The Pete Buttigieg Experience
The mayor isn’t the only one who wants to leave South Bend.
By James Freeman
Nov. 18, 2019 2:12 pm ET
Pete Buttigieg is surging again in presidential campaign polls, and media observers are once again asking whether the mayor of South Bend, Indiana has enough experience to run the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the latest depressing story out of South Bend suggests that what Mr. Buttigieg lacks most of all is achievement.
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He has certainly achieved a large measure of popularity among Iowa Democrats. Brianne Pfannenstiel reports in the Des Moines Register:
Pete Buttigieg has rocketed to the top of the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll in the latest reshuffling of the top tier of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
Since September, Buttigieg has risen 16 percentage points among Iowa’s likely Democratic caucusgoers, with 25% now saying he is their first choice for president. For the first time in the Register’s Iowa Poll, he bests rivals Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who are now clustered in competition for second place and about 10 percentage points behind the South Bend, Indiana, mayor.
But back home in Indiana, one of the mayor’s most distinguished employees has decided he’s had enough. Marek Mazurek reports in the South Bend Tribune today:
Last year, Elijah Arias was recognized as the South Bend Police Department’s Officer of the Year.
Earlier this month, Arias and two other former South Bend officers were sworn in at the Mishawaka Police Department, leaving South Bend with a shortfall of officers after two recent recruiting cycles yielded no new hires.
Doesn’t anybody want to work for Mayor Pete? Mr. Mazurek reports:
The South Bend Police Department has come under increased national scrutiny in connection with Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign following the fatal shooting of Eric Logan, who is black, by a white officer in June...
Sgt. Harvey Mills, president of the Fraternal Order of Police in South Bend, believes Buttigieg’s actions following the incident drove some away from the force.
“There were a lot of officers that left as a result of Mayor Buttigieg’s comments and lack of support,” Mills said.
In the aftermath of the Logan shooting, Buttigieg wrote in a campaign email “All police work and all of American life takes place in the shadow of racism.”
All of South Bend life takes place in the shadow of rising violence. Last month, Christian Sheckler reported in the Tribune:
Through August, the latest month for which full statistics are available, South Bend had seen 10 homicides, an increase from five over the same period last year. The pace of homicides increased in September, with four killings in the city in the past month...
Through the end of August, 79 people had been injured or killed in shootings this year. That’s an increase of almost 60 percent compared with the 50 shootings through the same period in 2018.
In another South Bend Tribune story in today’s edition, Allie Kirkman notes that South Bend schools have “suffered from reduced enrollment,” not exactly a sign of a thriving community. Nevertheless school officials are asking voters to approve another tax increase.
A recent editorial in the Tribune suggested that Mayor Pete’s school system is having just as hard a time as the police department in attracting and retaining valuable employees:
In September, South Bend had 16 teaching jobs still open. In contrast, other local school districts, including School City of Mishawaka and Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp., were fully staffed.
South Bend Last night Mr. Buttigieg wrote in an email to presidential campaign supporters:
When I announced my campaign for president, I knew it was more than a little bold. Here was a youthful, Midwestern Mayor stepping forward as a candidate for the highest office in the land. We heard things like, “Is this for real?” and “Why now?”
As people study his record as mayor, Mr. Buttigieg may also hear things like, “Why should we apply your South Bend model nationwide?”
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Elizabeth Warren’s Problem
Mr. Buttigieg’s rise has been fueled in part by voter concerns about the health plan advanced by presidential campaign rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.). Those concerns may have room to grow. Shane Goldmacher, Sarah Kliff and Thomas Kaplan write in the New York Times that Sen. Warren is still struggling to market government-run health care:
...speaking to reporters the day after unveiling her Medicare for all financing plan, she uncharacteristically stumbled over the specifics, insisting, incorrectly, that only billionaires would see their taxes go up.
Meanwhile the U.K.’s government-run health plan hardly argues for a similar experiment in the U.S. Today Helen Puttick reports in the Times of London on the lengths patients of the National Health Service must go to find a safe operating room:
An NHS operating theatre has been mothballed because of staff shortages and patients having surgery are being taken to a mobile theatre run by a private company.
NHS Scotland is paying to transport people daily almost 40 miles from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary to have their operations at the temporary unit. One of the theatres in the hospital’s general surgery suite has been shut because the health board cannot find enough trained nurses to safely provide treatment there.
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