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Surging in the Iowa polls, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg brought his presidential primary campaign to Perry Sunday afternoon, with fans filling the McCreary Community Building gymnasium to its fire-marshal-mandated maximum of 499 people.

Buttigieg said his campaign has come a long way from where it was one year ago, when he had four staffers, no money and not only no name recognition but no name pronunciation. But all that has changed in Iowa.

“Every time we come back to Iowa, we see more momentum,” Buttigieg told the crowd, “and I’ve also been very encouraged to see how caucus goers are engaging with our organizers and our volunteers. Their job is to show, not tell the values of this campaign, and I’ve really loved to see how well these communities have treated our people.”

Some of the values Buttigieg mentioned Sunday were the values of faith, equality, love of country and hope.

“When you have a message that reaches people where they are, anything is possible in this country,” he said, “even now in our strange and challenging and sometimes dark times.”

As in his campaign ads, Buttigieg asked the MCB crowd to take part in a thought experiment: “Picture that first day the sun comes up in this country and Donald Trump is no longer the president.”

The sun on that day will shine on an America just “as divided as it is today, as polarized and as torn up over politics and exhausted from fighting” as now, he said, and still facing the same challenges of climate change, of gross wealth and income inequality, of racial tension, of kids learning active-shooter drills before learning how to read.

The difference will be Buttigieg, he said, the candidate now “most ready to beat Trump,” pursuing presidential policies refracted through the values of “healing and inclusion over the hatred and division that Trump thrives on.”

“You cannot love a country and hate half the people in it,” he said.

The eight-year veteran of the U.S. Navy drew a distinction between his own patriotism and that of the current president, who hugged a U.S flag on the stage of a 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference convention.

“When I say ‘patriotism,’ don’t let anybody confuse that with the cheap nationalism of the president who thinks it’s American to tell somebody they don’t belong,” Buttigieg said. “Don’t confuse that with the chest-thumping militarism of a guy who avoided serving when it was his turn and now thinks it’s somehow pro-military to overthrow military justice in the case of a war criminal.”

Last month Trump intervened in several military justice cases, issuing pardons for several convicted killers and reversing verdicts. He fired Navy Secretary Richard Spencer in the wake of the action.

Buttigieg also listed gun violence as one of the most pressing national security issues.

“National security starts right here at home,” he said. “It’s in the name of national security that we must act to see to it that the Second Amendment can never again be used as excuse to do nothing about background checks, red-flag laws and” other common-sense gun laws, the particulars of which were drowned out by applause from the exuberant Perry crowd.

In a brief interview with ThePerryNews.com following his speech, Buttigieg responded to recent criticism from fellow Democratic candidates for his wine-cave wooing of billionaire donors. He concluded that “it’s going to take a constitutional amendment” to reform campaign financing in the U.S.

“Look, I’m not a fan of the system that we’re living in right now,” he said. “I think it needs to go through profound changes. I also believe that as long as that system is in place, we need to bring everything that we’ve got, especially to the fight with Donald Trump and his allies, who are going to stop at nothing. They’ve already put together $300 million and counting, and they’re just getting warmed up, so I’m welcoming everybody who wants to be part of this effort to help support this campaign. I’m proud of the fact that we’ve had more than a million donations, and last time I checked we were pulling in an average contribution of around 32 bucks.”

Earlier this year, Buttigieg floated the idea of expanding the Supreme Court from nine justices to 15 in order to undo the recent overt politicization of the court by Trump, in concert with Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, and the Republican majority in Congress.

Beefing up the high court would be “no more a departure from norms than what the Republicans did to get the judiciary to the place it is today,” he said. “I think we need reform to make the Supreme Court less political. One of the ideas to do that would involve more justices but some of them would be seated on a non-partisan basis. There are a lot of different versions of reform. My point is that we need reform now because we can’t go on with the highest court in the land being treated as one more political battlefield. It’s supposed to be above partisan politics.”