Natalie: Hi, everyone. I'm Natalie Chapin.
I'm a second year studying Public Policy and Sociology in the college and I'm joining you from
California. Following a crowded primary Democratic voters must aligned behind a single platform
or risk another four years of Trump. The timely messages we are hearing all around us tonight
as one people for the common good, remind me of those of a certain former presidential candidate.
We welcome former mayor Pete Buttigieg and IOP director David Axelrod, to discuss the future of
the Democratic Party in this unprecedented time, the Trump administration's response to the global
pandemic, and Mayor Pete's historic presidential campaign. We all know Mayor Pete Buttigieg as a
former presidential candidate who now always seems to be in a bit of a spotlight, a former US Navy
Reserve intelligence officer and Rhodes Scholar, Buttigieg served as mayor of South Bend Indiana
from 2012 to 2020, leaving for seven months in 2014 to serve in Afghanistan. I had the pleasure
of observing this year's Iowa caucuses with the IOP, which I much later learned he won. Since the
end of his 2020 presidential campaign. Mayor Pete has been dedicating his time to a political action
committee called Win the Era, primarily focusing on electing young progressive candidates for
generational change. Mayor Pete will be talking with David Axelrod, who served as Barack Obama's
chief strategist during his presidential campaigns and Senior Advisor during his time in office,
but you know him best as founder and director of our very own Institute of Politics. This place
has been a home for me as I explore a variety of potential career paths in the policy world.
Please welcome Pete Buttigieg and David Axelrod. David: Thank you so much, Natalie, for that
wonderful introduction. Glad you are safe and sound in California. I'm down in Arizona and Pete,
welcome back. You're in your hometown of South Bend, Indiana. We will we will get to questions
in just one second, I want to say I am one of the great losses of this for the IOP of this horrific
moment is we lost our fellows for the quarter of which you are going to be one. And we hope we can
reconstitute that sometime, but we're so happy that you've made time to be with us today and
welcome. One viewer note for the people who are watching, in about 30 minutes will open up to take
questions from you, please use the q&a function at the bottom of the screen, you can start submitting
questions. Now if you'd like--if your question's selected, a staff member will privately message
you to take with the next steps. And I should point out they will make the selection not Pete or
me, so blame them if your question isn't chosen. Since this is a zoom webinar, we can't see
or hear the attendee. So if you need to step away from your computer, no problem. So Pete, I,
you know, we've all gone through this profound experience. But yours is most unusual, because for
a solid year, you were on this frenetic whirlwind, of a presidential candidacy that took off and
became really one of the top tier campaigns. And simultaneously for much of it, you were mayor
of South Bend, and now you're home and I'm sure not idle. But how emotionally did you adjust from
going 200 miles an hour now to relative isolation? Pete: Yeah, it's a strange thing. First of
all, I want to thank you for the chance to do this and I also regret that I'm not in
residence this season but hope that I'll be able to take up that kind invitation
in the future because I'm such a big fan of for you and your your students and
team are doing with the IOP in Chicago David: We may have to compete
with others for your time but Pete: You know, you get you get pride of place so
and and I want to thank Natalie too, I'm not sure she knows that Chapin is a very famous name
here in South Bend his old name neighborhood named after Chapin because it was one of the
families of French settlers to help get this place going. So and also I want to greet
I know a number of our students were were there on the ground in Iowa and we had a
chance to interact and I know that we're even though disembodied we're being reunited in
some way. So nice to be with you again. You know, I'm not sure what's a bigger change somebody's
life to come off of a presidential campaign or to go more or less under house arrest. And since the
two things in my case happened at the same time, I'll never quite be able to separate them. I think
that, you know, it's only when you step away that you realize fully how much being a candidate
has just dominated your life, little things, you know, driving a car, eating meals, that
are not in a car, it was pretty rare, actually, we're almost always eating finger food for the
last event in a vehicle. Your life becomes very big and very small. At the same time, it becomes
big in the sense that you're traveling across the whole country was not unusual for us to have a
four state day, you're meeting so many people and you're in the middle of all this activity. On the
other hand, in a way, your life becomes smaller, because you only do a handful of very specific
things. You appear on television, you speak with voters, you get speeches, you take questions,
you strategize with team members. Physically, you're either on a stage in a car, in a backyard
or green room somewhere like a TV studio, they're actually not that many environments that
you're in. And normal things like taking a walk or going out for a drive or picking up some groceries
just gone. Of course, a lot of those normal things didn't return because of the pandemic. But I've
been getting some Olympic puttering done around the house, a lot of furniture assembly, some of
the results, which are over my shoulder here. And so in some ways, I wonder if this is the only
thing that could have forced me to sit still, because it was so outside of my habit. And so
it's been about six weeks part of me feels only now like I'm starting to thaw out and reactivate
those parts of my mind itself that you just put on hold as a candidate. You know, I was reflecting
the other day, it's it's strange for anybody, I suppose--especially anybody in politics--to
think that I haven't shaken a person's hand in, in a month, the first time I do shake somebody's
hand, it'll probably feel strange and unlike quite a moment, so like everybody else, we're
figuring this out. But I'm also thankful for, for being safe for having home to, to be in
for more time with Chasten, since the two of us barely got to see each other in waking hours on
the campaign. And it's a moment that has all of us asking a lot of, I think bigger questions about
where we're headed. And part of how we resolve those questions is in person having debates and
arguments and conversations, but part of how we resolve those questions is to have time alone to
think and at least there's no shortage of that. David: What, there's the other half of you,
not the candidate half but the mayor, half, you finished your tour of duty as mayor eight
years at the end of last year. But you but that is ingrained in you, you think like
a mayor, is there a part of you that says, Man, I would love to be under the hood
right now trying to fix this and make it work? Or are you relieved not to, to
be to be in that role? And what are you seeing through a mayor's eyes about the
way we have responded to this crisis? Pete: Well, just as I came to the presidential
campaign, with the mayor's side view, it's definitely at the heart of how I'm
thinking about the pandemic. And there's that mix, you describe the kind of relief and
impatience not to be in in the seat right now, my successors doing a great job, we've been
in touch with him about how to make sure I'm supportive of the work that's going on here in
town. I do remember the first time snowing and group the scrape of a snowplow hit the street, and
woke up early in the morning, realizing that was not my responsibility. There's some things that
I'm relieved to set aside but have also found that part of how I can be useful right now is with
that mayor's perspective, for example, I pulled together a group of mayors to coordinate with a
group of researchers out of the Safra center who just on Monday released what I think is the most
comprehensive roadmap yet put forward on what it's going to take to get back to normal responsibly,
looking at everything from how we're going to get testing produced to what it might mean to
activate volunteers through national service to conduct large scale contact tracing, and even
applying some of the tactics and techniques of the military and the intelligence community like the
idea of the fusion cell, which is a an entity that exists for exchanging information among operators
in the field, using that same concept to help keep mayors informed and distributed resources that
are going to be needed. Look, part of it's my bias that I'm always going to say especially when
we have poor presidential leadership, that it's an important time for mayors. But that's that's more
true than ever in the context of what's going on right now. Local leaders have been left to make
decisions on everything from opening and closing communities to try to route the resources that
are needed, and its moments, it's also showing how important informal power is. So often, in a
given community, the only person who can easily on speed dial bring together the hospital
CEO, the county health department, somebody who speaks to the business community, the county
and the state representatives, the state - is the mayor - not because it's in the job description,
it's just because that's how it works. And so mayor's almost literally set the table for the
kind of coordination that's got to go on now. David: So and by the way, my questions are
informed by dozens and dozens and dozens of really good questions that were sent in in advance. And
I appreciate everyone who sent them in because it really prodded my own thinking. You talk about
presidential leadership. And this whole event has caused rethinking about federalism and the role
between the federal government and the state. But there have been disparate messages sent by the
President and his, even the president and his own directives and medical advisors and public
health advisors, but also between the President and the governor, President to some degree,
and mayor's. Talk to me about how you think it should work and what is the appropriate role
of the federal government in a crisis like this? David: To be more assiduous about
it now, but yes, yeah, yeah. Pete: So, again, my instinct is to really lift
up local leadership and give that as big a role as possible. But often, it's in trying to solve
problems locally, that you're confronting just how important national leadership is, I believe
this is a time for a new kind of federalism to emerge that has state and local leaders in
power to deal with conditions on the ground. But no model of federalism tells you what to do
when a White House is contradicting itself when the President is not on the same page as his own
advisors or other leaders in public health within the administration. And then we have the problem
of the president contradicting governors or as we see with Brian Kemp, right now, the governor
contradicting mayors in Georgia. And that's just just one example. And so, in an environment
where it shouldn't be partisan, I mean, nothing's less partisan than a virus, we're still
seeing a lot of different, I think, ideologically driven approaches to what to do, at a moment
when we need to start with the relationship to the cold, the cold, hard facts. But here's why
national leadership is so important. Take an issue like testing. So according to the group I
mentioned earlier in the research they've done, we really can get more or less fully reopened
by July or so with one big if. And the if, is, if we can generate enough tests that we could do
5 million to 20 million tests per day. That means not only testing everybody, or a large proportion
of Americans, but testing Americans repeatedly, and then making it possible to run down the
contacts when somebody tests positive. If we can pull that off, we should be able to reopen
much sooner than we would otherwise safely be able to do it. All right. How do you get 20
million tests a day or for that matter of five, first of all produced, let alone distributed?
Well, the only comparable solution we can turn to in American history, are the wartime production
boards that were a big part of how we got ready for World War Two, you know, right here down
the road in South Bend, Studebaker car company, basically flipped on a dime and became a Jeep
production facility for as long as it was needed for the war effort. We need something like that,
in terms of a pandemic testing board, which has been proposed by a lot of legal scholars as well
as researchers in terms of how you do it. But it can't happen without presidential leadership. The
next best thing will be an interstate compact, where states or cities are both team up,
whether we're talking about getting the testing, whether it's what they've already done
to get personal protective equipment, or what we're going to need Sunday with the
vaccine. Let me mention this too. A lot of us might slide into assuming that once we they
think of the vaccine, we'll be all set. Let's not ignore the massive challenge of actually
getting a vaccine distributed and making sure everybody knows to use it. Think about how
hard it is to get people to take a flu shot, for example. Hopefully it was a little more
motivation this time, but it's still a difference. Pete: And you know that so then you say,
Okay, what can states do coming together as states to form an agreement? Well, of
course, the original agreement of states is the Constitution. That's what the
federal government is supposed to be: an agreement among the people in the
states what we're going to do together, so we may see new interstate structures that
are improvised to take the place of a Federal government that isn't working, because there's
no real leadership in the White House. From a government structure perspective, that's
what I'm watching for. And we're already seeing it start to emerge with regional
and inter-city and interstate cooperation. David: You know, you talked in an interview
about how information is delivered in the modern environment. And this, of course, is part
of what plagues our political system is that we get, we get, we are siloed in information
corridors in which our views are affirmed, but not always informed and we're not hearing
the same account of things. And so you have these demonstrations on the streets, with people
who have a wholly different conception of, of, of where we are and what, what the
hazards of, of doing coming out of this the wrong way are. How do you how do you
deal with that in the midst of a pandemic? Pete: Yeah, so the good news about these people
swarming the statehouse lawns demanding that everything be reopened is that the number is
actually tiny. And like a lot of outrageous things, it gets a lot of attention relative to the
number. But there are still people who think that and there are people who either don't understand
or don't care, that simply trying to go back to normal would lead to tremendous destruction and
loss of life. I think part of what we need to do is find ways to have credible touchstones
of information that are apart from politics, and that everybody can can, can reach. So while
I think the daily White House briefings have been problematic, put it charitably, because of the
President's behavior, I actually do think that the emergence of Dr. Fauci as a, as a, an objective,
non political fact driven public health leader, even though he'll be attacked from the fringes,
too. I think that's a healthy sign. Of course, it used to be that journalists
were the arbiters of these things, you could trust the editorial function of the
three major TV networks released, we did trust, as well as a handful of print outlets, your
hometown newspaper, and some national ones, to do a level of sifting, and make sure
that more credible information got through the gates more quickly than less credible
information, that it's just not the same now, with people accessing information in so many
different ways. And there's no real fix for that, that, that I think we as a species have
developed. Since information got so fragmented David: It's also it also is axiomatic that once
you know, the the paradox of all of this is, the better we do in terms of social distancing and
isolating ourselves, the less the impact of the virus is going to be felt. It's still dramatic,
45,000 people dead, the first person died, the day you started your the day you ended your
campaign, the day of the South Carolina primary was the first reported death, and now we have
45,000. But still, it's not as, as reported. And what is felt broadly is the economic impact
of it. So you know, persuading people of what they can't see is a real problem. And you see
it also in this climate change issue. I mean, I keep thinking about the analogy, you've talked
about climate change quite a bit. But, you know, it's always been hard to mobilize people around
a threat that they can't see on a daily basis, especially when they feel like you're
asking for economic sacrifice in order to service dealing with that problem. And
so you see the same debate setting up here, at least among some elements of the
right, and the President's coalition of the ideologues versus the scientists about
whether, in fact, this is really warranted. Pete: Yeah, I think, in many ways, we can view
this as a kind of a dress rehearsal for climate change, you know, part of why we've struggled to
get on top of it as it played out in slow motion, but everything's relative, this is way more
fastforward than climate change is. But I can think of at least three huge, hugely important
parallels. One is that this is another example of where science is trying to tell us something
but politics is getting in the way. And so much depends on listening to what scientists have to
say. A second is that it's become the subject of a tug of war between short term economic imperatives
and dealing with the issue. But I think in both cases, it's also a false choice, in that the
economic consequences of failing to deal with the pandemic. Certainly the economic consequences
of failing to deal with climate change dwarf the the pain that might be implied in in making the
changes that we got to make before it's too late and third these are examples of issues that don't
really respect international boundaries, they can only be resolved with some level of coordination
among international players. And that's one of the reasons why the WHO thing is so disturbing. I
think the President threatening to defund the WHO, on one hand, I hesitate to bring it up, because
I think it's largely an act of trolling for attention by setting up another fight that will
divert attention a little bit from presidents failures. And it's not even clear whether it will
happen in concrete terms. But I do think one very important symbolic thing at stake right now, is
that it is only with international institutions that are designed to deal with global problems,
whether we're talking about bodies like the IPCC, when it comes to gathering climate information,
or the WHO, that first of all America needs to participate. And secondly, America needs to
lead. In other words, the more flawed you think the WHO are, for that matter, the UN, the
more flawed you think those institutions are, the more important it is for the United States
to be very involved in leading them to where they've got to be, if we still think we're
the leading country in the world, there can be no meaningful international coordination
without a --. It's true about climate is true about the pandemic. And I guess the optimistic
interpretation of where we are now is that we might learn the hard way but but learn through
this experience, what we're going to have to do to start to get ahead of the next even bigger,
slow motion, global catastrophe that scientists have warned us about, and politicians haven't
dealt with, until it's truly become a crisis. David: State and local governments are
taking a beating now trying to deal with this. They on the one hand, are having to make
extraordinary expenditures to deal with a crisis, and on the other hand, have no revenues
coming in. Because the economy has been shut down and almost every state and
locality is reporting or projecting huge deficits as a result of this. This seems
like a--Congress didn't address this yesterday, when they pass their latest relief bill. This
seems like a slow rolling crisis as well. Pete: Absolutely. Look, we're about to see
just how important government is. And that's especially true of the services we totally depend
on from local government, we're talking about the basics. So at least in Indiana, any kind of you
know, they've passed the property tax reforms about a decade ago, that ensured that if there
was fat left and local budgets, it's long gone, and we're down in the muscle and bone now,
we're talking about fire, police protection, we're talking about trash pickup, I mean, really
the basics. And if we lose our ability to stay on top of that funding wise, you know, the
pain will will go to a whole new level. Now, this is one example of where in our federal
system, things really are going to be different from state to state. Everyone's heard it. But
I've been talking to a lot of Ohio mayors in the last few weeks, they are in huge trouble because
they are almost completely funded by income tax, which means they'll see an immediate one mayor
of the major Ohio city told me he was looking at, I think more than a third of the city's budget
just gone. And remember, a city budget deficit. That's not like a federal budget deficit, we're
used to federal budget. Exactly. I wish we could have printed South Bend Indiana currency when
we had a shortfall, but we budget in cash. So you literally just have to make that up. And if
the revenue goes down, so do the services that that's that's inevitable, now here in Indiana, By
comparison, we're mostly funded by property tax, which means that it will take a little bit
longer for these revenue shortfalls to work their way through the system, and cities will have
a little bit longer to prepare. But wherever you are in the US, this isn't gonna give us all
federal action. And so I was disappointed to hear that this current package, working its way
through the House and Senate doesn't look like it's gonna do much for cities. But I've got to
think that the next turn will include things that just can't wait, which will include cities
will also include the postal service, which I think last I gathered is less than two months
away from from coming to the brink. And again, we're going to see because--think of it this
way, when a family goes into financial hardship, there's a kind of hierarchy of the things that
that are cut, starting with, with luxuries, and then things that we might think of as necessities
but you can live without extracurricular activities for kids and the bills, maybe cable
goes before electricity. The very last thing that goes is water and we're gonna go through
that same thing, I think in some ways. What are the things that we literally rely on? and need
immediately is to get by. And we're going to be forced to make some of those decisions getting
through the cash flow issues in the long run, even recognizing that our country remains wealthy
enough to solve these issues if you're smart. David: Yeah. One last question on the crisis,
and then its impact on elections. And then we're going to get to some questions from the folks
who are who are watching, you dealt with race quite a bit in this campaign or questions
about racial disparities in South Bend, and you address them on a national scale. This is
really put a lens up to that as well. We've seen disproportionate fatalities among people of color
among the poor. You had an interesting quote, you said it's not because the virus is
discriminating. It's because of America discriminating. What do you see structurally?
Because your last answer portends cuts and programs that are of huge importance to people who
are struggling people who have been the victims of institutional bias and so on. And yet, they're
the ones who are the most being victimized right now. So what are the implications of all this?
And do you see changes in the social compact? Pete: Yeah, I mean, one of the implications,
I think, at the moment we're in and this is, I think, the real response to the assumptions of
the people on the statehouse lawns demanding we go back to where we were before, is that it is both
impossible, and undesirable, to go back to where we were before. And that's true for the country
as a whole. That's especially true for groups that have been marginalized by the status quo. Look
at the look at the statistics on, for example, black residents of Chicago, or black residents of
Louisiana, twice as likely to die from COVID-19, as their shared population would suggest. And
as I said, in the remarks that he quoted, there is no evidence that there's any difference in
terms of how the virus entering the bloodstream, treat somebody based on their race. But
it's not that the virus discriminates, it's that America does, black, you're more likely
to live in a neighborhood without access to fresh food. So you're more likely to have diabetes,
which means you are more likely to have lethal complications from the pandemic. If you're
black, you are more likely to get been unable to get health insurance in this country. And the
longer you've lived without insurance, the more health issues you're likely to have. That could
be complications with COVID-19. Also, Americans of color are more likely to work in jobs, that
you can't just work from home. So there's also a greater likelihood of exposure. Yeah, in
addition to the danger when you do get infected. David: But these are, these are structural
issues. And the question is, you know, this should shock our conscience, it should raise
awareness, it should speak to a need to address these issues. But at the same time, you just
discussed the fact that we're gonna have these budget cuts that will affect the same people
profoundly. So what what is the answer to this? Pete: Well, I think the answer is that
considerations of equity and justice have to be at the heart of every federal
response that takes place. So for example, we're going to pump more hundreds of billions
out through employers to employees. Okay. Last time we did this, part of what happened was, they
went out through banks, the banks distributed them largely according to relationships, they had other
words to your bank, and you got enough money to kind of flow out from the stimulus package to 20
employers. And, you know, there's 40 that could be appealing to you for help you're gonna start
with the ones that you had the longest standing kind of insider relationships with one of many
reasons that black owned and minority and women owned businesses were less likely to get cut of
the stimulus. So what if we have more of a role as I believe the current bill is contemplating for
CDFIs community development financial institutions that are more likely through the kinds of loans
they've made to be backstopping businesses that are smaller and better, more likely to be in
disadvantaged communities. That's just one example of what it would mean to have intention
upfront about the response that we're going to put together. But there are also structural questions
at stake. I just cannot believe that it is, again, A morally desirable, but B even possible to go
back to what we had before. So what we're about to build next, in terms of an economy that
we'll have, think about it, there's going to be a different relationship of the size of the
service sector to traded goods, there's going to be a different, I think, proportion of land
allocated to office space, if we find out that, you know, we don't quite need offices as much
as we thought we did, these are just some of the things that are going to change that are really
deep in our economy. And that means we have a chance and an obligation to reconstruct the terms
of 21st century economic arrangements in America in ways that that address these structural
issues too, because not only did the virus expose structural inequality, it also exploited
structural inequality to spread more quickly, right. So the fact that low income workers didn't
have sick leave, meant they were more likely to come into work sick and more likely to infect
people, whether they were low income or not. David: Yeah. So interconnectedness as one as one
community. You know, there are a lot of questions about the election, one, and how this might
affect the election, the most profound of which is voting. And what we saw in Wisconsin, what
happened to turnout and the situation Milwaukee where 180 polling places where we're tunneled
down to five, because there weren't people would come in and work those places. And so this whole
debate is turned on mail voting, mail-in voting. You just said, interestingly, that the post
office is two months away from insolvency. How concerned are you about the administration of
this election and the integrity of this election, given some of the inhibitions that the and
prohibitions that the virus will place on us? Pete: It's a huge challenge. And it's a reminder,
again, this is revealing things are reminding us of things about the structure of our country that
we don't always think about. So one of them is the simple fact that in our country, elections
are managed by county and state officials, there may be a federal backstop, like, like the
Voting Rights Act, to set some of the overall boundaries. But most of these decisions are
made at the state and local level, which is what we're seeing in, for example, the attention
that came to what was going on in Wisconsin, one thing that I think all of us who care
about the election should be pushing for is expanded access to vote by mail and making
sure that, again, there's a total patchwork of whether you have to have I mean, some states are
extremely restrictive, you basically have to have a doctor's note to apply for an absentee ballot
other states, vote by mail is the only way that you voted even before the pandemic, especially
in the Pacific Northwest that had done a lot with this. So I think we all need to be pressing
for vote by mail. But there's a big asterisk on this. Whether vote by mail becomes more kind
of pro enfranchisement or whether it continues to contribute to the disenfranchisement of some
people depends on how it's done, for example, are there still going to be resources for safe
in person voting? I believe that's important, it's got to be done safely. But it's important
because not everybody has access to, to the ability to easily vote by mail. And some of those
who don't, some of those might have moved around or be homeless might be some of those who have the
most at stake in an election decision that's about to be made. We also know that a lot depends on
these registration purges that have gone on again, I would point to Georgia as one example.
It's hard enough to plead your case, if you appear at a voting station, you're
denied and maybe you can file a provisional ballot and then get it sorted out afterwards. If
it turns out, you were wrongfully turned away, way harder to do that by mail. And so
we've got to make sure on the one hand, I think it's the right thing to do to massively
expand access to vote by mail. On the other hand, that is it solving for democracy is not as simple
as making that widely available. We've also got to make sure it's widely available in a way
that's equitable and doesn't contribute to either active voter suppression or just structural
hardship for those who who are most marginalized. David: We have this this sort of imbalance right
now, because the President has the podium and he has seized it every day for hours. And the country
wants to hear news of what's going on on the virus. He, he strays a bit, but the point is, you
see the image of the president behind that podium, Joe Biden, who you have endorsed is like you
at home, we see him from his basement. What are you advising him about how to or what would
you advise him about how to deal with that disproportionality? What should he be doing? A
lot of questions came in about the use of digital communications at which your campaign excel.
Are they doing enough in your view right now? Pete: I've been really struck and impressed
by the the urgency that I think the Biden campaign has shown in moving into new means of
communication. Look, this, this is a as big a shock to the system, as we have ever seen in
campaigning. I mean, there, there have been a lot of evolutions in campaign right in the 19th
century, it was actually considered impolite in some periods to campaign for yourself. McKinley
famously, I think he had to come to his porch if you wanted to see him speak, then there were
innovations in the middle of the 20th century, like the the whistle stop tour, where you would
actually cover large parts of the country quickly by train. What's never happened is for these
big evolutions in campaigning style have, literally overnight. And any campaign, I think
what would be challenged to, to adapt to those, one of the things we're very proud of would be
for America was was the way that we spent a lot of time in the digital space. And, you know,
my view is that there's no such thing as too much attention to digital right now. And I say
that with a dose of humility, because, you know, our campaign didn't win. But I also think it's the
case that there's, there's more and more, because we don't have the option of big in person rallies,
there's more and more to be gained. And so we see, for example, the VP does a podcast right now, not
something you probably would advise a candidate in a traditional campaign season to do kind of blurs
the lines a little bit in terms of your role and your format. But it's a way to have a conversation
to get a deeper sense of, of how he's thinking through his interactions with guests. And it's
been everybody from the presidential historian Jon Meacham to, to Reverend William Barber, really
getting a deeper sense of of how he's going to lead this country as President. I think that
there needs to be continued. I think some level experimentation, some level of risk may be taken,
because the President does have this megaphone, not not just from the campaign, but just the
fact that the eyes of the nation are on these white house briefings even contradictory
and sometimes less informative by the day. David: Young people, you know,
Biden didn't do particularly well, in the primaries among young people.
There is this question of enthusiasm, a lot of questions came in saying what does
he need to do to generate a response? And is it enough simply that to count on
antipathy to Trump, to activate both young people in progressive voters who, who
supported senator Sanders in large numbers? Pete: I think the fact we're staring down
the barrel of a second Trump term should be very powerful. But I don't think it's enough,
I think there also has to be a proactive vision of where we're headed. Now, here's the thing, the
Democratic Party in general, the Biden campaign, in particular, are making the case for us
to do something about climate change, to act on gun violence, to empower workers to raise
wages, all of the things that are priorities for progressives, and in particular important for a
younger generation, you may believe that, that the platform should push further, faster, fine. But
what we're what we're negotiating right now, in the November election, is not a question of how to
do these things that that was that was negotiated in the primary and it will be negotiated again, in
the legislative process, when we're governing next year. What's being negotiated, going in and it was
being decided going into November, is whether to do these, any of these things. It's not a question
of degree, it's, it's one side that wants to see workers in power, and one that would take away
that power. It's one side that might be arguing internally over how best to deal with climate. But
those we've got to act against another side that literally doesn't want to do that wants to move
in the opposite direction. One side of that that's arguing among ourselves over the best rate
and approach for getting universal health care in this country. And other that's actually
determined to reduce access to, to any kind of public publicly sponsored health care in this
country, which means there'll be less. So think about what we have a chance to do proactively
on the positive side, not just what we're up against the chance that we can have a president
who will do something about climate change, who will work to restore the role of the United
States in the world who cares about gun violence. And that was before we got to the pandemic, where
I think we also understand how important it is just to have a decent human being, and someone
who listens to science in the White House. So if-- David: He also will get to a point A lot of
people you expect or do Would you like to be one of them? Are there things you would
like to do in a democratic administration? Pete: Of course, I love public service.
And I'd love to make myself useful in that way. No promises were made. I don't have any
expectations. But if there's a chance, of course, I'd leap at that. Look, all of us need to
be finding ways whether it's in you know, as a as a .gov employee or through advocacy or
in some other fashion. We've all got to take this moment as one to, to have our hand on the
future of this country because the 2020s will be, I already believed this was the case before
March, but now we know the 2020s will be the decisive decade for how I think really the rest
of this century goes for the American project. David: So speaking of the future,
let's start taking some questions from the folks who were who've been patiently
waiting. The first will come from Jade Klain. Jade: Hi, hi, Mayor Pete. My name is Jade
Klain, and I'm a first year at the college and I'm currently in Indiana right now.
So as you may have seen in Indianapolis, there were protests surrounding COVID-19. And I
just want to know your thoughts on these protests? Pete: Yeah. First of all, good. Good to see,
fellow Hoosier thanks for thanks for joining and look at the protests are, first of all, they're
idiotic, which we should call what it is. They're dangerous, because the people there are at least
the ones in Indiana, we're not exactly going out of their way to stay apart from each other. Again,
I do think it's worth remembering that this is ultimately a tiny number of people. And any number
of wacky things are believed by a non trivial, right if something is believed by one half of
1% of Americans that we believe by more than a million people. So, you know, part of this is just
precisely because of the the kind of outrageous and militant idiocy of some of these protests
they they command more attention than than kind of proportionally they probably should. And
that, you know, you don't have to be a Democrat, for example, to by and large among the American
people to know that there's something serious going on and to take the warnings of doctors
and scientists seriously. I think what we need to watch out for, though, is this, this idea, it's
not just the protests that I think are a problem, it's a much more widely believed trade off
that even very educated people in positions of responsibility have bought into that I
think is a false choice. And the trade off is either we continue to accept economic pain
that's growing more intolerable by the day, or because that's really intolerable, and in its
own way can be lethal. We've got to just accept a lot of death and destruction by by by just giving
up on the social distancing. That shouldn't be, those shouldn't be our two only choices. That's
why testing is so important. Testing doesn't sound sexy. But the approach of massively increasing
the access and distribution and use of testing in this country is the only way out of having to
choose one of those two things. They've also been characterized as, you can look at this one is
surrender. And the other one is just pain. We shouldn't have to choose between those things.
That's why we got to get our act together. The question is, is our country capable of
the level of coordination that is needed to massively expand our testing capabilities?
And that To be fair, as is an open question, it's up to us to do our part to make
sure it gets answered in a positive way. Jade: Thank you. David: Thank you, Jade. Our next
question is from Bobby Nolan. Robert: Good afternoon, Mr. Buttigieg, thank you
for your talk and for taking our questions. My name is Robert Nolan. I'm a fourth year medical
student at Pritzker School of Medicine. And I'm planning on going into emergency medicine. I
wanted to ask you what strategies you believe this country should implement to better connect
our veterans with mental health resources, with social support and with
career opportunity. You know, I find the continuing epidemic of veteran,
both suicide as well as housing instability to be a disparity. It's horrifying and still
very evident in this country. Thank you. Pete: Well, thanks for the question. And I gather
there's a maybe a Navy affinity in the in the household if I'm reading your bookcase, right.
So glad not to be the only Navy person in the in the proverbial house here. And thanks for your
question. I think it's incredibly important at a time like this. It was a big focus on on
our campaign, we're far reaching veterans policy that that really was about making sure
that we first of all, treat the wounds of war and make sure that we are comprehensive in taking
care of people including an evolving understanding of what that means different wars have different
wounds. This by the way, is one of the reasons why it's so important that we have a VA that we
have a dedicated agency without which we probably wouldn't know what we know today about traumatic
brain injury for example. And it has been so important even though there's a long way to go
in dealing with the different generations wounds like like Agent Orange. I think it's also very
important that we have a different attitudes a country about veterans who carry unique struggles
and also unique potential. Sometimes there's this this framework or this kind of narrative takes
hold, that doesn't know how to treat veterans other than as either victims or as heroes. And I
think most veterans don't view ourselves in that way. And so the idea that veterans are
not people who need to be taken care of, but also a tremendous resource to be tapped.
And that's where I'm very excited about, again, in the context of the pandemic, for example,
some conversations that are happening in a new way about how to make use of the service of people
who were trained in that way. I'll be discussing this on Instagram later this week with General
McChrystal, definitely invite folks are interested to pay attention to that evolving conversation,
because, for example, if we need 100,000 people to be quickly trained and deployed as contact tracers
to be able to support that test, and trace method of reopening society, one of the best places to
look for organizations that can quickly organize, staff, train and equip a large number of people,
of course, anybody with military training. And it's one example of I think the new spirit
of our generation of service organizations, thinking about efforts like Team Rubicon that
recognize that one of the greatest needs that veterans often have is a way to continue serving.
It's not always about what you can do to take care of me, it's about how I can continue pitching
in after having had an often very intense experience of service that was also a source of
community and of identity and a purpose. And in addition to making sure everybody has the basic
medical needs physical and mental addressed, I also think those questions of identity and
purpose are at the heart of the mental health crises that are affecting a lot of different
kinds of Americans, especially veterans. And speaking to that is as important as lining up
the right kind of access to clinical care when it comes to confronting things like the epidemic of
deaths from despair in the community of veterans. David: Thanks, Bobby. Our next question
will come from Keaton Zen Gupta, who is an admitted student will be coming
to the university in the fall. Okay. Keaton: Great. Hi, Mayor Pete. Hi, David.
Thanks for taking my question. My name is Keaton. I'll be attending UChicago next year. And
my question is, several counties in the rust belt, where Indiana is act as bellwether counties for
presidential elections, accurately predicting the winning candidate for every year, since
the early 1990s. To now. And I was wondering, why does the rust belt which is culturally so far
removed from so much of America act as a microcosm for the nation? And why are its representatives so
representative of the general electorate at large? Pete: So it's hard to answer this question
without a little bit of personal bias creeping in, because I think everybody use their own their
own home as as a kind of center of gravity. But I also think that it's not, it's not wrong to
really look to this part of the country as a place that can tell us a lot socially and
politically about the country as a whole. And we've gone through different periods where
sometimes it feels like this, this part of the country is ignored. It certainly felt that way
in the 1990s, when it seemed like a lot of policy decisions were being made at the expense of this
part of the country, only to become fashionable, especially in the wake of the 2016 election
with a lot of reporters kind of descending on on communities like mine, saying, take me to
your dive bar and wanting to really get get to the bottom of the rust belt. I think one reason why I
suddenly view South Bend stories as characteristic is the diversity that is here. So we are a
community that is about a little over 50% White, with a long standing African American tradition,
and then a fast growing Latino community that is really responsible for a lot of the population and
economic growth that we've had in the last decade or so. This mirrors not perfectly, of course,
but mirrors a lot of the patterns in in America, as we're becoming a more and more diverse country.
There's also the experience of having gone through a heyday and then losing it and asking what comes
next. And there's a temptation for any place that had a heyday to go back and try to recover it,
to me this is this is the message that's baked in to make America great again, that everything was
great once and we're going to turn back the clock and make it the way it used to be. Which of course
is a lie because there's no going back. Every era has different possibilities and different
limitations. And what made it possible for this community to grow was when around the time that I
became mayor, we really shed any any belief that we could rewind to our heyday as an automaking
town and instead, build a new future that didn't walk away. From our tradition in manufacturing,
but linked it with things going on in technology and education and medicine, and, and recognize
that we're going to rise and fall together, you couldn't have a solution that only worked for
professional class that came to work downtown. But it didn't make a difference for people in
neighborhoods where there was lower levels of wealth and often lower levels of education. That's
not to say we cracked the code here. But that's how we started to turn the corner and grow again,
I think also, so many of the problems that we're experiencing, that we talked about in national
terms are actually extremely local when they cash out. So whether we're talking about economic
patterns of inequality, certainly questions of racial justice, criminal justice, policing,
which is an inherently local function, obviously, the issue of police violence and questions about
racial disparities in encounters with police, these are all things that play out in one city at
a time. And a lot of the play out in the diverse low to middle income cities of this the so called
Rust Belt. And the last thing that I think is really important, in terms of how our story kind
of telescopes out into a bigger American story, is that equation between the stature and hope for
the future, and I think what's what's playing out here, a lot of the time is a real contest between
those two things between that impulse to look to the past, and the willingness to take a leap into
a future that's gonna look different based on the belief that we'll be better off if we do, if we
can do it here, the company can do it. And if we can't, then we see the consequences of
that too, which is, if you can't find new sources of that kind of community and identity
and purpose that I was talking about earlier, in the context of veterans, some really ugly
substitutes come in to take its place from white identity politics, to substances. And so that that
struggle that plays out in so many communities that don't have the easy or obvious pathways to
prosperity that were there for our grandparents generation, I think the way we wrestled with those
and the solutions, we come up with those winds up capturing the mood of the country as a whole.
And that's why I think this will continue to be a very salient place for understanding where
we're headed as a country and as an economy. Keaton: Great, thank you so much. David: Thank you, Keaton. And now
question from Hopi Melton, who, by the way, Mayor Pete has been very
active in the UChiVotes campaign to get students registered and voting in
the election. So Hopi, where are you? Hopi: Hi, Mayor. Pete, thanks so much for
being here. And thanks for answering all these questions. You've kind of touched on this already.
But I was wondering how you see this pandemic, kind of changing the conversation around
universal health care. In particular, I understand your point that we should
probably have this conversation once we are sure to have a democratic president
and that universal health care itself is is incredibly challenging to reach but aren't
the inequities that you mentioned that this crisis is revealing to us telling us to at
least strive for that in the US? Thank you. Pete: Yeah, I think they are I think, first of
all, we're seeing why it's just unacceptable to allow anybody to go without good health insurance
coverage. It's morally unacceptable. But it's also a public health threat to everybody,
when some among us aren't insured. Yeah, I think the debate continues to be your oh
well actually, let me mention a second thing that I think will be, I already believed it was
true, but I think it'll become more obvious as we go. And that is that for many, probably most
people, employer based health insurance doesn't make sense. And it doesn't make sense because we
can't count on a relationship between a single employer for the bulk of somebody's career. And
those relationships just aren't as stable as we wanted as we as we were used to them being.
Now and it's it may sound odd coming from me, because my stance in this debate was always that
we should not mandate that those plans go out of existence. I still believe that, by the way, I
think the right way to get to Universal care is to have a robust public plan to subsidize it so that
it's free for low income people to default people into it if they're not insured. But to let people
decide for themselves, if it's really better than some private alternative, that maybe you do have
through your employer or you have on some other terms, like an exchange through the Affordable
Care Act, Obamacare, which which by the way, now that I'm not employed by the city of South
Bend, how Chasten and I get our health insurance. So, you know, I think that we will continue
to debate the means. But I think that the the destination has become even more vividly
clear to us in the context of this pandemic, where it just seems like it would add insult
to injury to expect most Americans to be able to get their insurance through their
employer, when employer relationships are being almost apocalyptically shattered or
changed in a way, it's not just going to snap into place like it was a year ago, whenever
we begin to climb our way out of this hole. David: We have a another question.
And I think this may or may have to be the last question from Yang
Jeng. Are you here? There you are. Yang: Hi, Mayor, Pete, thank you for
this talk. So I'm a student from China, now a PhD fourth year now living in Chicago
because of the restriction of travel. So my question is about Trump's patchwork approach in
this whole covid 19 pandemic. So my question is, to what extent is China-blaming effective
in Trump's reelection campaign, given the patchwork approach by Trump's administration,
even after the covid 19 pandemic is clear? Pete: So it's a great question. It's clear the
president, look, the President has always been a specialist in allocating blame. It's what he
does, especially when confronted with a challenge. And so he will continue to direct and divert blame
everywhere he can, from domestic political rivals, to to other countries. Now, it may also be the
case in fact, I believe it is the case that that fault can be found with many elements of,
of the approach in China to dealing with this, this challenge. But I think in terms of any kind
of competition or rivalry between the United States and China, frankly, a continued Trump
administration is probably to the advantage of a Chinese government that I think, is now determined
to present the experience of this pandemic, as an example of why the Chinese model would be
a more desirable way for for societies to develop than the American model. I don't want to read too
much into or assume that these two countries are always going to be at odds. But I do think that
the more unsteady the American response looks, the more that affects the credibility of arrangements
and institutions that, to me are still the ones we should be defending on the global stage, from
democracy to partially decentralized government. And I think, you know, somebody who believes in
the power of local, I also think that to get this right, we have to have consistency at the national
level, but it's just a fundamentally different strategy. So I think that this kind of contest
over approaches could be a healthy one. But it's not healthy right now, especially when you have
the president, calling it a Chinese virus, which, of course, first of all, doesn't make sense. And
the viruses don't have a nationality, but also carries a lot of racist attachments that actually
put can put people in danger here in the United States. Also not helpful to make it seem as though
the World Health Organization is illegitimate, because it was maybe too responsive to the Chinese
government's account of what was going on when our president himself was praising the transparency
of the government of China in some of his early tweets and comments. So look, we're gonna continue
to see a lot of noise coming from from this White House. We're also, by the way going to see I
think, some some questionable assertions made from the other side of the Pacific, including
the circulation of conspiracy theories about the United States' role in the virus spreading,
it's a good moment for us all to step back and to make sure that one offensive claim is not
met with another one from the other party and instead recognize as any global threat from
climate change to, to a pandemic can teach us when it doesn't care about national borders, and
it doesn't care about geopolitical tensions. The virus doesn't care, though we who do care should
be looking for every opportunity to team up and and the only approach to this that will be a
credit to, to our respective countries and to, to our time in the eyes of history will be one
in which this became an occasion for greater cooperation rather than greater recrimination
between these these two great powers. David: And, we're going to try and sneak one last
additional question in here from Fernanda Ponce. Fernanda: Hi, Mayor Pete My name is
Fernanda. I'm a first year at the college and I was listening recently listening
to a podcast on the Philip Roth novel, The Plot Against America. And I'm very hopeful
that America will survive these turbulent times. But if our democracy is unable to rein in
Trump and undo the damage, she's wrong on the EPA and other departments, where do you see
our--how would you see our dystopian future, panning out? And do you think in that
dystopian future class revolution is possible? Pete: Well, I think it's up to us. So,
you know, what we need to ask ourselves right now is how the decisions that are
going to be made in the next few months, the next few years, including the presidential
election, but that's just the beginning, are going to make us better or worse off in
terms of how this decades going to unfold. If you mean class revolution in the Marxist sense,
I'm not sure that it will have to come to that, for us to respond to this moment. But I guess
that depends how dystopian you're envisioning things getting and the plot against America is on
my definitely on my shortlist for binge watching this weekend. Look, terrible things can happen
anywhere, including here. But our imperfect and magnificent system has a lot of antibodies to
authoritarianism at home. And those antibodies mostly are in the form of our democracy. It's
why we need to be guarding our democracy, and paying just as much attention to the threats to
our democracy in the context of this pandemic. As we do the threats to our economy, and the threats
to our individual health. It's going to be up to us whether things get really ugly, or whether we
look back on this time as one that was unstable, difficult and frightening, but also led
to a great deal of positive change the way we might look back on the 1960s. I've even
heard it suggested that us living in this time, this kind of cosmic punishment for us ever
telling our parents or grandparents generation that we were envious, envious of them for
living in a time as exciting as the 1960s. Future generations will ask what it was like to
be around in 2020. And we still have the power among ourselves if and only if we can mobilize
in a politically unified fashion to prevent things from getting anywhere near the kind of
dystopian realities that that I hope will remain the stuff that HBO and not find their way into
historical accounts of the times we're living. David: Mayor, thank you so much. We, we miss
having you on campus. We hope to have you on campus in the future. But it's great to hear
from you. There's a huge audience for this, for this event today. So it's a reflection
of the interest in what you have to say. And I think there's a lot of interest in what
you personally are going to do in the future. So thank you so much for being with us. We
look forward to seeing you down the line. Pete: Well, thanks. It's an
honor to be with you. As always, I love the thought that that's going
into the questions from students and count me in whenever circumstances allow
me to come up the road, say hi in person. David: We will do and thank you to everyone
who's watched and everyone who submitted their questions and we look forward to seeing
you down the line as well. Thank you. Pete: Thanks so much.
