South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg joined me this morning for a wide-ranging interview:

Audio:

05-17hhs-buttigieg

Transcript:

HH: I am about to embark on a very special interview with the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, who is of course one of the highlights of the early primary season in the Democratic race for president. Mayor Pete, welcome, it’s great to have you on the show. Thank you for doing this.

PB: Good morning. Thanks for having me on.

HH: Our mutual friend, Mark Gearan, who along with Dan Poneman was my roommate in college and my closest friend for my years on the Charles told me a couple of nights ago I had to be very fair to you because of your love for the IOP.

PB: (laughing) That’s a very special place. It’s, as you know, it’s an organization that tries to get young people to care about politics. So I appreciate that he had a good word to put in.

HH: Oh, a very, very good word. So I want to do three things – biography, policy, and politics, and start with biography. I have a theory, Mayor Pete, about your rise, which is tied to a small town America. I’m from Warren, Ohio, which is South Bend without Touchdown Jesus. For your Studebaker, I can match you with Packard. For your South Bend Watch Company, I’ve got Halsey-Taylor Water Fountain with Warren, Ohio in every…for your folding paper box, I’ve got Lordstown. Is part of your liftoff, and it’s been spectacular, the fact that small city America is a very, very large part of the country, and you represent it?

PB: I think so. There’s a lot of South Bends out there, a lot more than there are the biggest cities. And so many Americans who grow up in these communities where when you’re young you kind of get this message that success has to mean getting out. I don’t remember anybody ever saying it, but I remember thinking it. And it’s exactly what I did, only to realize kind of slowly that I needed to come home, and that’s, that it mattered that I was from there and not from somewhere else. And I think there’s a fair amount of self-awareness right now, maybe not with everybody, but certainly among many in the Democratic Party that we’ve lost our grasp on these communities. A lot of these are the kinds of places that were the bedrock of my party at one time, and yet as we know, it’s where so many voters turned away from us, especially in 2016.

HH: Now when you continue to campaign around, I think you’ll continue to find that chord resonant. But you have to go to places that a lot of liberal Democrats don’t like to go, like the Hugh Hewitt Show. Now I had to wrestle, battle your comms director dreadnought Liz Smith to get you on. So this is an end run while she’s in port. Will you come back monthly? Will you come and talk to me often?

PB: Well, we try to talk to everybody who gives us a chance to reach new audiences. So I don’t know that I ought to make a scheduling decision on the air, but I’m pleased to talk to you now, and I hope this won’t be the last time.

HH: Great. Now my three obligatory comments are a part of every interview. Do you think Alger Hiss was a communist spy?

PB: I guess. To be honest, I haven’t studied that closely enough to render a smart opinion, but that’s my understanding of the storyline there.

HH: All right. And have you read Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower?

PB: Yes, I have.

HH: What did you make of it?

PB: I thought it was fascinating. And I started to get into the Jeff Daniels show they did about it, although my TV watching has mostly dropped off since I started campaigning. But you know, what it tells you is that there were so many things that went into the perfect storm that led to the failures on the U.S. side that made 9/11 possible. You know, it’s always easy, of course, in hindsight to look at mistakes that were made. But just the fact that there were so many indications of something going on, and that we weren’t able to get to it, of course, revealed that we needed to restructure our intelligence and security apparatus, and also just understand differently the world that we were in. I think we’re still geared to deal with countries. I remember a friend after 9/11 saying, you know, how could they do this, doesn’t Afghanistan know we have bombs, and thinking well, it wasn’t Afghanistan. It’s not how it works anymore. It’s not countries attacking other countries. This is a stateless entity hosted in a failed state by a rogue regime that’s a transnational network. And it’s one of the things that got me interested in serving in counterterrorism personally, which I wound up doing. It’s just how complicated these things are.

HH: You know, Mayor Pete, I’m just a civilian, so that’s why I have to read books like The Looming Tower to get a grip on this. But you have been deployed to the combat theater of Afghanistan as a Naval intelligence officer. And you understand Wahhabism or fundamentalist Sunni doctrine. Does that seem to you daunting? We are sort of side players in a war that’s going on 700 years longer than our country’s existed between Shia and Sunni in the Middle East. Does, do you find that daunting as a prospect if you actually win this race?

PB: Everything about geopolitics ought to be daunting to any mortal. I mean, if you take seriously the responsibilities of the office, and the issues and the sometimes unsolvable problems that hit the president’s desk, then that should put some humility in you. Then again, you know, every dynamic that the U.S. has operated in has been complicated. There’s, you know, centuries-old tribal and interreligious conflicts that explain what’s been going on in the Middle East, but you could in many ways say the same thing about Europe in the time of World War I or World War II, which the U.S. perhaps never mastered but obviously played a decisive role in a better outcome when it came to something like World War II. Look, the thing that’s really alarming when you think about something like Wahhabism, which is definitely an ideology or religious fanatical ideology that fuels a great deal of extremism and terrorism around the world is that it’s propagated by a Saudi regime that we think of, or at least treat as an ally. And so many of our relationships around the world, whether it’s with Saudi Arabia or in a different way with Pakistan, our incredibly, I’m trying to think of the right word, I’d say two-faced, but well, yeah, in a way, it is. And we can be two-faced about it, too, as a country, because we’re perfectly happy to work with these countries in one dimension even while they’re doing things that undermine our interests in another. And I think until we have a little more consistently between our interests and our values, we’re going to continue to find ourselves being confused and sometimes harmed by what happens around the world.

HH: Do you find Iranians’ variant of Shia extremism to be more dangerous to the world than the Sunni variant that we see in the Taliban and perhaps in Hamas and some of the more radical elements of Wahhabism?

PB: Well, you know, not unlike Christianity when it is motivating someone to do something extreme. It can have a thousand different flavors. The real question is what’s going on with the regime, the government, that’s given the power and the apparatus of the state and intelligence service and a military, and what do they do with their ideology? Iran, I think, is a little more complex than the Saudi picture, because I think there’s, frankly, a less unified regime, not that the Saudi regime is homogenous, either. But you look at Iran and the dynamic that’s gone over the years between those who have the most fidelity to the revolution, and those who really want to see change, the moderates. The problem, of course, is that whenever moderates come to power in Iran, the U.S. has a way of undermining them. I mean, imagine if you’re an Iranian politician who put all your eggs in the basket of saying let’s make a deal with the Americans. We really can trust them, and it’ll make everybody better off. And of course, now you’re going to have a lot of egg on your face. And so the hardliners keep getting empowered with each turn of the wheel. The setup for conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians is one where I guess we feel like we have a side, because we’re more aligned with the Saudis. But in some ways, nothing good can come of one side totally dominating and winning that particular conflict. And of course, the Israelis in particular are worried about…

HH: There’s a view in the national…there’s a national security view that the Iranians used the idea of moderate members of the regime as a tactic to confuse members of the West, and that the Supreme Leader is the Supreme Leader is the Supreme Leader, and the IRGC is the IRGC, and their Rommel is Soleimani, and that all this other stuff is just fluff to draw in well-meaning but naïve Westerners into conversations with a hardline regime. Do you reject that, Mayor Pete?

PB: Mostly. I mean, look. Every country has enough complexity that its players can play us off against one another. And there’s layers and layers to what’s going on there. But there’s also something real. I mean, the extent to which I think their regime really was threatened by some of this protest and street action that happened a few years ago, I think, is real. We’re talking about a country with millions of people. You know, we talk about them on the news, or in classrooms. Like you just had this colored space on a map, and everything’s the same. And then if you actually go there, and admittedly, I’ve not gone to Iran, but every country I’ve set foot in has proved to be dramatically more complicated than you would think. And they had their own politics. You know, Iran, the Iranian regime does not speak for all of the Iranian people as a unit any more than, you know, you could say that there are no moderate politicians in the U.S., and we’re all secretly enthusiastic Trump supporters. It just doesn’t work that way.

HH: Would you, if you are in fact the president, try and take the United States back into the JCPOA?

PB: Yes. The JCPOA was designed to reduce or eliminate the nuclear threat from Iran. We didn’t do it as a favor to Iran. We did it for U.S. security interests. If we’re going to do something again, we can always look at ways that it might be done differently. But I believe it made us safer, and I believe getting out of it has contributed to instability in the region. I mean, it set off a chain reaction that now has people wondering whether the National Security Advisor, one of the same people who led us into the war in Iraq, is trying to put us on a course to some kind of military confrontation that nobody needs with Iran as well.

HH: Now I am, this is an interview, not a debate. So when I disagree with you, I just let it pass. But let me ask you if you think the JCPOA under President Obama, and before President Trump withdrew from it, in any way constrained Iranian behavior in the region.

PB: Well, the JCPOA was about their effort to get nuclear capability. The bad behavior in the region is another story. And no, I don’t think that it really constrained their regional activities. I think that you know, in order for that to happen, we have to have a stronger regional security framework overall. Look, we know that the IRGC has all kinds of extracurricular activities, many of them targeting American interests, many of them things we would consider nefarious. But you also can’t ask one deal or one policy to solve everything. The focus of the JCPOA was the nuclear issue, and I think it helped when it came to that particular issue.

HH: All right. Let’s go back to biography. I got off very quickly to policy. I read Shortest Way Home, all nearly 600 pages of it, and I just had a few questions. One, St. Joseph’s High School in South Bend, how big it is? Other than being class president, who were you then? What did you do? I mean, were you in the Latin club? The audio-visual club? Were you a track athlete? Who were you?

PB: I was on the track team. I wouldn’t say I was an athlete. I was probably the slowest guy on the track team. And it wasn’t a very big school. We had about 200 people per class, something like that. I was just figuring out who I was. I was pretty shy. I was pretty awkward. I was pretty intelligent, and you know, I did all the things you’d expect an awkward and intelligent kid to do. I did Quiz Bowl. I was in a play. I did, we had a monetary policy competition, if you can imagine such a thing.

HH: (laughing)

PB: Called the Fed Challenge.

HH: Oh.

PB: It was actually pretty cool…

HH: It’s painfully geekish.

PB: It was, but we advanced all the way to Chicago, the regionals, and we got to sit in the boardroom of the Fed and do a mock monetary policy presentation. It probably doesn’t get geekier than that, but it was actually where I formed a lot of great friendships. St. Joseph is a great place to go to school.

HH: Which play were you in, and what character did you play?

PB: A pretty minor part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was Theseus, the Duke of Athens. He kind of comes up at the beginning and at the end.

HH: All right. Now which elementary school did you go to in South Bend? That detail is not in Shortest Way Home.

PB: Oh, I started out at a place called, it was a Montesorri school actually where Chasten, my husband, wound up teaching later on. I was there through 5th grade, and then I went to a place called Stanley Clarke, a little more traditional, 6th through 8th grade. I had teachers who were definitely put me in touch with the need for discipline and set me on a good path through high school.

HH: My theory is that 90…

PB: But back then, I… go ahead, sir.

HH: My theory is that 90% of successful people can name 90% of their elementary school teachers. Can you?

PB: Ooh, interesting. Probably. Maybe not 90%, but pretty close. They make strong impressions. I mean, of course, they do, right? They show you how the world works. They scare you sometimes. And they explain things to you that you never forget. I still remember how much it blew my mind, I think I wrote about this, the first time I figured out what a metaphor was reading that Robert Frost poem, two roads diverged in a yellow wood. Teachers explaining how it’s not actually about two roads in a forest, and I’m like whoa, it just, I mean, the moment that light bulb goes off is something you can’t ever forget. So of course, you remember the person who turned on the light bulb for you.

HH: So in high school, were you Catholic?

PB: No. You know, I was baptized Catholic, but I didn’t really identity with any religion until later in life. You know, we went to, we had all-school Mass. I’d kind of sit through that, but there were some things in the Catholic education that really spoke to me, especially when you learned about the tradition of Catholic commitment to justice, and you learned about what was going on around the world. But I didn’t connect the dots to something in my own spirituality until much later.

HH: All right, so who were your best friends at St. Joe’s?

PB: A bunch of different kinds of people. Actually, one of my good friends from St. Joe just got nominated, the Democratic nominee to replace me back home as mayor, a guy named James Mueller, a little smarter than me and always telling the truth, even when I didn’t want to hear it, which is an attribute that years later when I reconnected with him made him a really good colleague, too.

HH: So high school boys do, they do a lot of dumb things. And sometimes, they get pulled over by the cops. Were you ever pulled over by the cops?

PB: Not that I can, not for anything particularly dumb other than speeding. At least, nothing leads to mind. But we did our share of dumb things.

HH: Okay. Let me go to your Harvard experience. You’re a Holworthy guy. We used to shout bad things about Holworthy from Stoughton, and then a Leverett House guy. Are you still close with your roommates from Leverett House?

PB: Oh, yeah. Yeah, a lot of them were at my wedding. A lot of them, in fact, all of them hit the road and came to South Bend when my dad died. We really turned to each other. You know, you’ve got to have people in your life who care about you no matter what you’re doing professionally, and whether things are going well or badly for you. My block mates definitely fall into that category.

HH: And from Oxford, where you got a first, by the way, which is a heck of a big deal. I didn’t know that until I read the book. Are you still close with your Oxford buddies?

PB: The ones who are U.S.-based, I keep in pretty good touch with. Obviously, I don’t see the ones abroad quite as often. But yeah, I mean, this is the thing about being a student, right? You become really close with people when your fulltime job is just to learn everything you can about the world, and about yourself.

HH: And you know, as the campaign goes on, they will be reached out to by all the reporters out there. If Pete Buttigieg remains in the top three or four, they’re going to be contacted. Are they ready for that?

PB: Oh, it’s already begun. Yeah, it’s, luckily, they usually let me know when that happens. But yeah, I’m starting to read things about my own student days that I either forgot or never thought would show up in a magazine. But so it goes.

HH: I particularly liked Chapter 14, “Dirt Sailor.” And I particularly liked the fact that your application to join the Navy was slowed down when the recruiter thought, when you put down Arabic, it meant aerobics. So they thought you were a very fit applicant. But it slowed…

PB: Yeah, and then later on, they made me the command fitness leader. So I guess that caught up to me.

HH: But you also…

PB: I just thought for an intel package, they’d be impressed that I knew a little Arabic.

HH: It was a very good introduction to the military and the ways that it works. But you also talk about Major Donahue, General Green, Senior Chief Hockenberry. These are people that you did not come home from Afghanistan. And you point out that nothing they had happened during the deployment would justify the pattern by which I returned safely, and some others did not. But I had the rest of my life to repay whatever debt I had incurred by coming back in one piece. That is very much the theme of John Kerry’s memoir. How often do you think about that?

PB: Pretty often. First, just for the record, I want to clarify Senior Chief Hockenberry was injured, but did come home, in case anybody is listening and is worried about her. As I understand it, she made an impressive recovery. But yes, people were injured, and some people didn’t make it. And you think about it, because you can’t think of any reason that really justifies it, especially with the kind of cruel lottery if IED’s. You know, most, I was an intel guy, so a lot of my work was on base. And when I was exposed to danger, unless you count the rocket attacks, which is also kind of a lottery, it was when we were outside the wire. And my job was to drive and get a vehicle somewhere. And so you know, the kind of danger I was exposed to was almost completely random, as these IED’s. and you get one, or you don’t. And thank God, I didn’t. But it makes you wonder about your relationship with luck, especially if you’re life depends on it, and somebody you know doesn’t make it. Also, because of luck, it’s not like you know, some of these people were far more professional, professionally experience in the military than I was. The only way you can justify it is after the fact, trying to figure out how you can live in a way that makes good on this crazy fact that some people come home and some people don’t, and you’re one of the ones who did.

HH: It’s an interesting part of the book. Let’s go to policy now. A very blunt question, because you talk about going to every Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Indiana when you were running statewide. Should Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves?

PB: Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I think it’s the right thing to do. You know, over time, you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor. And I think we know enough, especially Jackson, you know, you just look at what basically amounts to genocide that happened here. Jefferson’s more problematic. You know, there’s a lot to, of course, admire in his thinking and his philosophy. Then again, as you plunge into his writings, especially the notes on the state of Virginia, you know that he knew that slavery was wrong.

HH: Yes.

PB: And yet, he did it. Now we’re all morally conflicted human beings. And it’s not like we’re blotting him out of the history books, or deleting him from being the founder fathers. But you know, naming something after somebody confers a certain amount of honor. And at a time, I mean, the real reason I think there’s a lot of pressure on this is the relationship between the past and the present, that we’re finding in a million different ways that racism isn’t some curiosity out of the past that we’re embarrassed about but moved on from. It’s alive, it’s well, it’s hurting people. And it’s one of the main reasons to be in politics today is to try to change or reverse the harms that went along with that. Then, we’d better look for ways to live out and honor that principle, even in a symbolic thing.

HH: My commitment is to not take you longer than 25 unless you give me the time. Do I have, is that a hard out at 25 minutes after the hour?

PB: I think so, because I think we made another promise for right after that. Go ahead.

HH: All right, so very quickly, which part of the nuclear triad matters the most?

PB: Well, I’m a Navy guy, so you know, I’ve got a certain affinity for that side of the kind of maritime element to the nuclear triad. But you know, more broadly, I’m interested in how we mix deterrence with the continuing need for non-proliferation. And you know, we just marked the passing of Dick Lugar in the state of Indiana, a statesman who really committed himself to making sure that we were safer by having fewer weapons in the world, including engaging with the Russians at a time when nobody was quite sure what to do with them and with the other post-Soviet states. And obviously, that’s kind of fallen by the wayside. Look, we’re always going to need to maintain a strong nuclear deterrent, but again, the best thing we can do on the nuclear side is to make sure that there’s fewer, or at least not more countries, that are emerging as nuclear powers, which is one of the reasons why I think that getting out of the JCPOA was such a mistake.

HH: Now I also want to get to Governor, now Vice President Pence, who’s a lot in your book. And he’s a friend of mine. And the last time I saw him, though, was when he was swearing in Rick Grenell, while Rick’s partner, Matt, was holding a family Bible as enormous as a Michelin tire. Do you really think Mike Pence is homophobic?

PB: Well, he advances homophobic policies. I don’t know what’s in his heart. He’s always been polite to me in person. But you look at the fact that he, to this day, cannot bring himself to say that it shouldn’t be legal to discriminate against people who are gay, or that I should have been allowed to serve and put my life on the line in the military, as I was, even though he said very nice things about my service. He has not brought himself to reverse his position on firing military members who are gay. He certainly doesn’t seem to have objected to the way that troops who are transgender are being treated in this administration. And he hasn’t even gone on the record to say whether he believes that my family should be broken up or my marriage should be ended or not. So you know, if you’re in public office and you advance homophobic policies, on some level it doesn’t matter whether you do that out of political calculation or whether you do it out of sincere belief. The problem is it’s hurting other people.

HH: Now it’s my opinion that your being a married gay man matters to less than 25% of the electorate, and the D’s are going to vote for you anyway that are in the group, and the R’s would never vote you anyway in the group. So it’s not going to be an issue in this campaign. Do you think African-Americans, rightly or wrongly, resent the rather quick assimilation of LGBTQ into the mainstream?

PB: I don’t know. I definitely take the point about how quickly things have changed, not that we’re there, yet. I mean, you can still get fired, and people do, in a lot of parts of the country because of who you are. And there are a lot of serious issues, which is why I think we need an Equality Act. But you look at the trajectory of equality for LGBT people, and you compare it to the struggle that is going on for black America to this day, and you’ve got to ask the question how come one moved to quickly, and the other is plodding along generationally at such a slow pace. And as somebody who’s part of, you know, a group of people that’s been pushed to the side in one way, I think I have that much more responsibility to be there to stand up for people who are on the wrong side of racism. I mean, you just look at the numbers. You look at the outcomes. And you look at the stories of what happens to people of color in this country, and I’d be pretty pissed off, too.

HH: Let me conclude with the issue that most troubles me about the Democrats, including you, Mayor Pete, which is you are in favor of expanding the Supreme Court and packing the Court up to 15 justices, which would be profoundly destabilizing. I’ve been teaching Con Law for 25 years. I wouldn’t want the Republicans to do it or the Democrats to do it. Are you open to persuasion on that, because it is such a bad idea?

PB: I am in favor of anything that will depoliticize the Supreme Court. And as you know, I think, in fact, you know better than I do, was it six times or seven times that America has changed the number and/or structure of the justices? Anyway, at least from time to time…

HH: I don’t know, but it hasn’t been for, it hasn’t been for 80 years, 90 years…

PB: Well, no, the number of justices was changed in my lifetime.

HH: No, it hasn’t.

PB: Yes, it was. It was changed by the Republicans a couple of years ago. They changed it to eight until they took power again. So…

HH: Oh, I see. But not the law governing the number of seats. You would expand the number of seats. That’s an interesting rhetorical trick, but that’s not…

PB: Well, look. I’m only interesting, yeah, I’m only interested in changing the number if it’s part of a structural reform that makes it less partisan. So the article coming out in Yale Law Journal soon that I think is very interesting, and that I’ve floated, favors a structure where you have 15 seats, but only 10 of them are appointed on a partisan basis. The other five can only take their seats if the other 10 agree unanimously. So the idea here isn’t about pulling the Court to the left, even though I think it’s way to the right of the American people right now. The idea here is about making it less partisan, because you get more of the Souter’s, the Kennedy’s, people who actually think for themselves if you can’t get to a quorum of the Court unless some of the members are seated by the unanimous agreement of the other ten. It’s not about adding people.

HH: That’s a Constitutional amendment, isn’t it?

PB: Probably.

HH: I guess it’s not.

PB: I’m not a legal scholar. I’ve talked to legal scholars, something…

HH: Maybe it’s not.

PB: That’s, yeah, it’s up for debate.

HH: It’s up for debate.

PB: Look, there are other ideas that have been proposed. I mean, people have talked about term limits, although I don’t think that gets the job done.

HH: That’s a Constitutional amendment.

PB: Some people talk about rotation.

HH: That’s a Constitutional amendment.

PB: Yeah, some people talk, some people think you could set it up by a rotation off the appellate bench. I’m not out here saying I have the perfect answer. What I’m saying is we have got to get out of this pattern where every time there’s an opening on the Court, there is an apocalyptic ideological battle, because it is clearly diminishing the stature, and I think over the long run the legitimacy, of the Supreme Court that’s supposed to be our last resort and a body that’s not political. So when I talk about being open to changing the number, it’s not for its own sake. It’s just part of a bigger debate over what would it take to make this vitally important institution in our society less political at a moment when it’s getting more and more so.

HH: Come back, and let’s continue that conversation. Mayor Pete, I want to honor my commitment to Liz and to you. It’s a great conversation. I look forward to having you back in the future.

PB: It’s a pleasure. I’ll look forward to it. Thanks a lot.

HH: Thank you.

End of interview. NOTE: The Supreme Court has, by statute, been fixed at 9 members since 1869. The last attempt to change that –FDR’s ill fated “court packing plan–was in 1937.