As a single person, I had lived simply during my time at McKinsey, and had saved enough to get me through one year. So, other than Navy Reserve drill weekends, I was a full-time candidate for most of 2010. Jeff and I set up a simple office in the basement of the Building Trades Union Hall in South Bend, next door to the Insulators and across from the Painters. Like my high school, the interior of the place had a distinct feel of the 1950s—dark brown tile on the floor and what looked like asbestos panels on the ceiling. It was also functional, close to home, and filled with likeable and jocular labor organizers—and the price was right. We moved in and got to work.
As with any other job, there is no better way to learn political candidacy than by doing it. An introvert by nature, I slowly became comfortable with the outgoing disciplines of campaigning. Each day brought a new lesson. Up at dawn to shake hands at a manufacturing plant gate when the shift changed, you learned that the people coming into work were a much better audience than the ones who were leaving, tired and ready to go home. Crossing the state in a hurry to get from a parade in one county to a lunchtime function in another, you learned that car time can and should also be call time, your best chance to reach potential donors and allies during the day. Watching faces rise and fall during a dinnertime speech to, say, the Dearborn County Democratic Party at an Elks Lodge, you learned which stories would resonate where, how long to make your speech, when you had an audience in your hands, and when you were about to lose them. Sticking out your hand to introduce yourself to a stranger enjoying his pork tenderloin at a county fair, you learned that it was a lot better to start a conversation by asking about his goals than launching right into yours.
The call time was the hardest. It meant reaching out to everyone you had ever known to ask if they would send you money. You have two minutes’ small talk, a quick windup about the state of the race, and the inevitable hard ask: “Sooo, I was hoping I could count on you for a two-hundred-fifty-dollar contribution.” Eventually I came to prefer calling strangers to calling acquaintances, since they took less time to realize why you were calling and were more comfortable giving a yes or a no. I spent hours on this daily, and often wonder if most Americans realize this is how many elected officials spend most of their time. It’s not unusual for a member of Congress to spend twenty hours a week doing this, and you have to wonder whether, like spending too much time typing or sunbathing, it does something unhealthy to you over the long run. In the car or at a desk in headquarters, I would go through page after page of calls that our finance director had prepared for me, based on lists of people who had a history of giving to Democrats. And just when I was losing hope, after an hour spent leaving ten voice mails that I knew would never get returned and having three conversations that all ended in “Okay, let me think about it” or “I’d have to talk to my wife,” someone would actually help.
“Is this Charles?”
“Yeah, I go by Charlie, but yeah.”
“Well, my name’s Pete Buttigieg, and I’m running for state treasurer. Have you followed the race much?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, well, I’m the Democratic candidate, and we’re putting together a campaign to stand up for a better way to handle our state’s finances. Did you know that the Republican incumbent—”
“I’m actually a Republican.”
“Oh. Um . . .”
“But all my friends are Democrats. John says you’re a good guy, so I’ll write you a check.”
I think, Really? but I say, “That’s great, here’s the address. . . .”
In fact, more strangers said yes than I’d have expected, and friends were extraordinarily supportive once I got over the awkwardness of asking for their help. And as with everything else, I got better at it with practice.
Compared to fundraising, retail politics was a simple pleasure. Indiana has ninety-two counties, and we visited nearly all of them. A typical Saturday that summer would involve three or so parades, perhaps a county fair or two mixed in, and one or more appearances at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner, each event usually at least an hour’s drive from the next.
The Jefferson-Jackson dinners, or “JJ’s,” were the central ritual of campaigning within the party. (A decade later, Democratic organizations would reconsider naming their annual events after these two morally problematic men, but that trend is only now penetrating throughout Indiana.) Jeff and I would appear at the Elks Lodge, Legion Hall, community center, or, in the very biggest counties, a hotel ballroom. If I was lucky, a county chair would recognize me and show me in, but usually I started at the check-in table, where a volunteer asked my name and then furrowed her eyebrows, studying a printed list as she tried to figure out how to spell my name without asking me again to say it. I’d buy a few tear-off tickets for the fifty-fifty raffle, go into the hall with the tables, and introduce myself to every single person. The faces would be skeptical but polite, and eventually we would all settle in over chicken and beans as the program began: the pledge, the prayer, and the speeches. The custom of working your way up to the most distinguished speaker is often reversed at a rural JJ dinner: if a congressman was present, he would usually go first, so he could leave for another event. The down-ticket statewide races typically came late in the program, somewhere after the state representatives and before the auction.
I could write a book just about the food we ate. A street fair comes to mind, one summer night in Evansville, a city about the size of South Bend but on the opposite end of the state, across the river from Kentucky. At the unforgettable West Side Nut Club Fall Festival, I was met with a mostly delicious range of offerings that amounted to a cardiological nightmare. That night in my journal I copied just a portion of the “C” section of a two-page guide in six-point font that spelled out, alphabetically, all the sins available by booth: “Caramel Puffs, Catfish Filet Sandwich, Catfish Nuggets, Chai Tea, Cheese Balls, Cheese Soup, Cheese Sticks, Cheese Quesadillas, Cheeseburgers (about a dozen booths listed for this one), Cheesecake, Cheesecake on a Stick, Cheesey Fries . . .” Walking among the booths, I don’t remember seeing any Chai Tea, but there was certainly an abundance of cheese. I somehow avoided the featured delicacy that year, Deep Fried Turkey Testicles, as well as the festival’s well-known tradition of brain sandwiches. But you have to eat something, and I ended up sampling candied jalape?os (of which the guy from the church selling them said, “All I can tell you is they’ve been in this here jar since the last festival a year ago”), and something called Pig in the Mud, which is a sort of peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwich covered in powdered sugar.
That summer I played a small part in setting a world record: most fried chicken ever prepared in a single serving. A little geographic background is in order. There is an invisible line that goes on a northeasterly slant across the northern third of our state. North of it, the preferred fair food is pork burgers; south, it’s chicken. Cross another line into the southern third of the state and the fare is typically schnitzel, only you call it pork tenderloin. (If you are going to use ethnic meat names, you’d better know what you’re doing—once in South Bend, I saw a visiting politician from a German-settled downstate city take the mic at a sausage-intensive Polish festival and make the mistake of praising the “bratwurst” instead of the “kielbasa,” and the air went out of the room for a second.)