South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Wednesday evening discussed his new book before a sold-out audience at Scripps College in Claremont.
“Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future” combines Buttigieg’s story of being an Afghanistan veteran who came out as gay and found love and acceptance, all while in office, and the transformation of South Bend from a Rust Belt city to a technology center.
The book made its debut on the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list this week at No. 9.
Peter Sagal, host of the National Public Radio game show, “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me,” called “Shortest Way Home” “the most well-written, honest, and genuine campaign biography” since Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.”
This visit to Southern California is Buttigieg’s first since his Jan. 23 announcement that he has formed an exploratory committee for a possible presidential campaign.
“The show in Washington right now is exhausting — the corruption, the fighting, the lying, the crisis, it’s got to end,” Buttigieg said in a video announcing the committee’s formation, which was released four days after his 37th birthday.
“The reality is there is no going back. There’s no such thing as again in the real world. We can’t look for greatness in the past. Right now, our country needs a fresh start.”
Buttigieg has not officially announced his candidacy because “he is not a household name, like many of the Democrats looking at the 2020 race, so he’s testing the waters in the truest sense of the term,” his communications adviser Lis Smith told City News Service.
“He’s exploring how his message of generational change is resonating, as well as his ability to build a national campaign,” Smith said. “All the signs have been very promising since he announced his exploratory committee.”
Buttigieg will be doing “a number of meetings for fundraising and political purposes” while in Southern California and “a few media interviews,” including for the Pod Save America podcast, which will be released Friday, Smith said.
After leaving Southern California, Buttigieg will make return trips to Iowa, site of the nation’s first caucuses, and New Hampshire, the site of the first primary, Smith said.
Buttigieg was elected in 2011 when he was 29 and re-elected in 2015 as mayor of South Bend, which has a population of about 102,000 and is best known as the home of Notre Dame University.
During his first four-year term, Buttigieg introduced the “1000 Homes in 1000 Days” initiative, which demolished or repaired abandoned homes throughout the city. Projects during his second term include a “Smart Streets” initiative to create safer, more appealing streets while creating a more vibrant downtown and record spending on parks and trails.
Buttigieg was born and raised in South Bend, received a degree in history and literature from Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar, receiving a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford.
He was an officer in U.S. Navy Reserve from 2009-17, taking a leave of absence as mayor in 2014 to serve a seven-month deployment to Afghanistan, receiving the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his counterterrorism work.
If elected, Buttigieg would be the nation’s first openly gay president; the youngest — breaking the record of Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when he succeeded the assassinated William McKinley in 1901; and the first born in the 1980s.