cards. i wasn t that interested in baseball. the card, i had them alphabetized. count them. collect them. you had them in the little cards? yeah. me too. in high school, his hawks took a more serious turn. he organized programs for amnesty international. it seems to me you knew early on you wanted to get into public service? yeah, i was always intere interested. but by the time i got to college, i knew that in some way, shape or form, i wanted to be a part of public life. what was the first time you remember thinking about running for president of the united states? i remember as kind of a class joke in high school when i was a senior. i was a senior class president. but i m not sure i took it seriously at the time. i think most folks in high school would have said if there is somebody that will go on and be any special and be involved in public service and maybe become president one day, i think a lot of people would have picked pete. i think in the yearbook they
small city in the mid-west. where is the national experience? where is the seasoning? is he going to get to the kind of numbers that make him effective in iowa? there are black people in iowa. there are latinos in iowa. there are latinos and african-americans in new hampshire. how is he going to do in nebraska by the time we get to carolina. this isn t the first time, in 2017, the then 34-year-old tried to raise his national profile by running for the chair of the democratic national committee. pete caught my eye when he was running for the chair of the dnc. i long believed the democratic party needs to be taken over by 35-year-olds. howard dean was a mentor for his campaign for dnc chair. the dnc loved him. he was a symbol. the dnc didn t want a new generation. they know they have to have one. it was evident he wasn t going to win, he decided not to be on the ballot. that was very smart.
he does have an instinct for when to hold em and when to fold em. that you can t buy. you can t teach it, either. that will go through the primary process. the funny thing people then who said i think you would make a great president but i m not going to vote for you for dnc chair and they d explain all the reasons why. two years later, pete buttigieg took their praise to heart. my name is pete bute gij. they call me mayor pete. i am a proud son of south bend, indiana and i am running for president of the united states. what is your political ideology? i view myself as a progressive. but i also am aware of living in a moment when a lot of the ideological frames i grew up with are becoming less and less useful. you got a president who doesn t even have an ideology. a month-and-a-half into his run, many voters still didn t have a clear idea of the candidate s platform. people have knocked you for not
in 2011, newsweek was calling south bend one of the ten dying cities. the new mayor had a plan to change that. first he said the basics should be easy. that is, we should be picking up the trash. mark neil served as the new mayor city controller. so you will see pete even today, he loves riding around in the garbage truck with the sanitation folks looking at what the newest technology is. right. from traffic and sewers, mayor pete was on a mission to bring people back downtown and get south bend off of america s worst cities list. a critic at part of rerate issalization, rediscovering the river the city was built on. so today this is the new heart of the city or a part of what the cities is becoming again? yes. so the thing about the river. south bend was built in a very industrial period 120 years ago when rivers were treated as something between a conveyor
company that s growing with enthusiasm, looking to the future with a few face. when pete buttigieg was growing up in south bend in the 1980s and 90s the abandoned studebaker factory shuttered two decades earlier loomed as an empty reminder of the city s industrial golden age. another remnant was south bend s aging and abandoned housing stock. which became a focal point for the young mayor. the simple mathmatical truth is we have too many houses in our city and many houses are in such disrepair they will have to be demolished. this is not only a demolition program. we should rehabilitate those houses that can be saved even as we tear down the ones that cannot. a year into the job mayor pete raised to repair the city s vacant and blighted homes. he called the plan a thousand houses in a thousand days. so when i was running for