Some national Democrats swoon over South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
'Pete Buttigieg was in Des Moines last month, riling up a crowd at the Progress Iowa Corn Feed with a message that the Democratic Party needs a new focus—“the politics of the everyday”—to make inroads in parts of the country where its influence is waning. But 400 miles away in his hometown of South Bend, where Buttigieg is mayor, residents were riled up about something completely different—train whistles that have been wreaking havoc on their sleep.
This is the dual existence Buttigieg has been living since he decided to run—unsuccessfully—in January for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a move that boosted his profile overnight. . .
Buttigieg also said the threat of automation “is about to give us another economic transformation,” one that will cause real pain for middle-class workers. . .
“If they spent more time in the industrial Midwest, they might not have been so shocked that we had what you might call an economic-anxiety election during conditions of recovery and near full employment,” he said. “If your only relationships to voters and workers in this part of the country is as numbers on a page, you could be forgiven for not realizing that a lot of the anxieties around the economy here are around not just income, but job security and also job identity and the dignity of work,” he said.
“Telling a guy who’s been working in a machining operation for 20 years that we’ll make him into a computer programmer or a nurse may not fit with the way he understands his place. The reason an auto worker needs to know where he belongs in the local economy isn’t that different from the needs of, let’s say, a transgender kid at John Adams High School who just has to use the bathroom like everybody else. Everyone needs to have a place.”
Buttigieg said the Democratic Party needs a positive message about what it stands for—and answers to these challenges. “There has to be more to our political process than horror,” he said. “Nobody is really going to leap to join a movement that feels 100 percent negative.”
That belief is why he’s hoping his new political action committee, Hitting Home, makes inroads with disaffected voters. Buttigieg said his goal is to help promising candidates in competitive federal, state and local races “using communications based entirely around regular people’s lives and how they’re made better or worse by politics.” . .
“One of the things I’m always harping on is the importance of having the center of gravity in our politics move away from the characters of the politicians and more toward the lives of people going about their day,” Buttigieg said.'>>>
https://www.ibj.com/articles/65820-some-national-democrats-swoon-over-south-bend-mayor-pete-buttigieg
= new reply since forum marked as read
