing. So my hypothesis about lasagna, I actually have several. My primary lasagna hypothesis is that anything that makes a good pizza makes a good

lasagna. Really? So the one that I've made for you is the classic lasagna, bolognazay, a baschanel, but bolognese sauce, fresh pasta, though I used a little trick for this, and I didn't make pasta from scratch and roll it out. I bought egg roll wrappers. Egg roll wrappers. Egg roll wrappers.

This is the great pasta secret. Not store-bought lasagna noodles. No, those are too thick. So it turns out that the wonton wrappers or the egg roll wrappers that in the grocery store are sort of by the tofu in the produce section are their pasta, their flour and water. And they are the perfect cheat method to make a fresh pasta. a lasagna. Egg roll wrappers for lasagna.

Yeah. Okay, excellent tip. Are there more exotic lasagnas that don't involve the usual bechamel bolognets? Oh, yeah. Restaurants are doing really interesting things with presentation. There's a restaurant that just opened in Miami that's doing this bizarre kind of cross-sectionally lasagna that looks almost like a slice of, you know, an agate or some sort of beautiful layered stone. They're cool looking and pretty and nostalgic.

everybody gets psyched when a lasagna lands on the table. Absolutely. I've never been more psyched than I am now. Okay, is there another choice you've got? So I was hoping to bring you a brand new jar of this sauce. But instead, I'm going to give you a half full one from my own personal fridge because this is sold out everywhere. It's that good.

This is a sauce called... Whoa. I put my nose and inhale deeply. And what is that? It says coconut cilantro chutney. And the brand is Somali foods. The brand is Bas Bas Bas Samos Sommali Foods, right. B-A-A-A-A-S.

This is easy to find? It is, well, it's easy to find on their website if you go to bas-bass sauce.com. Oh, that is really good. And what do I put that on? Everything. Everything. That is superb. It's phenomenal.

And the woman who makes these sauces also has an incredible story. Her name is Hawa Hassan, and she was born in Mogadishu, and her family fled as refugees. when she was a young child. And she eventually was able to come to the U.S. and grew up in Seattle. But her mother wasn't able to come to America with her, and they were separated for something like 15 years. And when they finally reconnected,

it was the Somali food of her childhood that they sort of reestablish their relationship over. So what do you taste? It has a late-breaking kick. It's vinegary and a lot of lemon juice and jalapeno ground up in there. And there's coconut, cilantro, garlic, salt, Whatever's in there, that is something. So seriously, what would you put that on?

I've been making a lot of sort of chickpea curries, like my quick dinner as I sort of dump a can of chickpeas and with a bunch of spices and a little bit of coconut milk. And then I just drizzle this on top of the end. That would make your dinner rise up and walk at attention, I think. That's pretty great. It's a beautiful sauce. I'm obsessed with it. So Helen, you have another pick. What is it?

Yeah, it's a cookbook. It's called Jubilee by Tony Tipton Martin. And it is a book that is just sort of. of this extraordinary historical cookable compendium of the food of African-American history. This is really beautifully done. There's a photograph here of mashed turnips and carrots with rum that it should be outlawed. It's so good-looking some of these things. It's really, this is gorgeous. The food is phenomenal. What's some of your favorites in here? Right now I'm particularly obsessed with a recipe in here for fruit fritters, which the recipe is with apples, but I've also

made it with pears, and she suggests trying it with bananas or plantains, which I think is brilliant. But you make a pretty simple batter with flour and milk and eggs, and you add a ton of spices to it and a little bit of rum, which is the secret ingredient, and chopped up fruit, and you drop it in a deep fryer, and you make these gorgeous fritters. So tell me a little bit about Tony Tipton Martin herself. She is a scholar, an editor, and writer. She was a food editor at a major newspaper for a long time and realized as she was working on major food stories that there were very few cookbooks by black chefs and black cookbook authors in the libraries of the test kitchens where she often

found herself. And, you know, so each of the recipes in here has almost, you know, a scholarly citation. I don't want to make the book sound inaccessible or boring. No, it's incredibly inviting looking. It's the opposite of, you know, scholarly otter. It looks fantastically delicious. Every other page is a beautiful photograph. There's a roast turkey in there that would stop Thanksgiving dead in its tracks. It's amazing. I mean, those fruit fritters that I mentioned, she mentions in the headnote that the recipe is drawn from the handwritten notebooks of a black man who was a caterer in the 1920s. I mean, there's just extraordinary threads of history behind every single one of these recipes.

It's a cookbook that tells an incredible historical story and also makes freaking beautiful food. Helen Rosner, who writes about food for the New Yorker. Helen, thanks so much. Thank you. The cookbook is called Jubilee, and it's by Tony Tipton Martin. We tried the coconut cilantro chutney from Best Best Somali Foods, and the lasagna that Helen made was adapted from a book by Anna Hazel. I didn't save you any lasagna, but you've got to ask yourself,

would you have saved any for me? I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining me today, and I hope you'll join me next time for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-oper. production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Karen Frelman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina. Endowment Fund.