Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks at a rally Friday on the University of New Hampshire campus in Durham. [Jane Murphy/seacoastonline.com] ▲

DURHAM — Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, held a rally on the University of New Hampshire campus Friday to highlight his newly released Women's Empowerment Policy and to answer questions from the public in a town hall-style format.

Several hundred turned out on the late fall afternoon on the lawn in front of Scott Hall to hear Buttigieg highlight some of the initiatives he's proposing in the new policy such as eliminating the gender pay gap, creating free childcare for families in need and affordable child care for all families and reducing maternal mortality rates. He's also pledging to make 50 percent of his cabinet and his judicial appointments women.

But first he addressed the origins of the divisiveness affecting the nation.

"The job before the next president of the United States is going to be to unite the American people and hold the American people together in a new American majority, while acting decisively to solve our problems. We can't skip that step. It's not enough to unite everybody just by talking in a generally agreeable way. We've got to act, because these problems are part of how we got here," he said.

"Remember, under ordinary circumstances, if our economy and our democracy were working the way they were supposed to, then a guy like Donald Trump would never have been able to get within cheating distance of the presidency in the first place," he said.

"That's why there's no such thing as back to normal. We've got to create a new normal. We've got to fashion a new normal out of the will of that new American majority," he said noting the way to keeping that majority intact is "in the name of American values, values that don't belong to one political party. If we take it seriously, that's a pretty progressive concept."

After all, he said, "Our country is made up of people and you can't love our country if you hate half of the people who are living in it."

In an interview after the rally, Buttigieg talked about his personal motivation for putting together a comprehensive policy to empower women.

"Both in the city of South Bend, where my mayor's office has typically been majority female and I've seen the extraordinary leadership there, but also in the community of U.S. Mayors where some of the most remarkable mayors are women," he said of his inspiration. "... But also just growing up around strong and capable professional women like my mother, who was an academic and navigating that world was not simple."

"I see the importance of really having an integrated and a comprehensive approach that recognizes that you can't separate economic, political and social power from the need to get the right policy outcomes and that's why we try to take it all together, and look at all the different things you have to do at once," he said.

On the issue of equal pay, Buttigieg said, "Without intervention, the path to equal pay for all women including women of color would take more than 200 years so there's got to be intervention." He proposed doubling the resources going into the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate pay discrimination claims and enforce judgments on employers. He also proposed requiring employers to publish data on gender pay gaps in their organizations and make their rates of pay public.

Buttigieg said, in addition to discrimination, the government needs to address other issues that get in the way of women earning the same as men.

"Discrimination is only part of what's driving this pay gap. We know that a large part of it is the things that lead to women's career trajectories, they're just not on as fast of a curve," he said. "When you don't have access to child care, for example, or paid family leave, then women are more likely to step out of the workforce when they have a child or a family event. And even if they decide to eventually go back in, when they do, they will have missed so many years of opportunities for pay increases and advancement that can then impact them for the rest of their career," he said.

"It's also the case with workplace harassment. There's evidence that when women experience harassment and leave a job because of it, they will often leave for a lower paying job because they've just got to get out of a workplace," he said. "So, when we act on the culture and climate that leads to harassment, we're also acting in a way that allows women to be more likely to stay and grow and succeed and advance in their chosen career at a given employer. So I think we've got to take all of these things and intervene at the same time."

On reducing maternal mortality rates, which have risen in the United States, and inequities in women's health care, he said, "This is one of the areas where health equity zones can make a difference because the drivers of mortality often vary regionally. Sometimes it's an environmental issue with people living in an area where there are more contaminants that lead to complications. Sometimes it's a matter of nutrition and people living in food deserts. Often it's the clinical environment. For example, one of the drivers of the racial gap is that women of color are less likely to have their description of being in pain believed."

He would address these problems with more culturally knowledgeable clinic staff, by improving gender inequities in certain fields of medicine, and making sure that medical research into women's health concerns gets the necessary resources.

On this and other issues of "racial and gender equity and health, the idea is the community will figure out what it needs to do and the resources should be federal," he said. "Instead of what we have now sometimes is a federal answer and the community is supposed to come up with the dollars."

Earlier in his rally, Buttigieg he would pay for these policy proposals by rolling back President Trump's corporate tax cut and by allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices which it is estimated could save $300 billion.

On the concern that young people are growing up in country without examples of how democracy and politics can work, Buttigieg replied, "One message I have for young voters is the longer you're planning to be here, the more you have at stake in decisions that are being made right now, decisions around climate, around the economy, around equity. These will affect you for the rest of your life, and they're often being made by people with a different perspective, or, frankly, made by people who don't have your best interests at heart."

"You have a chance to change that, you have a lot of power if you choose to use it," he said. "Running for office is an expression of hope on some level, and being involved in politics even voting is something you can only do if you have some measure of hope that doing it will make a difference. And I think my job is to cultivate that sense of hope, about the value of being involved. Even knowing that hope has gone out of style a little bit, because of where our politics has gotten. We can't let that become a self-fulfilling sense of skepticism or even cynicism."

"It's about American leadership in the world because the values that America models, when we're at our best, are values that the whole world cares about. It's been always been part of our edge - a belief in freedom and democracy and equality," he said. "... if those remain American values, then the world will remain supportive of American ideals and that's good news for us and for the world, if we're out there practicing what we preach."