After Pete Buttigieg’s surprise win in Iowa, you’d think his rivals would be searching for his weak spot. The irony is that it’s right out in the open where it’s always been: his record as mayor of South Bend, Ind.

Buttigieg faced few hard questions about it until Friday night. That’s when ABC correspondent and Democratic debate moderator Linsey Davis refused to let him wiggle out of answering why, under his mayorship, “a black resident in South Bend was four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white resident.”

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Buttigieg first tried to evade the question by saying the “overall rate” of marijuana arrests for South Bend was lower than the national rate. But Davis’s point was the racial disparity, and she stuck to it. In the end, the Buttigieg campaign issued a “fact sheet” that didn’t deny the disparity but cited other numbers to say marijuana and drug possession arrest rates were lower in South Bend than the average for Indiana.

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The telling thing about the encounter was not the particular statistic. The telling thing was the deer-in-the-headlights look on Mr. Buttigieg’s face provoked by a simple factual question about what happened while he was mayor.

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