Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, on Thursday took a thinly-veiled shot at his more liberal rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination by saying people are being presented with a “false choice” that you have to be “extreme” or it’s “business as usual.”

“On issue after issue, we’ve got to break out of the Washington mindset that measures the bigness of an idea by how many trillions of dollars it adds to the budget or the boldness of an idea by how many fellow Americans it can antagonize,” Mr. Buttigieg said at Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate in Los Angeles.

Mr. Buttigieg touted his higher education proposal that would offer free college tuition for most Americans but exclude higher-income earners.

“If you’re in that top 10%, how about you pay your own tuition and we save those dollars for something else that we could spend them on that would make a big difference whether it’s infrastructure, childcare, housing, health?” he said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont have proposed making public college tuition-free, regardless of income.

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