Sound Bend Indiana Mayor Peter Buttigieg
Derek Henkle / AFP / Getty Images
Pete Buttigieg, the 35-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is pursing a new ambition in national politics: changing the vocabulary of the Democratic Party.
Buttigieg, known as Mayor Pete, will form a group called "Hitting Home," with the goal of reorienting the party, its policies and its rhetoric, around a single message: that Democrats strive to "protect and support people going about their lives."
The PAC, Buttigieg's first major political effort since his campaign for chair of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year, proposes “a renewed politics of the everyday" — a way of articulating message and policy in terms that are personal, not ideological, as the mayor put it in an interview during a visit to New York.
“At the end of the day, if you wanted to fit it onto a left-right spectrum, that’s going to bring you to core progressive beliefs. But I don’t think that’s the best frame," he said. "If we can get back to people's lives, it kind of frees us from [ideological labels]."
The approach makes Buttigieg an outlier in a party where Democrats are now measured by their progressive credentials and their willingness to oppose President Donald Trump. This week’s defeat in the Georgia special election instantly became a debate over party ideology and strategy, with officials on the defense and liberal groups claiming that a more progressive candidate would have won.
Buttigieg described Ossoff race as “a reminder that being against Trump isn’t going to be enough,” he said. “People have to know what you’re about.”
"I think the best chance that we have of breaking the spell of this mesmerizing horror show that is going on in Washington is to express all of our politics in terms of the stories of people who are affected by them," he added. "The show can be hypnotizing, and I’m worried our national politics could get oriented around it."
The PAC, set to launch in earnest after Labor Day, will back state and local candidates, he said, “who can explain a policy agenda in terms of what it’s going to mean in people’s lives” (i.e. how it “hits home."). Buttigieg is also planning a paid media strategy, creating TV ads that “elevate” voters with stories about the real-world effects of policy, particularly when it comes to health care, he said.
Buttigieg said he believes that, in the end, the “politics of the everyday” approach is a road to winning Democratic support — at the local and statewide levels.
"It's the same reason I’m philosophical about waste water and filling pot holes, and it’s the same reason I care about equality issues and wage issues and health care," he said. "We’re more convincing as a party, and we’re just better on policies, when we always have that as our touchstone — the lived experience of people."
For Buttigieg, an openly gay mayor, a red-state Democrat, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard graduate, the PAC is also an opportunity to bridge his executive experience with a growing national profile, while traveling to key states. In September, he will headline an annual fundraiser in Iowa, the Progress Iowa Corn Feed.
In today’s Democratic Party, with lines still drawn between names like Clinton and Sanders, establishment and grassroots, Buttigieg can be hard to place. He campaigned in the race for DNC chair as a candidate who knew how to win in red states and could offer a “fresh start” after a contentious primary. When asked about his ideological leanings, he often found a way to navigate around the question.
“When you step on the stage, people want to fix you onto a spectrum and find a box to put you in,” he said at the time. “I spent Thanksgiving in a deer blind with my boyfriend’s father. Identity buckets aren’t comfortable places for me to be in.”
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/2tTrNWb
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