Pete Buttigieg: Time for Radical Change

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, coming at you from my old stomping grounds in Des Moines, Iowa on Sunday evening.
I was at the Liberty and Justice Dinner put on by the Iowa Democratic Party. That was conveniently for me at Prairie Meadows Casino, where I spent a lot of time on the craps table back in my heyday.
So it was nice to get back into town. And I was here to have a little chat with the keynote speaker at that dinner. I'm delighted to be able to sit down with him today. You might know him as the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, former secretary of transportation, Navy veteran, winner of the 2020 Democratic Caucuses right here in Iowa. That's Pete Buttigieg. Hey, Pete, how's it going?

**Pete Buttigieg** (0:56)
I'm good. Thanks for having me.

**Tim Miller** (0:57)
How was it on Sunday night?

**Pete Buttigieg** (0:58)
Great. Really good energy.
I felt kind of like a reunion, because there are all these memories of when I was here in 2020 But also, I just really feel good about our chances in Iowa.

**Tim Miller** (1:09)
Yeah. To me, it felt like even in the room, some of the Iowa Democrats have been depleted.
I try to come back to Iowa every year. I got a lot of old friends here from my campaign's past. And I don't know, I went to an event in 24 It's just Republicans have controlled the state for 10 years. And after a while, eventually, you get beaten down. And it did feel like there was a little bit of a jolt of energy among the Iowa Dems.

**Pete Buttigieg** (1:33)
Yeah, I think so. And it's not just vibes. I mean, people are seeing it in the numbers, they're seeing it in what's possible. And as the Iowa Democrats are quick to point out, this is maybe the only place where you have a chance to get that many House seats flipped and a Senate seat, and the governor's office at the same time.
And I also think, I mean, this is a little provincial of me maybe, but I think this Midwest region is an especially important place to prove that out. Because I think we can show how, what we believe about policy, and what we believe about just how people ought to see each other and how people ought to act, all kind of comes into alignment in the way that people in this part of the country really care about. And then in turn, the other thing that it strikes me is I think when we have more wins in places like this, we have more voices inside the party who are elected who are from places like this. And it really makes a difference to our vocabulary and our body language and our ability to connect versus the places that are kind of already the biggest strongholds of the party.

**Tim Miller** (2:33)
I was talking to a state senator from Sioux City, a scientist who was there. And to the end of the conversation, I looked at her and I was like, you just talk like a regular person, which is really nice. I think a lot of times the Democrats talk about talking like a regular person and then you end up actually still kind of using the types of terms that you'd use like a Grinnell Symposium or in like activist meetings or whatever. And it's just different, you know?

**Pete Buttigieg** (2:57)
Yeah. And I think just having that kind of normal human style and approach and vocabulary is rewarded in some places, maybe more than others. And I think it's rewarded here in the politics of a place like Iowa.

**Tim Miller** (3:08)
I want to talk about your speech and the big themes of it for a lot of the show. But we do have some news today. We're taping this Monday afternoon, so there could be more that comes up by the time this publishes. But there's a man that's killed today in another ice shooting in Biddeford, Maine. He's a 26-year-old from Columbia with work authorization. We don't exactly know what that was, likely an asylum applicant. He was shot six times while he was driving. After they shot him, they still pulled him out of the car, dropped him to the ground and handcuffed him.
It appears there was a three-year-old girl on the scene, maybe his daughter in bluey pajamas.
Just another one of these things. We have obviously the shooting in Houston earlier this week. So I was just wondering your initial reactions.

**Pete Buttigieg** (3:51)
I mean, first of all, it's stomach turning and upsetting. We don't know a lot. We don't know everything, but we know that this keeps happening or some version of this keeps happening. And we know that this kind of thing doesn't have to keep happening. And another thing that's on my mind, again, we've just learned about this. More information is probably coming in the next hours and the next day. But this administration's Homeland Security Department has already been caught in another case saying that somebody was trying to ram federal agents and that turning out not to be true. So I think we have more questions at a moment like this than we would if we could trust our federal government.