Can Mayor Pete Be a Democratic Front-Runner?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Six months ago, David Remnick interviewed a politician named Pete Buttigieg, who was just beginning his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. Buttigieg was an unlikely candidate: the youngest person to run in decades, he was a small-town mayor with no national exposure, and had a difficult last name to boot. But a smart campaign has made Buttigieg a contender, and a recent Iowa poll put him in second place, behind Elizabeth Warren. Gay, Christian, and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Buttigieg is running as a kind of centrist outsider. “If you really do want the candidate with most years of Washington experience,” he told Remnick, “you’ve got your choice”—meaning Joe Biden. Furthermore, “if you want the most ideologically, conventionally left candidate you can get, then you’ve got your choice”—between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But, he claims, “most Democrats I talk to are looking for something else. That’s where I come in.” Buttigieg spoke with Remnick in October, at the New Yorker Festival. They discussed whether he can overcome one notable weakness in his campaign: a lack of support among black voters, which would injure him in the South Carolina primaries. Plus, the New Yorker food correspondent Helen Rosner shares three current food-world favorites with David Remnick, including an ingenious cheat that blows the lid off of lasagna.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. About six months ago, I interviewed a young man who had announced that he was a candidate for the presidency. He was an up-and-comer in democratic politics.
0:22.3	In fact, Barack Obama mentioned him to me back in 2016. But as the mayor of a small city in
0:28.2	Indiana, he had had less exposure than almost any figure in the race. And while we were preparing
0:34.9	for the interview, the hardest question of my producers tackled was how to pronounce his name.
0:39.7	But in the month since, we've all learned to say Pete Buttigieg.
0:43.6	Budajedge, even Donald Trump has learned it.
0:46.4	As a Midwesterner, Buttigieg counts on support in Iowa to lift his candidacy.
0:51.0	And that tactic seems to be working out.
0:53.6	Recently, an Iowa State University poll put him
0:56.5	in second place to Elizabeth Warren, just a hair past Bernie Sanders and significantly ahead of
1:02.2	Joe Biden. I had a chance to sit down again with Pete Buttigieg, Mayor Pete as the campaign calls him,
1:08.6	in front of a live audience at the New Yorker Festival in October.
1:15.1	Let's start with the news. Let's get the D.T. stuff out of the way. Is Donald Trump's political goose cooked?
1:24.2	That depends on the conscience of the Senate Republicans.
1:36.1	And what that actually means is it depends on whether there is enough of a threat to the power of the Senate Republicans that they would be reunited with their conscience, which obviously they've taken a holiday from.
1:42.8	Which is really important because in a moral sense and in a constitutional sense, this is
1:49.0	about accountability when the president has admitted to an abuse of power.
1:54.6	And I think this is one thing we need to be really clear on.
1:57.1	There's going to be an investigation.
1:59.2	There's going to be testimony.
2:00.5	There's going to be records. But there's going to be testimony, there's going to be records,
	...

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