Of all the things we’ve been up against as a country, only one of them actually came convincingly close to permanently ending the American project, and that was white supremacy during the course of the Civil War. And I am now convinced that, if we don’t tackle that in my lifetime, it could wreck the…
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Pete Buttigieg Talks Impeachment, Health Care, and the Political Spectrum
Another way to think of it is this: Americans usually want something along the lines of the opposite of whatever we’ve just had in the Presidency. And I might be the one person who can say that, whether it’s President Trump or President Pence, I represent the opposite of what we have just had.
I think my understanding of why politics matters is different. It’s more rooted in everyday life. Part of that’s a mayor’s orientation. Part of it’s my Midwestern orientation. Part of it’s my personal story as somebody who saw, for example, the Afghanistan War, not just in terms of the theoretical d…
Where I am right now in the mix is roughly where the eventual nominee almost always has been in the year before the vote, if history is any guide. And I think where this is going to shake out is, if you really do want the candidate with the most years of Washington experience, the most familiar face…
Right now, there are a lot of lines being drawn about who gets to be American. And it speaks to a bigger crisis of belonging in this country. My candidacy, in many ways, is a response to that crisis of belonging.
When you’re a mayor, there’s no waving away. If there is a hole in the road, and you didn’t fill it in, and somebody calls you out on it, you don’t get to say, 'That’s fake news. It’s a great road. There’s no hole in it.' Because they’ll look at the hole and they’ll know.
I think any time you run for office you should ask two sets of questions. One: What does the office need? What does the next occupant of that office have to do? And then you ask the question: Who am I, and what do I bring to the table that’s different from the others? And then you look for a match.…
We can’t pretend that the Trump presidency is this weird anomaly that we can just kind of recover from by returning to the old normal. We are where we are because normal didn’t work.
Well, I arrived knowing we were there because we’d been attacked. It was very different from the Iraq conflict in that sense. But, also, while I was there, it was increasingly difficult to understand what our goal was. And the thing that has made me feel a greater and greater sense of urgency about…
The core principle for me is not whether or not the government is your health-insurance provider. The core principle for me is that you get covered one way or the other. That’s what Medicare for All Who Want It entails.
One of the Afghans I got to know best—his job was to clean this building that I worked in some of the time. And I was attempting to learn the language of Dari. He would teach me these Afghan sayings—there’s an amazing, rich tradition of proverbs in Afghanistan. One of them that I always think of is…
There’s going to be an investigation. There’s going to be testimony. There’s going to be records. But, for all the things that might emerge then, he confessed on television to the abuse of power. So there’s this central fact that Congress has to weigh in on: whether this is or is not a high crime. F…
Well, the day that Nixon resigned, I’m told, he had about twenty-five per cent of the country with him. So I think we can assume that there’s at least twenty-five per cent that you’re just not going to reach. That still leaves an awful lot of people.
Who among the candidates for President can lead us in a world where we’re going to have to solve these big policy problems that didn’t take a break during impeachment, and somehow unify the American people? And, of course, I’m running to be that President, because we need somebody capable of turning…