The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg on Coming Out: “I Realized I Couldn’t Go On Like That Forever”

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

During an exit interview with President Barack Obama in November, 2016, just weeks after the election, David Remnick asked who would be the leaders of the Democratic Party and the contenders to oppose Trump in 2020. Obama mentioned people like Kamala Harris, of California, and Tim Kaine, of Virginia, along with a very surprising figure: Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who was only thirty-five at the time. In recent weeks, Buttigieg has been raising his profile dramatically, and raising money at a surprising clip, considering that he lacks the national profile of a senator or a governor. In a huge field of candidates, the mayor stands out. He’s a Navy veteran, and was born and raised in South Bend, so he brings heartland credibility to his campaign. But he’s also the youngest candidate in the field, and the first openly gay person with a real shot at the nomination. Buttigieg had not yet come out when he took office and when he joined the Navy Reserves, but deployment in Afghanistan changed his perspective. “I realized I couldn’t go on like that forever. . . . Something about that really clarified my awareness of the extent to which you only get to live one life and be one person,” Buttigieg tells Remnick. “Part of it was the exposure to danger,” he notes, but there was more to it: “I began to feel a little bit humiliated about the idea that my life could come to an end and I could be a visible public official and a grown man and a homeowner and have no idea what it was like to be in love.” 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. In November of 2016, just a few days after the election of Donald Trump, I went to the White House and interviewed President Obama. The place was like a funeral parlor. And among the big questions on my mind was the future of the Democratic Party with Hillary Clinton, clearly out of the president. picture, who would go on to lead? Who would take on Trump in 2020? Obama threw out a few names we all knew pretty well, senators, Kamala Harris, Tim Kane, and then he mentioned someone I'd never heard of, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, town of about 100,000 people. But Obama couldn't quite remember his name either, or maybe he didn't dare pronounce it. That may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy because now Pete Buttigieg is having a moment. He's gaining the attention of voters,

and he's raising money hand over fist. Ideologically, he's positioning himself just to the left of centrist like Joe Biden and a few ticks to the right of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And he's got a sterling resume, Harvard grad, Rhodes Scholar, Navy veteran. He's also gay and a church-going Episcopalian. But who exactly is Pete Buttigieg? What does he believe? What does he propose to do as the youngest president ever elected. I talked with him at length earlier this week. You said this very recently to the Washington Post, I believe it was. Donald Trump got elected because in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and in our democracy. At least he didn't go around saying that America was already great like Hillary did.

Now, I know you've backtracked a little bit about that latter bit, but you're saying something pretty large there. What is it? Yeah, so I know that that quotation got circulated a lot. That was something I said last year and I think appeared in a profile in January and it got circulated unfortunately a little bit without context. But the point I'm making here is that a presidency like this doesn't just happen. A figure like Donald Trump doesn't just become possible unless there's a real sense of brokenness in our political and economic system.

And so to the extent that we, the Democratic Party, into the United States, 2016 were perceived as saying that the system was fine. So he was saying, I'm going to blow up the system. And we were saying trust the system. A lot of people, especially people in industrial, Midwestern communities like mine, didn't find our message to be convincing because the system really had let them down in the sense that, you know, the rising tide rose, just as we were promised it would. But most of our boats didn't budge. Now, I've got to ask you, you're two years older than the minimum to run for president, in the presidential race, there are at least three leading candidates who are over 70 or close to it, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. Are they too old to be president? It's not my place to say, why or whether anybody else should run or not. I do think that there's a lot

of energy and interest in a new generation putting forward leaders. You know, the consequences for my generation of the decisions being made right now are enormous. I mean, almost by definition, the longer you're planning to be here, the more you have at stake. And I mean to be a wise guy by saying this, but that sounds like a polite version of a yes to my question, that they are too old in a sense, in a substantive way. You know, I don't know that I can embrace that. Look, one very interesting thing, for example, that you saw with the Sanders phenomenon is that a lot of younger voters were gravitating toward an older candidate. By the way, conversely, one thing I've learned in my career from

beginning when I ran for mayor is that a lot of older voters are among the most excited about a younger candidate. So, you know, I think somebody of any age can deliver a compelling message. I do think we're in a generational moment that makes it perhaps more appealing or more meaningful than usual. I mean, most recently, you saw the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who I believe she is younger than I would be when I would take office. But the world is beginning to put forward leaders from this new generation. And it's almost uncharacteristic that America has been slow to do the same. Now, you talk a lot about the concept of intergenerational justice. What exactly does that mean in practice and on a policy level? Well, again, climate is a very pressing example of this.

I mean, there will be a reckoning for the costs that have been run up by essentially discounting the future to the point where you just view it as somebody else's problem. And unfortunately, the somebody else is us. The somebody else is a generation that's alive today. and we'll be paying the price. So if we were properly accounting for the consequences for my generation and those coming next, when it comes to climate, we wouldn't be having a debate over whether we could afford to do a carbon tax. We'd be having a debate over how we could possibly afford to do anything but a major mobilization around this issue. I also think it's a lens that maybe could help us navigate the challenging questions around reparations,

which are very much a question, I think, of what, one generation owes to another and how injustices or choices or inequities made in one moment in time can be visited upon the heads not just of others living in that time, but of others not yet born. The question you're going to get at every campaign stop and at every pain in the neck interviewer like me is your experience so far in political terms has been to be the mayor of a modest-sized city, South Bend, Indiana, which is just over 100,000 people. Is that adequate experience to be commander-in-chief and president of the United States? So I get the audacity of somebody in my position talking about the highest office in the land, although I think it is no less audacious and a little

bit obscene for any mortal to look at that office and think that they belong there, that they could just walk in. But, you know, South Bend... Obama used to say you have to be a little bit crazy to think that you can run for that office. Of course, or to think that you could do it. And yet every one of the 45 people we've put in there has been a human being with a certain set of experiences. I would argue that the set of experiences I have is about as relevant as it can get without having already been president. You know, to have the experience of managing everything from infrastructure to economic development, to know in a very literal sense what it is to get a 3 a.m. phone call and have to make decisions, to be managing everything from you know, a parks and recreation puzzle to the urgent question of how to hold a community together

when there's a racially sensitive officer involved shooting. I mean, from hour to hour and sometimes minute to minute, you experience the full range of what's expected and required in government leadership. Not to mention the fact that I have more military experience than I think anybody to go into that office since George H.W. Bush. You know, it's a non-traditional model. I get that. for a mayor to go in this direction. We're roughly the 300th city in rankings by size. But I think if I were the 300th most senior member of Congress, I'm not sure I'd be getting the same question,

which is odd because you could be a very senior member of Congress and have never in your life managed more than 100 people. You served in the military, which distinguishes you from just about everybody in the race. But at the same time, you have Harvard University, Oxford University, and an area where you'll probably get hit from the left, you worked at McKinsey for a few years. Why did you work at McKinsey? And what do you make of the reporting on McKinsey's work advising Purdue Pharma on how to turbocharge? There were oxycontin sales and how they counseled

dictators worldwide on how to build more efficient autocracies? Is your work for McKinsey something that was, that you're proud of in the rear-review mirror? I'm proud of the work that that I did for our clients. I worked on everything from grocery pricing to renewable energy. And I would not have worked on a client engagement that I didn't believe was ethical as well as helpful or at least not problematic in that way. I went to work in McKinsey because I wanted to understand how the world worked, how people, goods and money move around the world. And I wanted that kind of private sector experience and they were willing to take a chance on me, even though I didn't have an MBA and teach me what I needed to know about business. It was a phenomenal

learning opportunity. But are you angry at McKinsey for their work on Purdue Pharma and various dictators around the world? Of course. I mean, my community has been harmed by irresponsible behavior of corporations in the opioid industry. And I think it shocks the conscience any time that a murderous dictator can rely on the legitimacy of a, you know, Western consulting company, especially the most prestigious company out there, in order to further their goals. And I think that, you know, this firm needs to be a lot more selective and a lot more thoughtful in the work that it does. There was recently an article in Slate that I found actually quite confounding, but let me quote it for you. It says, Buttigieg, for instance, would register

on only the most finely tuned gay dar. That doesn't mean he's not gay enough. There's really no such measure. It just means that he might not be up against quite the same hurdles that a gay candidate without such sturdy ties to straight culture would be. Now, you're going to get written about every which way till Sunday in all different directions. And when you read something like that, what do you make of it? Well, I don't love it. It's, uh, um, I get it. I remember, you know, some of the same, uh, kind of strange conversations happening around the historic quality of President Obama's candidacy and presidency. Meaning the critique that he wasn't really black, that kind of thing.

You remember all that kind of stuff about whether his black experience counted the same as other people's black experience. I can only speak to my own experience in ours, and I'm not interested in getting into a kind of oppression Olympics over who has suffered in which ways for being gay or any other kind of minority. I am interested in tapping into the experience that Chaston and I have had as a happy, married couple, but also as people who know what it's like to be othered, and to hopefully use that as some basis for solidarity, not only with other members of the LGBTQ community, but

anybody who, for whatever reason, has experienced exclusion or wondered whether they belong. And I think there's a lot of potential for our experience to help. is because I talk to people who have been impacted in some way just by the fact of me getting into the field. And, you know, people are going to write what they're going to write. And, you know, you can't get too absorbed in it or else you'd lose your mind. Now, you were not out, at least publicly, until a very few years ago. As an ambitious person in public service, how did that decision work? Why the reluctance if that's what it was? Well, I first had to overcome a lot of personal reluctance to just admitting this simple fact about myself, although I got over that somewhere

in my 20s. Then once I did, it was a matter of law that I could not serve in the military and be out, and it was at least a conventional wisdom that I could either be an elected official in Indiana or I could be out, but I could not be both. And so needless to say that helped motivate me to drag my feet on coming out. What changed all that? Well, two things. One, I grew older, I realized that I couldn't go on like that forever. But then the thing that really put me over the top was the military deployment where I took a leave from serving as mayor to go serve overseas. And it just something about that really clarified my awareness of the extent to which you only get to live one life and be one person. Well, tell me about that deployment.

What happened? Well, part of it was just the exposure to danger, even the fact of the writing the letter that I wrote to my family before I left just in case. What did the letter say? Well, a lot of it was about why I felt that my life, how I felt my life fit together, and why I didn't want them to think that I'd been cheated if I didn't come back because I had such a full life up till then. I was 32, 33. But at the same time, I realized that there was something really important that was missing.

I began to feel a little bit humiliated about the idea that my life could come to an end and I could be a visible public official and a grown man and a homeowner and have no idea what it was like to be in love. And did you come out to your parents in that letter, to your family? No, no, I did that after I came back. Pretty soon after I came back, though. Now, you can't do everything first as a president. What would be your signature first priority policy as the holder of that office, what would you really look at to spend your political capital on right away? Democratic reform. The condition of our democracy is diminished and the worse it gets, the harder it will become for us to fix anything else, any of the top issues we care about, of which I think climate is the most pressing. So, you know, for the rest of my life, our system of government will be probably inadequate to the moments we face unless we fix it.

So we're talking voter suppression, redistricting. Yeah, certainly the contents of HR1 would be a good place to start. We also need to be, I think, considering structural reform. So in addition to redistricting and money and politics and voter suppression, I think we need to look at. whether we're going to continue to allow D.C. not to be a state. We should look at whether the Supreme Court can be reformed so that it is less political. And, you know, the Senate's going to have to figure out whether the filibuster is appropriate to the modern environment. I suspect it is not. You know, we really need to look at the big questions. And it is entirely possible that the House of Representatives has the wrong number of representatives, that the U.S. Supreme Court has the wrong number of justices, and that the United States has the wrong number of states. I think you're looking at a constitutional convention, aren't you? Maybe a convention, maybe a series of amendments like we had in the late 1970s, many of them spearheaded by Indiana Senator Birch by. I mean, this stuff is not crazy out of left field.

This is something that the United States has routinely done in every era except the one that I'm living in. But the memories of the court packing debacle under Franklin Roosevelt are, at least for historians, pretty fresh. how do you propose rationalizing increasing the size of the Supreme Court? Well, it's not simply about adding to it in order to take it toward the left because it's too conservative, even though I do think it is too conservative. It's about a structural reform that will make that body less political. We can't go on like this where every vacancy turns into an apocalyptic ideological battle.

So there are many options for reform. I'm not wedded to one of them, although the one I think is the most attractive, which I think will be discussed in a forthcoming, Yale Law Journal article would be to have 15 members, but only 10 of them, selected by the traditional political process, and the other five selected in a process which requires the other 10 to agree unanimously. There are other, perhaps less structurally complex ideas like having it become a rotation off the appellate bench.

But my point is, whatever mechanism we choose, we need to make sure that this body, which by the way, I think, has been restructured something like six times, or at least had its size changed six times in U.S. history. We need to make sure that we have a structure that stops this trajectory toward coming to be viewed as a nakedly political institution, which is bad for the court and bad for the country. So this collection of reforms and changes is what you would put your political capital on far before, say, a green initiative, an environmental initiative. What we're realizing is we are totally sclerotic in our ability to manage even the most urgent issues. When you have 80 or 90 percent of Americans believing that we should at least do universal background checks but Congress can't make it happen,

when immigration reform, the most divisive issue of our moment, is actually the subject of an American consensus. If you look at the popularity of a comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of what once passed in the Senate but couldn't get through the House, When you think of our total inability to have a debate over who's got the best plan for climate change because folks in Washington are still arguing over whether there even ought to be a plan, what you see is that the center of gravity of the American political system is no longer within shooting distance of the center of gravity of the American people. The longer that goes, the more twisted and dangerous outcomes you get. I'm worried that this could eventually lead to the instability that could even cause. political violence, and I believe it's absolutely helped lead to the presidency we're living with now.

Now, it's extremely early in the race, but you've got a lot of energy on your side, even though it's a very crowded field. Let's think ahead to post-nomination. Let's say you get the nomination, and you are pitted against one of the most unpredictable minds, let's put it this way, and debaters in the history of American politics. How do you propose to defeat Donald Trump on a debate stage and in general. What's the wrong way to go about it and what's the right way to go about it? Well, the wrong way to go about it is to be focused on him and how to defeat him, to concoct in your mind the masterful zinger that is going to lay him flat on the debate stage.

Because it just doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter in some regards what you say. Any energy or attention, including critical energy or attention that comes his way, is something that he absorbs and feeds off of and becomes bigger from. So if you really want to defeat him, you have to create an environment where it's not all about him. If you're just thinking up the great line to get him at the debate, you're setting up a framework where it's almost as though he's the one you're trying to impress. What we need to do is quickly, effectively, and flatly correct any lies that he tells

and confront any bad policies he puts forward and then move on to what the world ought to look at the The press has been correcting these lies at a rate of thousands every few months to very little effect it would seem. Exactly, exactly, because that's just table sticks. That doesn't get the job done. You have to do it because you can't fail to do it. But that's not how you're going to win. How you're going to win is to put forward something better. And to remind people that this presidency is going to come and go, that it's not all about him.

It's one of the reasons I talk a lot about my concern for what the world will look like in 2054 when I come to be the age he is now. We need to treat this presidency as a symptom, not a cause. And, you know, even though it can be mesmerizing, as many grotesque things are, at the end of the day, pointing out all the ways in which he's terrible does not amount to a message. Mr. Mayor, thank you so much. Same here. Good to be with you. That was Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and one of more than a dozen Democrats running for president in 2020. I'm David Remnick, and that's the show for today.

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