michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, I sit down with Democratic presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

pete buttigieg

I don’t think it makes sense to worry too much about any one of my competitors.

david leonhardt

Then, Ross, Michelle, and I talk about Mayor Pete’s rise and his views on intergenerational justice, the radicalization of the Republican Party, and more.

michelle goldberg

He has a pitch that’s kind of aimed squarely at me.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

You’re sort of pinned to your seat. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

He’s the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, which isn’t exactly a typical resume for a presidential candidate.

news clip He’s the youngest candidate and the first openly gay one. But he says it’s not about winning a race. It’s about winning an era.

david leonhardt

But these aren’t typical times, and Pete Buttigieg seems to have intrigued a lot of Democratic voters. In recent polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s been in third place behind only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. I went to Chicago last week, where Buttigieg was campaigning, and we sat down in a downtown studio. After you hear our conversation, Ross and Michelle will come back to offer their thoughts on the Buttigieg phenomenon. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, welcome to “The Argument.”

pete buttigieg

Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt

So we’re sitting here in downtown Chicago in the studio. And actually, I want to start by reading you a sentence from your book as a way to ask you a question. So you have this great little phrase where you say, “A politician’s account of how he or she first came to run for office is supposed to begin with a ritual mention of having been urged to do so by others, being flattered, demurring, and eventually feeling called to step forward.” So with that, I have to ask you, when did you decide to run for president, and what made you do it?

pete buttigieg

So the first murmurings of it happened when I was running for D.N.C. chair. And so people really did suggest that I run for president. I couldn’t tell if they were just being nice, especially because many of them were not going to support me for D.N.C. So they explained why they thought I would make a good president but were not ready to vote for me for D.N.C. chair, for what turned out to be all kinds of reasons relating to their own commitments and loyalties. But that didn’t really get into my head too much because I was getting ready to go back home to South Bend. And my thought had always been not to think too far beyond my current job but that if I was going to be a really good, successful, two-term mayor, then I’d have a chance of running for governor in Indiana. But I also think the way you run for office is you kind of map what the office calls for at the moment. And then you think about what you bring to the table, and then you look for a match. So that’s the process that led me to run for mayor and D.N.C. chair. It’s the process that led me to not run for Congress several times.

david leonhardt

Mm-hmm.

pete buttigieg

And following that process didn’t really lead me to think that I was uniquely the answer to what Indiana needed in the governor’s office. But meanwhile, I’m looking at the national picture. And I’m seeing this moment that is of tectonic change, where I think even now, we might actually be under-reacting to how big the urgency of the moment is. I saw that there was a disconnect between my party and the part of the country where I live, the industrial Midwest. I saw a real appetite for generational change swelling up in the party. And I saw a general sense of frustration or even disgust with national politics by sometimes the same people who really believed in their civic institutions and their local government and their mayors. And I thought that I might be able to do something that nobody else can do, even people who I largely agree with in the Democratic Party and that I’ve got to think about stepping up. And so I thought about it, talked to people, tried to figure out if this was as crazy as it looked on its face or not, eventually set up the committee in January. By April, we were ready to go full blast and officially launch the campaign.

david leonhardt

And what about Indiana governor did you decide wasn’t a good fit?

pete buttigieg

It’s just that those same things that I was talking about don’t apply in the same way. There’s actually a much healthier generational mix among leaders in Indiana right now than I find that there was kind of visible at the time in the national scene. I certainly have some views about how the state ought to be run differently than it is today but none that I thought only I can really help set right when there are a lot of really good, strong Democrats in my state, one of whom who I will, I’m sure, be supporting for governor soon.

david leonhardt

So you’re asked constantly about the experience question, and I’m not going to ask you the normal version of it because I’ve heard you answer it. Actually, your answer is more persuasive than I expect it to be, which is basically, as a mayor, you make executive decisions that members of Congress, like your competitors in the race, which you don’t say, but imply, make. And you also point out that you’re a military veteran, unlike all of our recent presidents. I guess what interests me is the larger issue. If you were to become president, by my calculations, we would have had three of the least experienced or least traditional presidents in our history in a row. Barack Obama was an anonymous state legislator five years before he was president. Donald Trump had never been in politics. I would describe him as a real estate and television huckster, and then you, a medium-sized city mayor. What do you think it says about our country right now that we’re doing that? And is it something to be worried about at all?

pete buttigieg

So I think it reflects a sense across the country that normal is not working. And so there was a very hopeful and, I think, unifying and aspirational response to how to make politics less business as usual that the Obama campaign represented. There was a more vengeful and spiteful version of how to do that that is what the Trump moment has represented. And we’re still there. We’re still at a moment where the last thing Americans want to do is go back to normal, or at least people where I live. I’m worried about this, actually, because I think there will be a temptation for Democrats to say what’s going on right now is crazy. It’s chaos. It’s unsustainable. It’s terrible. Therefore, let’s go back to normal. And I think that will leave a lot of people cold in the industrial Midwest. where I live.

david leonhardt

Meaning in the general election?

pete buttigieg

Yeah, exactly, because you could start the clock in the 70s and watch the rising tide — the proverbial rising tide — that’s supposed to lift all boats. Watch it go up. Watch G.D.P. go up. Watch unemployment, in recent years, go down. And yet most of the boats didn’t budge. Ninety percent of Americans barely saw any real wage growth at all over a period that extends longer than my lifetime. And I think that has contributed to this political moment, to this disaffection, to this frustration, part of what put this president in office. I’m not waving away the racism and xenophobia of his appeal. But I think people are more susceptible to that when there is a broad sense that nothing works. And I think we’re still there. Even more so, actually, because I think what we’re now living through is the collapse of the Reagan era— the supply-side, neoliberal consensus that dominated the thinking and behavior of Democratic and Republican officials for as long as I’ve been alive. And it’s over because it didn’t work. And what comes next could be anything, from a kind of enlightened, forward-looking, progressive outlook like what I hope we’ll have to something really, really dark, like what we’re living through right now, taken to the next level.

david leonhardt

You’re making an argument there against something that feels safe.

pete buttigieg

In a way, yes. Look, we clearly need the kinds of experience or at least the kind of demonstrated commitment to service that the current president lacks. But often, as a matter of leadership and as a matter of political strategy, being too safe is a big mistake. And let’s come back to the nomination and this question of electability that keeps getting thrown around. I think sometimes our party can psych ourselves out by nominating the person we think is most “electable” and generating somebody who is less inspiring and therefore actually less electable. Part of the example of why it can pay off to do something more unusual is in my home state of Indiana. Only once in the last 50 years, onec since L.B.J., have we voted Democratic. It was not for Bill Clinton. It was not for Jimmy Carter. It was not for John Kerry. It was for Barack Obama. Now, if we were sitting here in May of 2007 debating how we could have an electable democratic nominee who would even put a place like Indiana on the map, I doubt that Barack Hussein Obama would be one of the names that the consultants and commentary would have proposed. And yet because he was able to arouse something among voters that transcended some traditional political tribal loyalties, he was able to succeed in some unlikely territory. So I think that’s a really important object lesson for us to think about today.

david leonhardt

It reminds me of something else that you’ve said, which is there are people in South Bend who have voted for you and for Barack Obama and for Mike Pence as governor and for Donald Trump is president. And there are probably people who have also then voted for a Democrat in the 2018 midterms, if you look at the national trends. So obviously, those people are not voting based on some analysis of white papers. And I don’t mean that dismissively. What do you think they are voting on? What is it about those candidates — you and Mike Pence and Barack Obama and Donald Trump — that spoke to those people?

pete buttigieg

Well, you’re right. They’re not downloading all of our policy commitments and mapping them on to a left to right spectrum and deciding whether we’re as left or right or center as they are. I think a lot of it is style. I hate to say it because I’m a policy guy. And I care most about substance. But then again, sometimes, style is substance. So I think that’s certainly true of this president, who, in my view, doesn’t even have an ideology, just a style. But his style then drives a lot of the policies you see. So I think people want somebody who’s for them, who they can relate to, who they believe cares about them, or at least will make things better for them. What changes is people also want something refreshing, something different. David Axelrod often talks about this kind of theory of opposites. It’s very convincing. It’s how you get Carter after the Nixon experience. It’s how you get Reagan after Carter. It’s how you get Obama after Bush. We tend to want something that is really different than whatever it is we just had. But I think that’s true both in the immediate sense, like the next president is going to be a lot different than this one, and in this sort of epochal sense, in which the next 40 or 50 years are going to look very different than the last 40 or 50.

david leonhardt

Before we move on, let’s just put a fine point on this. It feels like this race now has a front runner, and it’s Joe Biden. And it feels like all the things you’re saying are an argument against the Democrats nominating Joe Biden.

pete buttigieg

I don’t think it makes sense to worry too much about any one of my competitors because there are so many of them. And everybody brings different virtues into this race. It feels like somebody is joining every day. But I think we’re still at a moment where most people are just beginning to dial in.

david leonhardt

Yeah.

pete buttigieg

So it’s natural enough that, especially for those who are less likely to be following the blow by blow, the first name you’re going to say to a pollster is going to be the most famous. And that’s roughly the pattern that explains where the top tier is right now. And that pattern may not change until the last few weeks.

david leonhardt

OK, let’s talk policy. So you’ve made clear that your number one priority would be democratic reform— small d— right? Not health care, not climate, not inequality — you care about all those things. But your number one priority would be democratic reform. And so some of that seems fairly clear to me what that would be— make it easier for people to vote, make it harder for companies to anonymously give huge amounts of money to affect races. And so I can see a fair amount of that passing if you have a Democratic Congress. Then there’s this whole other category— enlarging the Supreme Court, enlarging the size of the House. And I’m all for the idea of presidential campaigns being times for bold ideas and starting conversations. But boy, I have a really hard time seeing how you’re going to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court. And I’m interested in how you think about that, if it’s your number one priority.

pete buttigieg

First of all, the reason I think these democratic reforms are so important is because I think every other issue we do care about — immigration, climate, inequality, gun safety — are dramatically harder to deal with until we’ve repaired our democracy. The reason I think we should undertake some of these very bold debates is precisely because they’re going to take a long time and a lot of work. It means we don’t have a moment to lose. The consequences of remaining as undemocratic as we are in everything from the way our districts are drawn to the way our president is chosen, I think those consequences get more serious each passing year. And while these are among those issues that I think have always been viewed as important to never viewed as urgent, like DC statehood. I don’t think anybody can make a principled argument about why DC voters shouldn’t enjoy—

david leonhardt

I agree.

pete buttigieg

A senator. We just tolerate it because it’s just been that way. And even though most people want to do the right thing, it’s not going to make it into your top 15 when you’re worried about wages, jobs, and health care and whatever. And yet, the longer we allow it to go on, the more harm has done to this country. And it’s just one example of how decisions are being made that do not reflect where the American people believe we ought to be. And perversely, even though I think he’s making it worse, the current president arrived where he is partly, as a consequence, of this general feeling, this roiling sense, that nothing works, that neither our democracy nor our economy is working for people. And while he’s certainly not a solution to that, I think he exploited our awareness of the problem at a moment when we seem, sometimes as Democrats in past years, to appear like we’re defenders of the system. So the reason I think that, even as a candidate for the presidency, I need to be talking about these things, under no illusions, for example, in the first 100 days, a president can deliver a reformed Supreme Court. Is it if this is a 10 or 20 year battle—

david leonhardt

Yep.

pete buttigieg

All the more urgency starting that battle yesterday, however bleak and strange things seem now, imagine where they will be in 20 years if we’ve done nothing. And I’m planning to be here in 20 years.

david leonhardt

But I assume a lot of that stuff you would want to get done in the first 100 days.

pete buttigieg

Yeah, the stuff that was in H.R. 1, for example.

david leonhardt

Which is the House bill—

pete buttigieg

Pro-democracy anti-corruption bill that was passed in the House. It’s going to the Senate, where it will die. That is something that I would want to sign right away as president. And that’s just the beginning. So yeah, some of these things you can do right away. Some of them I think you just set into motion and then begin turning to the specific policy areas that we care about, of which I think the most pressing and urgent is climate.

david leonhardt

So you’ve said a lot of the reason we need this is that the Republican Party too often does not operate in good faith. How did that happen? How did the Republican Party become radicalized, meaning why? And what is it going to take to de-radicalize the Republican Party?

pete buttigieg

Well, the main reason they’ve done it is because it works— the way they’ve behaved in the Senate, for example, in order to get their way on the Supreme Court. They changed the number of Supreme Court justices to eight—

david leonhardt

Yes, they did.

pete buttigieg

Until they took power again— so some really radical behavior. And they did it because it works. And the reward system right now contributes to that. Now, part of this ties back to the bigger democracy question. So this is also a function of the fact that, for example, with the Senate structured so that somebody in Wyoming gets 100 times the political influence of somebody in California, you add that to just good, old fashioned gerrymandering and all the harm that does. And you see that there is something not quite symmetrical in the polarization that’s going on. So a lot of people wring their hands over how Democrats and Republicans have become more polarized. And in certain ways, I get that. Although, I think a lot of that’s tonal. Substantively, the story of my lifetime, at least on economics, is that the Republican Party moved quite a bit to the right, and the Democratic Party moved quite a bit to the right. The other problem with radicalization is that it’s got a self-fulfilling quality. So if you’re a Republican who has stuck around for the Trump agenda for the first year or two, and now you’re having doubts, you don’t really have a lot of places to go.

david leonhardt

Right.

pete buttigieg

You’ve become so alienated from the mainstream by being on board with this stuff. This is not that different from how radicalization works anywhere in the world. And so if we want to talk about how the Republican Party might someday recover from the hostile takeover that it’s just experienced, the only thing I can imagine that would work is for the reward system to change. In other words for fidelity to Trump over fidelity to traditional conservative values, let alone values that I would espouse, as a progressive, for that kind of outlandish loyalty to be punished at the ballot box. And it’s one of the reasons why I think the best thing I can do, not only for the future of the country but, in some ways, for the future of the Republican Party and the two-party system, is to do my part to see to it that this president is resoundingly defeated and that whoever beats him, hopefully me, has coattails in the House and Senate too.

david leonhardt

So I think there’s a good chance that whichever party wins the presidency will win the Senate. But there’s also a chance that the Democrats will win the presidency and not the Senate. In that scenario, you’re not going to get legislation passed, I don’t think. So what do you do if you’re president and it’s 2021 and you’re facing massive resistance, to use a historical term, from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

pete buttigieg

Then you put the fear of God into him when it comes to 2022. Look, again, one of the things we’ve got to remember is that the American people agree with us on most of these issues. You take wages, health, choice, even ones where we’ve typically been on the defensive, like immigration or guns, and most Americans agree with us. And so if the Senate continues to veer in a direction that is just deeply out of step with the American people, then there has to be a price to be paid for that. And I think a very good use of Air Force One is to fly it into the state or district of somebody who is out of step with the American people and increasingly out of step with his or her own constituents and remind everybody what’s at stake. Now, they will do everything they can to distract from that. One thing that this presidency does is use an outrageous tweet to take everybody’s eyes off the fact that we’re the ones trying to get you a raise, and they’re the ones trying to stop it. We’re the ones trying to keep your health care and then we’ll trying to take it away. We’re the ones who actually believe that paid family leave ought to be a right. They’re the ones who gave it lip service and then couldn’t care less. Basically, imagine the difference between a president who is trying to take our eye off of that and a president who is trying to focus us on that. I think that’s all the difference. And I think even bad faith, power-oriented, cold-hearted, calculating Republican Senate caucus, there is a way to get their attention by threatening their grasp on power using not just the mechanics of government but good, old-fashioned political rhetoric and use of that bully pulpit to remind everybody just how far off the cliff they’ve gone.

david leonhardt

So you brought up climate. There’s a big part of me that thinks it should be the number one issue that every candidate is talking about. So can you give me a sense of your approach on climate? I’ll tell you how I think about it, which is for a long time, the progressives who wanted to attack climate wanted to do it by raising the price of dirty energy through a carbon tax or through a cap and trade program. And that’s really hard to do. Now, there are more people saying, no, no. We shouldn’t do that. We should fund clean energy research. We should put in place these clean energy requirements, which is kind of hiding the price increases but might be more politically palatable. And there’s a debate over this. Economists say no, the first approach is still the best. A lot of other people say yeah, but it’s not going to happen. Where in that debate are you?

pete buttigieg

I think you’ve got to do both. I think you’ve got to do massive R&D increases, probably at least quadruple if you use as a baseline something like the Apollo Project or the Manhattan Project. But the reality is we need to cut emissions and probably draw some out of the atmosphere. So we should be researching that. But that doesn’t get you out of the fact that we need to do carbon pricing. I don’t there is a realistic way that we get anywhere near our emissions targets without it. Now, the twist I want to put on it is that if it’s done as a tax and dividend and it’s distributed in a progressive way, then for most individual Americans, their experience of the carbon fee will be not that different from their experience of the Bush tax cut. It will be a check in the mail. And if you experience this as a check in the mail, that more than makes you whole. I think it takes care of some of the political concerns that are getting in the way of doing something that I think pretty clearly is necessary in order for us to safeguard our economy and our security picture for the 21st century.

david leonhardt

I would like to believe that. I guess my concern is that that’s a pretty technocratic program, right. It’s hey, we’re going to increase your price of gas at the pump. Trust us, we’ll send you a check. And there are a lot of people, particularly when you have a massive spending effort on the other side, who just aren’t going to buy it. And the whole plan could collapse based on your gas prices are going to rise. Am I being too cynical there?

pete buttigieg

Well, we’ve got to make it really simple. It all depends on the check and if we structure it in the right way. And as somebody said of the political cleverness of the Bush tax cut, keep it simple and take credit. Make sure people know this is not just some obscure thing that shows up as a disappearing line item on your tax returns. We’ll make it green.

david leonhardt

Right.

pete buttigieg

You get a big, green check.

david leonhardt

Right.

pete buttigieg

Then it’ll help people understand how we really can make them whole on this. And maybe it’s not extremely popular on the front end. But it’s a pretty good investment of political capital. If you’re going to use your political capital on a handful of things, this ought to be one of them.

david leonhardt

And maybe you send a check before you put the tax increase in place, meaning the first check arrives at year zero, not year one.

pete buttigieg

There’s going to be some deficit spending on this. I mean, I actually am more concerned with deficits than probably is fashionable on the left with most my colleagues, just because generationally, I’m worried about this coming due in my lifetime.

david leonhardt

Yep.

pete buttigieg

But there are different kinds of deficit spending. There are those that pay for themselves in the long run, and there’s those that don’t. Anything you do on carbon and climate will pay for itself compared to the cost of doing nothing. So it might be the kind of area where what you’re talking about is justified.

david leonhardt

So as you said, the bulk of gains in our economy have gone to people at the top. And they’ve just gotten a tax cut. How do you think is the best way to increase taxes on the wealthy? And I sort of see two options, and the answer could be both. One would be you do some sort of wealth tax. And the two would be you ramp up the top marginal rate. So Obama had it at about 40. Ocasio-Cortez is talking about 70. Back in the 50s, we had it at 90. So where are you on those two? What do you like?

pete buttigieg

First of all, I think when we’re talking about taxes, we should be talking about it in tandem with what we’re actually going to use them for.

david leonhardt

Yeah.

pete buttigieg

You make sure everybody knows exactly what you have in mind to do with it. I’m worried that our tax debate has become a little bit abstract, as if these two things are unrelated. Some of it depends on what exactly we intend to deliver. That being said, any of the menu of things that Democrats are proposing we’re not going to be able to deliver without revenue. So to me, it’s a portfolio approach. You’re going to need a mix of solutions. And I think a higher marginal income tax rate and a wealth tax need to be part of that. I think the wealth tax is intuitively attractive because it’s not that different from a property tax. The marginal tax rate, I would want to see how much of a benefit we can get by taking the top bracket to 49.9999 percent. And some of it’s psychological. But there’s something about paying the majority of a dollar that comes your way to Uncle Sam—

david leonhardt

Yep.

pete buttigieg

That I think people have more trouble with. But I do think it’s easier for us to take that that far and then look at other things, like a wealth tax, so that the portfolio adds up to being able to fund all these promises we’re making.

david leonhardt

That’s a highly progressive agenda, right? I mean, it’s taking the top marginal rate above where Obama had it. It’s adding an annual wealth tax, which we haven’t had before, and a financial transactions tax.

pete buttigieg

Being left of Obama doesn’t make you extremely progressive. Remember that he was the last democratic president of the Reagan era, constrained in many of the ways you talked about by the way that the House and the Senate were behaving and were made up. What I’m proposing might be considered conservative by the standards of the 50s, 60s, or 70s. And so where I think we are today is the beginning of a totally new chapter. I’d like to divide American political history into chunks of 30, 40, or 50 years. I think you had a moment with the dawn of the New Deal. You had a moment with the arrival of the Reagan era. Each of those lasted 30, 40, 50 years. I think you’ve got a moment now. And it could go any number of directions. But when you have a, in some ways, fanatical right wing, but also not right wing, populist president borrowing rhetoric and ideas from across the political spectrum, there is nothing particularly outlandish about saying that we would want to have more people who are very wealthy paying their fair share.

david leonhardt

Neera Tanden, who runs the Center for American Progress, as I’m sure you know, has said that she is no fan of Donald Trump, as she makes clear on Twitter all the time, but he has widened the aperture of plausible policies.

pete buttigieg

Yeah, I think that’s true. You know, some people will look at his arrival and say there are no rules. And I’m not sure that’s true. I think what’s more accurate is that we’re about to find out which rules were broken forever and which ones are going to snap back into place in the policy and in the political space. We should spend less time hedging and worrying about whether we’re ideologically shooting the right middle distance between left and right and more think about, alright, what would we really do if we had a clean sheet of paper? What would we really do? What kind of health care system would we invent? What kind of retirement system would we invent if we were starting from scratch not because we’re starting from scratch but because the American people more or less voted to burn the house down—

david leonhardt

Yep.

pete buttigieg

When they put this president in. And the more smashed up it is for the next president, the more room for maneuver you have. So it is a perverse but real advantage that the president will — the next president, hopefully me — will be able to work with, in terms of creating really original, important, impactful, historic policies that will help set the tone for the next 50 years.

david leonhardt

And so this question comes from Ross Douthat, my colleague and co-host. Are there any issues where you can imagine a policy compromise with religious and social conservatives? Can you imagine, be it on abortion, be it on guns, is there any issue where you say, look, my values are in this place, but actually, I can imagine a negotiated compromise that I would be comfortable with?

pete buttigieg

Everything in politics winds up being a negotiated compromise. It’s one of the reasons why I think as we candidates put out our various policy ideas, there should be a certain measure of humility about how that winds up. Nothing from the New Deal to the A.C.A. happened because it was cooked up as a campaign promise and then delivered exactly intact. So wherever we get on these issues will be a compromise. That being said, my orientation on these issues is pretty progressive. And again, the odd thing is so is most voters’, even in the heartland. So I come from, for example, from a place that’s very conservative on abortion. But you look at most Americans, they are nowhere near what just happened in Alabama or Georgia, including people in Alabama and Georgia. Their own representatives have gone quite a bit to the right of where they are. Choice was supposed to be the compromise— that we have a certain level of humility about whether any one of us, especially a male government official like me, is really positioned to impose a definition of life — a metaphysical question, that in a certain sense is unknowable — impose that definition on anybody else. And so however we feel about it, we decide that the space where that decision is made is personal and to some extent medical, not political. That was the compromise. And to me, this is one more example of how the entire playing field has been tugged to the right, to where left, right, and center have been moved. And somebody like me is asked whether I’m willing to do something moderate when I’m defending a position that has long been thought moderate but is suddenly presenting as left. On some of these religious discrimination questions, you can always think up some scenario where you test it all to the point of queasiness. And the reason that we establish a principle that may lead to a kind of queasy debate over what a baker is supposed to do is to make sure that we never again have a situation where somebody is denied medical care or fired from their job or unable to get housing because they’re gay. And the principle there is equality. We’re not asking somebody to make a gay product. We’re asking them to sell the same product to everybody who comes before them. It’s hard for me to think of a fair way to trade some of that off, even if the reality, in the political space, is these things get traded off against each other all the time.

david leonhardt

The American people may not be where the Republicans are on these social issues, but they’re not where the Democrats are either. I mean, the way I read the polling is the American people are decidedly progressive on economics but are much more centrist on a lot of these social issues. And they are certainly to my right on a lot of these issues. And they’re to your right as well. I guess I sometimes worry that the Democratic Party confuses the overall progressivism of the American people on economics with what it wants them to have on immigration and abortion and guns and all these things.

pete buttigieg

Yes and no. Again, we mentioned immigration, right? Most people want the bipartisan immigration reform that keeps getting killed, usually by Republicans, in Washington. You look at guns. Eighty percent of Republicans, last time I checked, want something like universal background checks. So maybe here’s an area where we can explore what a compromise looks like. I think a compromise is negotiating where to draw the line. The maximalist position of a lot of conservatives is that you can’t even debate whether to draw the line. Now, the truth is, we already have decided to draw a line. You can have a water balloon. You can’t have a nuclear weapon. Somewhere in between those two things, it is compatible with the Second Amendment that we have a limitation on that right. But the debate is such that you would think that if we’re even saying, OK, should an AR-15 really be on the streets right now, you are just categorically violating a right, where, actually, the debate we should have is O.K., we’re going to draw a line somewhere. Did we draw it in the right place? Maybe instead of focusing on the weapon, we focus on how hard it is to get a weapon and make it harder the more deadly the weapon is. Maybe that’s where we go. The bottom line is there are ways to save lives, many of which are based on things that most Americans are already fine with but that Washington can’t deliver.

david leonhardt

So it’s very early, as you said, in this campaign. But there are a whole bunch of polls that list the top three people as you, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders. And while you have many differences, right, you do have at least one thing in common, which is you are all men. And I wonder, as you reflect on that and also on the lessons of 2016 and watching Hillary Clinton run, do you think sexism is playing a role in the 2020 campaign already? How big a role do you think it plays in politics? And as a man, what do you think you can do to try to reduce the role that sexism plays in politics?

pete buttigieg

There’s no question that it plays a role. There’s no question that it helps to explain what happened in 2016. And while I may be a little too much in the middle of it to have an unbiased assessment of how it affects the 2020 field, there’s every reason to believe it’s a factor now too. And I think part of the best way to approach it, if you’re a male politician, is to figure out the extent to which you can be helpful here. To what extent are you part of the solution, first of all policy wise— making sure that you are as forward leaning on policies that benefit women and benefit the idea of gender equality and gender inclusion. I also think that we should be very watchful of doing anything in the political space because the conduct of our campaigns matters a lot, especially when there’s like 20 of us. There’s 20 different campaigns whose conduct will make a difference in American politics and then only one whose outcome will be the one that makes all the policy impact. So we’ve got to think about now. Are there things we’re doing or things we ought to not be doing that could have an impact on sexism? So how much are we willing to traffic in these debates that are very gendered about things like likability? Is a candidate like me well enough educated on how some of these themes or language that might slip into our speeches if we’re not smart might have some kind of gendered aspect to it we didn’t think about? I think a lot of it is just being ready to learn and listen. And of course, having women in positions of responsibility in our campaigns and in our political space, that will make a difference there.

david leonhardt

China’s in the news a lot right now.

pete buttigieg

Yeah.

david leonhardt

I think U.S. government policy over the last 40 years of both parties has been too lenient toward China. Do you agree with that?

pete buttigieg

In many ways, yes. It’s clear that, first of all, China, I think, represents authoritarianism in sheep’s clothing, that there’s a desire to build a lot of goodwill for a model that is deeply inimical to not just American values but, I think, shared values around the world when it comes to human rights and when it comes to democracy, but also, of course, more narrowly within the trade space. To me, though, I think what we really need to do is re-imagine the terms of the debate because some of these things aren’t going to change. I want to make sure we’re in this sort of competition with the Chinese model, playing a field that is more to our advantage, that I think also happens to be the right place to be. So, for example, if democracy promotion mattered more and economic and other policy tools were aligned at least partly around democracy. I think about climate diplomacy, which is not a big topic these days. But if part of how a country established international prestige were based on its leadership on climate issues and if we were ready to put our money where our mouth is, then we could actually have a considerable strategic advantage over China. So what we really need to be doing, I think, is recognizing that the accumulation of hard and soft power as well as economic power by the Chinese needs to be met by a plan to ensure that the broader terms of the world stage in geopolitics and diplomacy and security and in trade and economics is to the advantage of things that, yes, are good for America, but are agreeable to a much wider swath of people.

david leonhardt

What kind of cabinet do you want?

pete buttigieg

Well, a capable, diverse cabinet. It should be the most diverse we’ve ever had, again, especially if the president’s going to be male and not a person of color. I think it needs to have a mix of novel thinking and comfort with the kind of experience that brings you comfort with things that come your way. I faced this when I became mayor. I think if you look at all my direct appointees, at least in terms of department heads, every single one of them was older than me. It needs to be truth tellers. That’s maybe the biggest thing that I worry about is making sure you have people who are prepared to tell you what you need to hear, which is different than what you’d like to hear but absolutely crucial to making good decisions.

david leonhardt

A few last quick things— so Michelle Goldberg, my co-host, like me, she’s Generation X. She said one thing she’s been struck by is how many parents are excited by your candidacy. And actually, my mom texts me with her updated thoughts on the field and who her top three is, and you’re in my mom’s top three.

pete buttigieg

That’s good to hear.

david leonhardt

My mom is part of it as well. So what do you think that’s about? Why is it that baby boomers, people often over 60, over 70, have gotten intrigued by your candidacy?

pete buttigieg

You know, we noticed this pattern back when I was running for mayor. I was 29 years old. We had enough money for one poll. So we took a poll, tested all these different attributes about me. If you knew Pete was X, would you be more or less likely to vote for him? If you knew it was in the Navy, if you knew Pete was in business. and one of things we tested was what do people think of me being 29? And it was a straight line correlation. The older the voter was, the more likely they were to say it was positive. We didn’t have enough money to do another poll to find out why. But I don’t know all the things behind it. But you can definitely feel it. We definitely have had some nice resonance among young, millennial voters, college students who come to our events, digital natives who respond to our social media engagement. But people light up, especially when I talk about generational change, in our rallies and at our events in places like Iowa, South Carolina, are usually older voters. I’ve noticed it too.

david leonhardt

What do you do to unwind? Or what do you like to do on date night? What do you do to take your mind off of politics?

pete buttigieg

Usually TV. We’re living, thankfully, in a golden age of just great television. “Game of Thrones” is there for us. “Veep” is a little close to home, but it is there for us. Although, I think “Game of Thrones” is actually also a TV show about politics. So there’s that. There’s our dogs. Just the presence of a dog who has a very strong relationship to you and has no concept of politics is really good for you, I think. Buddy and Truman are pretty leveling for us. Part of the correct answer is physical exercise. I’ve not been as faithful to my P.T. plan as I like to be. But I envision that being an important part because you have to be a human being as well, especially in this moment when authenticity is the coin of the realm. And you think, what does it mean? What does it mean to be considered authentic or to present as authentic when between the time of recording this and the time I go to bed, several times, I will stand in front of people and say exactly the same thing —

david leonhardt

Uh-huh.

pete buttigieg

And have that be authentic. The only way you can anchor yourself in all that is to do things that are not related to politics, even if it’s just for a few minutes. It’s also where I think spirituality can be really important, not that you have to be religious to succeed here. But I begin my day reading a piece of scripture and a reflection that is sent to me. And it’s just something that matters, whether or not I’m doing well or doing anything in the political space. And you’ve got to grab hold of those things— spiritual, physical, emotional, interpersonal, and, if necessary, canine — that are just immune to politics.

david leonhardt

Mayor Pete Buttigieg, thank you for coming on “The Argument.”

pete buttigieg

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

O.K., I’m back with Ross and Michelle to chat more about Mayor Pete. So Michelle, what are your thoughts about Mayor Pete?

michelle goldberg

I mean, he’s speaking my language, particularly his emphasis on democracy reform and the structural impediments to the majority of people in this country actually being represented in our policy-making. He’s the one who’s talking about that most directly, has made that front and center. And part of me thinks that that’s kind of a boutique issue. I think most people care more about their more immediate material needs as opposed to these kind of higher level structural things. But I think he’s right that you don’t get progress on the material stuff until you fix the fundamental flaws in our democracy. It’s funny because I just recently wrote a column basically chiding Democrats for thinking too much about electability and saying that you should think about who speaks to you. And yet, at the same time, when I think about Pete Buttigieg, I realize how hard it is for me to do that. He’s maybe not my first choice. He would probably be in my top three. But I just can’t see it. The idea that you go from mayor of South Bend, Indiana to the White House, I just can’t see it happening. So I find it hard to kind of follow my own advice and follow my heart.

david leonhardt

I mean, he’s got more government experience than Donald Trump did when he won.

michelle goldberg

Right, but Donald Trump obviously should not be president.

david leonhardt

Yes. The combination that I find most intriguing about him is he is very ambitious in a lot of his ideas. You heard him be in favor of a tax rate higher than Obama’s and a wealth tax on top of that. And you heard him say there’s a lot of room to the left of where Obama was. And yet he also is, it’s quite clear, a realist who’s very open to compromising and taking half a loaf when that’s what you can get. And I like the combination of both ambition but also someone who doesn’t get all tripped up and say, well, if you’re not for “Medicare for all” now, then you’re just a sellout. And it’s that combination that I kind of find interesting.

michelle goldberg

You know, one question I should have asked you to ask him is whether— his father was a scholar of Gramsci, the kind of famous Italian Marxist. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s affected some of his thinking, particularly his thinking in these large historical arcs. I mean, he talked about Obama being the last president of the Reagan era and kind of has this sense about how all of the assumptions underlying our policy making have suddenly collapsed, and we’re in this moment when a new politics is possible. And that’s something that I think about a lot and that I think is true. And I sort of wonder what the kind of theoretical foundations of his thinking about that are.

david leonhardt

Ross, obviously, we’re interested to hear your response to his answer to your question. But I guess before we even get to that, I’d just be interested in what you make of him more broadly and why he seems to be resonating with at least some Democrats.

ross douthat

I mean, I think a big part of it, and I wrote a column about this, actually, is that he seems, in his personal life story, to represent a kind of answer to a problem that I talk about and think about a lot, which is this problem of elite self-segregation. The ways in which the system of meritocracy that we have encourages the best and brightest, the high SAT kids, to all end up in the same few cities and neighborhoods and create these concentrations of talent, while the rest of the country potentially falls apart. And Buttigieg, he’s an uber meritocrat. He’s the son of professors. He goes to Harvard. He gets a Rhodes Scholarship, the most meritocratic and also most insufferable of meritocratic honors. And he goes to work for McKinsey. There’s nothing more meritocratic, in the I think worst sense, than the appeal of going to work for a consulting firm.

david leonhardt

I mean, some of us would say that Harvard, Rhodes Scholarship, and McKinsey is the trifecta of meritocratic insufferability.

ross douthat

I think it is. So he’s insufferable in that sense. Except then, he does two things that the insufferable meritocrats don’t usually do. He joins the military, and he goes back to his hometown of South Bend, not to be a professor at Notre Dame and live in the academic bubble, but to be mayor of this fallen-on-hard-times town that used to make Studebakers back when Studebakers were a thing and now emphatically does not. And it’s sort of the equivalent of like a LeBron James going back to Ohio or something. It’s a story that has a particular kind of resonance in the moment that we’re living in. And it makes him interesting. I think that’s basically the core of the Buttigieg appeal. He’s a meritocrat who hasn’t behaved like one.

michelle goldberg

But can I just counter quickly because there’s actually another candidate in the race who, except for the military, has sort of an identical trajectory. So Cory Booker goes to Stanford. He is a Rhodes scholar. He goes back and becomes mayor of this hardscrabble city. And yet he doesn’t have the same mystique. I think there was a time when he did. There was a time when there was a lot of romance around Cory Booker. But it hasn’t really gelled this time.

ross douthat

I think that one of the reasons is just novelty. That Booker becomes mayor of Newark story was a big thing that the national media was very into for a while. But he’s sort of been here for a while. And we also already elected the first black president. And the media loves those kind of narratives. And Buttigieg would be the first gay president. In addition to having this narrative, there’s just some sort of appeal of novelty in his rise that, in six months, he could look like Beto O’Rourke does right now.

david leonhardt

So what did you think about his answer to your question, Ross?

ross douthat

Generally, I was pretty underwhelmed by the conversation. And his answer to my question was sort of a small part of the larger issue here, which is that he represents what political pundits used to call the wine track in democratic primaries. It was this kind of stupid term. But the idea was there was a wine track, and there was a beer track. And you would get the high-minded policy wonk running on the wine track and the guy who actually understood how politics worked running on the beer track. So Buttigieg is on the wine track in the sense that he’s the bright, young man who appeals to a certain kind of white, educated millennial and a certain kind of, like, “What a nice, young, man” baby boomer, like in Michelle’s question. And that’s a pretty narrow block. So Buttigieg needs a pitch for white people outside that block should vote for him. And maybe that should be a pitch to African-Americans and minority voters. I mean, Barack Obama was sort of a wine track candidate who, because he could win African-American voters, could win the nomination. I think more plausibly, though, Buttigieg sort of casts himself as the guy who understands the heartland and understands Trump voters, potentially, because there are some in Indiana, as you may have heard. And therefore, he should be someone who’s basically trying to peel off a big piece of Joe Biden’s support right now— the sort of moderate to conservative Democrats who aren’t all the way with wokeness and so on. But where’s the pitch that says here’s why I’m different, here’s why I’m more electable because I’m going to win more Midwestern states than Hillary Clinton does. Where’s the argument for his expansion? I think to make that argument, maybe you don’t need to say I’m the guy who can have a culture war truce, which I guess he doesn’t want to say. But you need to have something. And this comes back to this underlying question about small d democratic reforms. If you want to enact small d democratic reforms, you have to win the Senate. In order to win the Senate, you have to appeal to voters in rural states who are voting for Republicans. In order to do that, you have to have a plan, and I didn’t hear that plan in the interview.

michelle goldberg

I don’t necessarily disagree with Ross in that Buttigieg, he has a pitch that’s kind of aimed squarely at me and also my parents. I think he does appeal to some of those Biden voters who maybe aren’t all the way with Elizabeth Warren, certainly not with Bernie Sanders. I went to the Biden rally in Philadelphia, and by far, when people were telling me who they were deciding between it was almost always Biden, Buttigieg, and Kamala. And some people even had recurring donations to all three of them. They are kind of all drawing on the same people. Obviously, there’s a lot of interest in it. And obviously, there’s a lot of momentum behind it. But I sort of worry that it’s limited for some of the same reasons that Ross does, even though, not that I kind of want to see a candidate take a more culturally conservative tack.

david leonhardt

O.K., last thing— he also got a lot of attention for going on Fox News and doing a Fox News town hall. Michelle, do you think Democrats should be going on Fox News?

michelle goldberg

I don’t think they should. I understand why they do. And I think there’s competing interests. I mean, I feel like Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to go on Fox was something that she was doing in the interests of the progressive movement as opposed to the interests of her own campaign. So candidates like Mayor Pete, like Bernie Sanders can get a lot out of showing that they can go on Fox News and explain their policies and have people applaud for them in what might seem like enemy territory. But I also think that Elizabeth Warren is absolutely right in that Fox itself is such a malign institution. It’s this kind of quasi-state TV, hateful propaganda network that progressives have been systematically boycotting. And they’ve been losing advertising. And their business model, in some cases, is being challenged. And when Democrats come along and go on it, they help legitimate it. They help sort of whitewash it and help kind of prop it up as a business. And I don’t think Democrats should be doing that.

david leonhardt

I guess I think Democrats should recognize that Fox is basically a version of state-run media, as you said, Michelle. But I do think a town hall like that and a chance to really get the message out to people that Democrats don’t always reach, and I like the fact that he went on, and he criticized Fox’s role in spreading hate. I think the Democrats should treat Fox News differently. But I guess I found that idea of going on to a town hall there to be probably worth it.

ross douthat

Well, and Chris Wallace is not doing state propaganda. I mean, Fox News is a 24-hour channel. Chris Wallace obviously strongly dislikes Sean Hannity. And I don’t think Democrats are going to succeed in boycotting Fox out of existence. And I don’t think you lose anything by appearing on a town hall organized by the people who work for Fox who aspire to be serious newscasters. I think there’s a variation in candidate. There’s more of an argument that Warren should go on Fox News and that Biden shouldn’t in a certain way because both Warren and Sanders are premising their campaigns on the idea — I think, the plausible idea — that there are a lot of Heartland voters who are sort of white, culturally moderate, possibly economically populist who they could win over to their side. And those are people who, at least in the theory, would watch Fox. And so you’d be trying to reach them.

michelle goldberg

But Warren has been going out and talking to those people. She went to West Virginia. She’s going into kind of hostile territory. I think that her analysis, which I think is correct, is that the straight news people on Fox News sort of give cover and legitimacy to Tucker Carlson’s white supremacist variety hour and that the network as a whole should be treated as sort of toxic propaganda. It is, in some sense, paying the price for all its political influence, its viewership because it’s only a couple of million people, right. There are other ways to kind of reach the electorate, including the Republican electorate or the people who are sort of outside your ideological bubble.

ross douthat

In general, I think if you could organize a mass boycott of all the cable news networks, based on their viewership, that that can be healthy for American politics. But I think the idea that you’re going to sort of successfully delegitimize Fox News itself represents this larger liberal mistake about how much they can use cultural power to smash conservatism. But this is probably a topic we could take up at another time at greater length.

david leonhardt

O.K., well let’s leave it there. If you want to hear from other candidates, we interviewed Elizabeth Warren on the show back in March. And we will have more candidates coming up on “The Argument” in coming weeks. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we make a suggestion meant to take your mind off of politics. Ross, it is your job this week. What do you have?

ross douthat

So recently, David recommended a specific kind of perfectly-brewed coffee from a specific coffee shop. And one of the questions that you often get as a New York Times columnist, people say, well, where do you do your writing? So I figured I could follow on David’s recommendation and also answer that question by saying that I strongly recommend doing all of your work in coffee shops because that is, in fact, what I do. And the genius of working in a coffee shop is that you are effectively renting an incredibly small workspace in which you are sort of stuck for a specific period of time. And it gets you out of your home, but you’re not in an office. Honestly, when I worked in the Washington D.C. bureau of the Times once upon a time, this guy, David Leonhardt was always wandering into the office and wanted to talk to me about the great issues of the day, which was very distracting. I have always found the coffee shop as a workspace to be this happy medium.

david leonhardt

So how do you think about the ethics of the renting part of it?

ross douthat

It’s a little awkward, right? But generally, I feel like if you come into a coffee shop at 9 a.m. and you buy, let’s say, a latte and some sort of breakfast thing, then you’ve rented things up until the lunch rush. And then you need to make a choice about whether you’re going to spend more money at that coffee shop or clear out. That’s my basic ethical position.

michelle goldberg

I completely concur. People who read the Op-Ed page might be surprised at how much of the work that they’re reading is actually being done at random coffee shops in the tri-state area. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt