It was only two years ago that some supporters of Hillary Clinton, carried away by the looming success of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, were saying she was the most qualified candidate ever to run for president. Even as electoral gambits go, this was misleading. No one will ever be more qualified than George Washington was in 1789, although he did not exactly run.
In 1860, many Americans thought Abraham Lincoln was an irredeemable buffoon. We know differently now; we know, for instance, that he subscribed to the Charleston, South Carolina Mercury, which was mailed to his law office in Springfield, Illinois, in the late 1850s; when the first blow of the Civil War came in Charleston harbor, Lincoln was expecting it. He turned out to be the right person to answer the telegraph at 3 a.m.
Could South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg be that good? We recently listened to this 2020 Democratic candidate for president – a recorded presentation at a D.C. bookstore in February – and were taken aback by how wise he is at the age of 37.
The child of Notre Dame professors, Buttigieg studied at Harvard; was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford; was a consultant at McKinsey and Company; joined the Navy Reserve as an intelligence officer and was deployed to Afghanistan; was elected mayor of South Bend in 2012; and won re-election to that job with 80 percent of the vote, after he announced that he is gay in a column in the South Bend Tribune. (Buttigieg and his husband were married last year.)
You might be wondering why Americans might need a mayor for the presidency, or this mayor now.
“I think government in general, and certainly city government, in some ways it’s applied philosophy,” he explained at the D.C. talk.
“If you’re sitting in an office and your job is to make sure that you plow the snow for the greatest number of people or you fill in the greatest number of potholes in the greatest number of neighborhoods, you’re thinking usually in a very utilitarian way. And so you organize city services around that ... And yet, there are these moments when efficiency is not actually what you’re after.” You might want to be responsive instead.
“The most responsive way is, the moment somebody calls us, we get out there and do it. That’s actually not efficient. So what do you care about more, being responsive or being efficient?
“Some of the greatest hazard in public office comes from confusing technical problems with moral ones. ... There are times when you cannot make one person better off without making another person worse off. Those are moral questions, and you can’t think your way out of them with a technical fix. ...
“Taxes is a situation where you have to make somebody worse off in order to make somebody else better off. This is another thing we don’t debate enough, I think – the relationship between present and future selves. If you take my money in taxes and then you pay it back to me in the form of national defense and a good street, you’re negotiating an exchange between me and my future self.”
At this point, you might be wondering, who actually thinks like this? Who can speak like this off the cuff?
Buttigieg: “One of the premises of me getting involved in the 2020 conversation,” he said, “is, what responsibilities do we have to our future selves, in addition to the responsibilities that people have between one generation and another? And of course, the classic issue where this is coming to a head is climate.”
He discovered the power of data as a tool when he worked for McKinsey, he said. When he became mayor, he knew the city had to gather it to be able to evaluate the job his administration was doing.
“The old way of solving problems was, we’re missing trash pickup in your neighborhood. Then it comes to the attention of the mayor once it gets bad enough that somebody tells their council member. One of the things we learned once we set up the 311 [non-emergency phone] system ... is actually, the areas where we had the worst service were often the areas where we had the least complaints, because what had happened there was that the residents had given up. They felt ill-served; they didn’t think we cared.
“It didn’t seem to them possible that the reason we weren’t serving them was we didn’t know there was a problem. And so there was also a kind of justice that became available through better use of data.”
We doubt Democrats will be able to choose between candidates who equally can divine how justice might arise, not from data but the way we use it. It is possible someone will discover a frightful picture of Buttigieg, or that he threw a binder at a South Bend city underling, but meanwhile, he deserves a closer look by anyone who cares as much about governing well as the chimera of electability.
