Pete Buttigieg



Peter "Pete" Paul Montgomery Buttigieg (pronounced, born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former military officer who is currently serving as the United States secretary of transportation. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 32nd mayor of South Bend, Indiana from 2012 to 2020, which earned him the nickname "Mayor Pete".

Buttigieg ran as a candidate for president in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, launching his campaign for the 2020 United States presidential election on April 14, 2019. He became one of the first openly gay men to launch a major party presidential campaign.

2000

 * A new attitude has swept American politics. Candidates have discovered that is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. Most Democrats shy away from the word “liberal” like a horrid accusation.

2003

 * On one hand, the right wing is replete with personalities who undermine everything they profess to stand for. Across the aisle, members of a Democratic party, aghast at the hypocrisy of their counterparts’ personalities, seem themselves reluctant to demonstrate any personality at all.


 * The real challenge for the Democratic Party, and its presidential candidates in particular, is to figure out how to reverse the Right’s stranglehold on our political vocabulary, without adopting the kind of lock-step dogmatic monolithism that empowered the likes of Gingrich. I don’t have a quick solution handy, but I’m pretty sure that if the Dems don’t act fast to reclaim our language, they risk losing the word battle before they realize they’re fighting it.

2004

 * Politics is in my bones. I grew up hearing my parents hollering at the TV.

2012

 * The economic equivalent of a tornado did go through town. And it's not just in a symbolic way. It's in a physical way. You look at some of these buildings, and it literally looks like a bomb went off or like a natural disaster happened. So, you know, getting past that legacy - and if I don't I'll be in trouble - getting past that legacy is not going to be easy, and it's not going to be obvious.

2015

 * I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay. It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am. Putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper does not come easy. We Midwesterners are instinctively private to begin with, and I’m not used to viewing this as anyone else’s business. But it’s clear to me that at a moment like this, being more open about it could do some good.

2016

 * I am a Democrat because I believe in protecting freedom, fairness, families, and the future.

2017

 * If anything I think my story might help illustrate why categories aren’t as important as we think. I’m a church-going, gay, millennial, Red State mayor. I’m also a left-handed Maltese American. I also spent Thanksgiving in a deer blind with my partner’s father. So am I supposed to be a Republican or a Democrat?


 * Military service used to be something that we had in common. It’s where people like a young John F Kennedy would meet farm kids and would work side by side with African Americans, maybe for the first time in their lives. At the time [in 2009] it felt like the reverse. It felt like it reinforced the divides.


 * A lot of folks were telling me I was the future while I was really trying to concentrate on the present. They would say all kinds of nice things and then swear up and down that I was their second vote, which was a nice way of saying, ‘I’m not going to vote for you.’

2019

 * We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern, and less materialism in young people.


 * The problem is that they're telling us to look for greatness in all the wrong places. Because if there's one thing that the city of South Bend has shown, it's that there's no such thing as an honest politics that revolves around the word "Again". It is time to walk away from the politics from the politics of the past and towards something totally different. So that's why I'm here today. I'm here to join you to make a little news. My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete. I am a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for President of the United States.


 * We have to recognize that the China challenge is a serious one. This is not something to dismiss or waive away. China is using technology for the perfection of dictatorship.


 * It's time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say. It's true that if we embrace a far left agenda, they're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they're going to do? They're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists. So let's just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.


 * As a military officer serving under Don't Ask Don't Tell and as an elected official in the state of Indiana when Mike Pence was governor, at a certain point, when it came to professional setbacks I had to wonder whether just acknowloging who I was was going to be the ultimate, career-ending professional setback. I came back from the deployment and realised that you only get to live one life and I was not interested in not knowing what it was like to be in love any longer. So I just came out. I had no idea what kind of professional setback it would be especially cos, incoveniently, it was an election year in my socially conservative community. What happened was that when I trusted voters to judge me on the job that I did for them, they decided to trust me and re-elected me with 80% of the vote and what I learned was that trust can be reciprocated and that part of how you can win and derserve to win is to know what's worth more to you than winning.
 * Said in the Democratic Party TV debates on 12 September 2019. Video footage can be found in a tweet from Buttigieg's account.

2020

 * At the end of the day, rights in this country have been expanded because courts have understood what the true meaning of the letter of the law and the spirit of the Constitution is. That is not about time traveling yourself back to the 18th century and subjecting yourself to the same prejudices and limitations as the people who write these words. The Constitution is a living document because the English language is a living language. And you need to have some readiness to understand that in order to serve on the court in a way that will actually make life better.
 * Cited in Column: Make way for Slayer Pete. Buttigieg is the Biden campaign’s ruthless secret weapon, Mary McNamara, 12 October 2020, LA Times

Quotes about Buttigieg

 * How old are you? You don't look like you're old enough to be the mayor of anything.


 * Mayor Pete, people are like, “Wow! He speaks like a gazillion languages. Isn’t he so smart?” And I’m like, “Well, actually, you could go to many places in the world where people speak those gazillion languages, right, and they’re not positioned as smart in the same way.
 * Nelson Flores, Vocal Fries Podcast (2020)


 * Hard to believe that @FoxNews is wasting airtime on Mayor Pete, as Chris Wallace likes to call him. Fox is moving more and more to the losing (wrong) side in covering the Dems. They got dumped from the Democrats boring debates, and they just want in. They forgot the people who got them there. Chris Wallace said, “I actually think, whether you like his opinions or not, that Mayor Pete has a lot of substance...fascinating biography.” Gee, he never speaks well of me - I like Mike Wallace better...and Alfred E. Newman [sic] will never be President!


 * Now there’s a real competition going on up here... My good friend Joe (Biden)... he’s received contributions from 44 billionaires. Pete (Buttigieg) on the other hand, is trailing, you only got 39 billionaires contributing.
 * Bernie Sanders, debate in 2019