The NPR Politics Podcast - A Younger Pete Buttigieg Thought That Democrats Weren't Progressive Enough

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

This week, the NPR Politics Podcast investigates defining moments in the lives of four top Democratic presidential candidates to understand how those experiences shape their politics today.In deep conversations in college dorms at the height of the Iraq war, Pete Buttigieg joined friends to create an informal group with a mission: rebuild a Democratic Party that would live up to progressive ideals.Now a top contender for the Democratic nomination, Buttigieg has cultivated a more moderate brand — and faces criticism from a new generation of college-aged activists.Read more: Pete Buttigieg Spent His Younger Days Pushing Democrats Off Middle GroundThis episode: campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, and White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, we're going to make a pitch for you to support our work by supporting your local public radio station with a donation. But it seems like listeners like you already know why you should support us. Hey, it's Tim in San Jose. A whole lot of politics happened today. Here at the Politics Podcast, we bring you the biggest political stories. This fine podcast was recorded. But there's a lot of work that goes into making the podcast before it's in your feeds. It takes a while to engineer it. Things may have changed by the time you hear it.

And to do that work, from reporting to producing and editing, we depend on support from listeners like you. And the best way to support our show is by giving to our member stations. Without them, this podcast just wouldn't exist. So if you like this podcast, maybe even enough to write a song about it, please consider giving at donate.npr.org slash politics. OK, that's it. Hit it, Tim. NPR Politics, go, go, go. OK, get ready. Here's the show. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm also covering the campaign.

And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And all this week, we're taking a closer look at the top four presidential candidates running in the Democratic primary race. We each took a candidate, dove into their rise as a politician, and focused on a moment in their lives that was a turning point for them, either professionally or personally. And Asma, today we are focusing on South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. You are the one who reported out this profile. So which period in his life did you pick? So Pete Buttigieg is quite a bit younger than most all of the other candidates in the field, most notably the other leading Democrats in this race who are all in their 70s. So I was interested in how Buttigieg came to hold the political ideas that he has today. And early on, a number of months ago, I started making phone calls to a bunch of people who I had gotten word of that knew him socially, knew him because they had attended school with him either at Harvard or at Oxford, and started digging through, trying to better understand his college days and how he came to hold, essentially, the political worldview that he does today.

And how would you describe his worldview? He sort of puts himself out there as one of the moderates in the campaign. So this is an interesting question. I actually asked a lot of his friends if they would describe him as a progressive. And I think that part of what's hard about this definitional label is that going back to the time period that I focused on, which was essentially right after John Kerry's loss in the 2004 election, George W. Bush'selection. At that point in time, Pete Buttigieg and their friends felt that the progressive movement was not doing enough for the party. And so they definitely did see themselves as progressives. What I think is really interesting

is that this political moment, you're right, he is seen as perhaps one of the more moderate, pragmatist candidates, perhaps a third way politician, which is somebody who essentially is trying to find that middle road, somebody who thinks you can be maybe socially liberal, but also kind of more economically pragmatist. So what I thought was interesting was to understand how somebody who's a millennial came to form their political ideas. And that's where I started. Okay, so we're going to do something a little bit different here and take a few minutes to sit back and listen to that profile you put together on Buttigieg. When Pete Buttigieg arrived in England, he was a curious, bookish 23-year-old known to his friends as Peter.

The year was 2005. The Iraq War was raging on. John Kerry had lost the presidential election, and Democrats were soul-searching. It felt like a pretty dark moment. Dan Weeks was one of Buttigieg's old buddies at Oxford. I think finding like-minded people who were progressive but weren't quite content with the Clinton third-way status quo that had defined the Democratic Party for basically our lifetimes, we were really looking for a way out of that. And so every week they would meet up with other friends to discuss deep political thoughts. Their group was like a book club, but without books.

Together, they called themselves members of the Democratic Renaissance Project. We were nerdy types, I suppose. It was something more than just the camaraderie, which counted for a lot. We were looking to challenge each other's thinking, especially at that moment when, after almost eight years of George W. Bush, a lot of us were feeling like the country was almost unrecognizable. Sometimes they met in common rooms in the ancient ornate colleges around Oxford, other times at a local British pub that had been frequented by a now-famous former Rhodes scholar,

Bill Clinton. Buttigieg first conceived of the Democratic Renaissance Project with Ganesh Siddharaman, a friend from his undergrad days at Harvard. Siddharaman declined to be interviewed on the record for this story. He's a longtime advisor to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. But Sabil Rahman, who was also a part of the group, says the name, the Democratic Renaissance Project, was kind of tongue-in-cheek. It was very informal. We would take turns hosting in our, you know, we'd bring some snacks or something. We'd rotate who would tee up a different topic of conversation. But as ad hoc as it was, there was also a sense of generational urgency that if

they wanted to live in a better country, they were going to have to fix the country themselves. And so they wanted to prepare for public service. Sometimes the group would circulate writings by modern-day political theorists about citizenship or progressive values. Here's Rahman again. He's now president of the progressive group Demos. A lot of times we'd think through some of the policy debates of the day. The Iraq War was one that came up a number of times. Rahman was one of Buttigieg's roommates in Oxford. At the time, Buttigieg was studying politics, philosophy, and economics. You know, we were students.

It was our full-time job to try to think big thoughts and understand how the world works. That's Buttigieg reminiscing over his Oxford days in an interview with me. He says there was an assumption that in order to win elections, Democrats had to contort their values, work within the Republican framework, and put a conservative spin on their message. There had been a smallness to the aspirations of, I think, our own party, because it felt like all those years, that whole first decade of this century, it felt like all the Democrats were doing was responding to Republicans. Buttigieg was frustrated that the GOP seemed to have a monopoly on family, patriotism, and morality. I contacted over half a dozen old Democratic Renaissance

Project members, most declined to talk on tape for this story. They didn't want to discuss campaign politics, given their professional ties. But the consensus among former members is that the focus in these discussion groups was on values and philosophy, not so much specific policy. Here's Buttigieg again. A big part of what we were doing was studying the right. One of the things that we had noticed was that it was actually the American right wing that had built the strongest relationship between kind of ideas and politics. Buttigieg and his friends were obsessed with reforming the Democratic Party. Rahman says he remembers one particular example. We actually

staged a debate in Oxford, and the frame for the debate was, the third way is good for the Democratic Party, yay or nay. The third way refers to the moderate Democratic politics of the Bill Clinton era that sought to reconcile centrist economic ideas with progressive social ideas. Here's Dan Weeks again. Pete spoke up. I remember he was against that third way approach. He was a strong and I thought certainly a pretty compelling critic of that way. Buttigieg's critics now accuse him of being a modern third-way politician focused on rhetoric. When Buttigieg began his presidential campaign, he spoke about some

radical changes like getting rid of the Electoral College and reforming the Supreme Court. Now that he's seen as a more viable candidate, he's not as vocal about those ideas. I asked Buttigieg how he reconciles how people see him today with his vocal opposition to the third way back in the day. You know, I think over time I've come to appreciate more of the policy work that comes out of moderate organizations. Those friends who formed the Democratic Renaissance Project never came to a consensus on ideology amongst themselves. Today, some are more centrist, others more liberal. But Sabil Rahman says there was something that united them. I think we came into that space not just with the sense of crisis,

but with the sense that progressive politics, as it was being practiced in the post-Clinton era, was not up to the task of what we needed progressivism to do. Many friends said the focus on freedom, values, and generational change that you hear in Buttigieg today come from all the soul searching they did as liberal millennials living in a George W. Bush world. If we want to win, we can't look like we're the party of back to normal. What we have now isn't working, but normal wasn't working either. That's part of how we got here.

We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about Pete Buttigieg and his Democratic Renaissance project. Hey, Mindy here from NPR's Wow in the World, doing Guy Raz and me for our special 100th episode, a musical. Science, laughs, melodies. Melodies. Melodies. Melodies.

Melodies. Melodies. Melodies. It's Wow in the World from Tinkercast and NPR. Listen now and share with your kids. And we are back. And Asma, to do one of my favorite things to do, which is to repeat an ongoing conversation that we've had a lot in the newsroom in front of microphones. Like to me, this story more than anything else crystallizes what it means to have a millennial, especially an older millennial presidential candidate, because for people about our age, like this is such a particular political time and place

and mental space of like reacting to the Iraq war and all the things that were happening and just trying to make sense of it. And this is what Pete Buttigieg was doing with his university friends. I mean, we've talked about this so much, right? How the 2004 election, I think, for our generation was so formative. And so in some ways, writing the story felt so relatable, but it also made me feel like, wow, Pete Buttigieg is really young or I'm really old, one of the other. Or that this just feels like a long time ago in a way that it didn't before. Because it's a historical moment that helped actually shape, you know, a presidential candidate's worldview. But yet you're like, I was alive. And I remember that moment as well.

And it doesn't feel like that long ago. Yeah. And a lot of people to one degree or other about all of our ages were having similar arguments with their friends about this stuff. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And there is no better time to have deep thoughts and get together and like get together with your deep thoughts than in college. In college at Oxford. You know, they did say that they had the benefit of being some of them.

I should say not all of them because they had an outpost as well in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But some of them had the benefit of being Americans abroad, having the benefit of looking at their country and what was happening at this moment from a distance. And so you could sit there and sort of, you know, hypothesize sort of about a value system or a party that you wanted. And when I talked to a lot of his friends, when I mentioned this in the profile itself, but there are still a lot of core values that Buttigieg's friends believe are the same. A lot of that is how he talks about freedom and how he talks about generational change. I think one of the big question marks, though, is what happened to the progressivism, right, that he was talking about and searching for? I will say some people who know

him from this time period very strongly still feel like he is so much more progressive than where the party was in 2004. True. But what I think is interesting is he was frustrated by where his party was in 2004. And I will tell you, I have now met young people out on the campaign trail, be they at Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren rallies, who have told me how angry and frustrated they are with Pete Buttigieg's campaign, which to me is just sort of this weird circle of political life. And what jumped out to me was him telling you, you know, I was just so frustrated with all the Democratic Party did was responding to Republicans. And like, what is a central narrative of this race? It's Democratic voters and a lot of candidates just circling around

the central idea of how do we replace Donald Trump, the Republican president, which again, feels like 2004. Yeah, that is not unlike 2004, where there was this, do Democrats go with a progressive candidate, Howard Dean, or do they go with sort of the safe statesman who they think could really respond to George W. Bush on the war? And then who's that? Joe Biden in that equation? I mean, so maybe that's where Pete Buttigieg thinks he's somewhere as this alternative. My only question is what 2004 Pete Buttigieg would think of 2019 Pete Buttigieg. I would love to know the answer to that question. I would love to know the answer to that question.

I would love to know the answer to that question. I mean, in many ways, a lot of his friends who knew him from this time period, who did not want to be, you know, recorded on tape, because I talked to a lot of people for this story just on background, you know, people do feel like the values that he espoused then are the values that he's espousing now. Some of them, you know, have donated to his campaign. They are supportive of what he's saying and what he's doing out on the campaign trail. No doubt there are young people today, though, who feel enormously frustrated with Pete Buttigieg. So maybe what he represents is just this idea that when you grow up, your politics sort of evolve to some degree. And it's the new young people of today

who aren't entirely on board with his politics. And polls reflect that. All right. That is one of several profiles we're putting together on several of the candidates for president. Be sure to listen to the rest of those episodes we're putting out this week. And you can chat about them all at our Facebook group at n.pr slash politics group. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Asma Khalid. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.