THROUGHOUT THE PREVIOUS DECADE, the fate of South Bend had already been a constant topic whenever I was with people I had grown up with, inside or outside the city limits. Most of my friends had left if they had the opportunity—heading to Chicago, Indianapolis, or New York for a good job and a more appealing lifestyle—and those who stayed were restless. We would often gather over beer when we returned home for the holidays, swapping stories and news from mutual friends at Club 23 or the South Bend Chocolate Café. Inevitably, conversation would turn to the question of how South Bend could get moving again: What would it take for there to be more good jobs, and more places to hang out here? Did a city like South Bend have a future?
The sentiment wasn’t just generational. Many people older than my parents sensed a need for our city to get its groove back with youthful leadership. “What our city suffers from is a lack of imagination,” my mother would say from time to time. A retired business leader and a professor teamed up to put the sense of malaise into numbers, issuing a report called “Benchmarking South Bend” that showed numerically how South Bend was falling behind our peers on all the key economic measures that determined growth.
In the business community, the discomfort showed signs of ripening into rebellion. As 2010 drew to a close and the 2011 mayoral election approached, there had been rumblings of recruiting someone to challenge the mayor, though it wasn’t obvious who that challenger would be. One prominent attorney organized a major fundraiser for Henry Davis, Jr., an outspoken administration critic on the city council. It was a signal that Henry might be readying for a challenge to Mayor Steve Luecke from within the Democratic Party, but most doubted that he was ready for prime time. Others began to call me, but I was not inclined to blame the mayor for our city’s problems, and I was already running for a different office—state treasurer. But the latter excuse died with my campaign on November 2, 2010, and then the conversations changed.
IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS after I was defeated, there was plenty to think about besides my near-term professional future. I had a thousand-page-high pile of thank-you letters to sign, a campaign headquarters to clean out, and a lot of grateful phone calls to make, not to mention a personal need to recover from the total exhaustion of a year’s statewide campaigning. Running for a down-ticket statewide office entails the same geographic scope as running for governor or U.S. Senate but with a tiny fraction of the resources. Joining the Navy Reserve had compelled me to get into the best physical shape of my life, and the campaign had still all but burned me out.
But signing one thank-you letter after the other, calling everyone who had lent a hand, and carting lawn signs and boxes out of the office was quicker work than I had thought—even the sleep deficit didn’t need long to take care of. And then there was the inescapable question of what to do next. It might be possible to go back to the Firm, but I knew by then that consulting was not for me in the long run. I could try to take up active duty orders with the Navy, but I was still only an ensign in the Reserve, relatively early in my training and unlikely to be found useful enough to deploy for at least a couple more years.
Meanwhile, talk around town focused on a handful of prospective candidates for mayor—including me. The filing deadline wouldn’t be for a couple of months and so I didn’t feel much pressure to look into it too quickly, until the doorbell rang one day while I was puttering around the messy domain of my dining room, sorting through piles of mail I had ignored while campaigning. I opened the door and stood on the porch blinking for a moment as I faced a TV camera and a local reporter clutching a wand microphone, wanting to know if I was planning to run. I don’t remember exactly how I said no, but hopefully it was polite.
In all honesty, it’s not like it hadn’t crossed my mind. I was one of those impatient millennial products of South Bend who cared about the city and wanted it to do more. But Mayor Luecke had not decided if he was going to run again—and, while I shared the general sense of impatience, I was unsure how much of the city’s malaise ought to be laid at his feet. In fact, I liked him a great deal. Tall, pastoral, and infinitely gentle, he had in his fifteen years as mayor held the city together through a punishing recession, keeping its finances afloat even through state-mandated property tax cuts that had forced savage cuts in the local budget. Business leaders were impatient, but under the circumstances, any one of the developments that did take place was miraculous. At the very least, he had earned the opportunity to decide whether to seek another term before others came rushing onto the scene.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t just tired—I was also getting near the bottom of my savings account. I had health insurance and a little income from Reserve duty, but that came to about $400 a month, just shy of enough to cover my mortgage—and half of that seemed to go to military expenses like uniforms and gas money for getting to my monthly drill duty at Great Lakes, Illinois. Another campaign would wipe out what cash I had left and leave me reliant on credit card debt to keep going.
But I also felt strongly about how the city could be run differently. Well trained at the Firm in performance management and economic development, I could envision an administration that ran on business principles without abandoning its public character. I felt that I understood our city’s problems, not just as a resident but also as a professional; the overlap and balkanization of our city’s economic development efforts reminded me of what I had seen on my trips to Afghanistan as a consultant dealing with the bewildering array of development agencies on the ground there. I couldn’t yet picture myself as mayor, but I could picture how the city might run differently if I were in charge.
Meanwhile, people I respected wanted me to look at it—and not just young people. It was one thing for a high school friend to prod me about it over a beer (though some of them, like Mike Schmuhl, had become accomplished political staffers and their words carried weight). But there were also people who had noticed me during my statewide run, people like John Stancati, a compact, energetic man old enough to be my grandfather who had once run the South Bend Water Works, and who asked me to get breakfast with him before I had even lost the treasurer race so he could urge me to run. I’d have thought the old-timers would be content to work through the party machinery, but they seemed as eager as the rest of us to see something completely different.
So I became a regular in the Main Street Coffee House, a drafty corner hangout where I could ask different figures around the community what they thought, one cup of coffee at a time. In between camped-out students and businesspeople having meetings, I sat listening to anyone who would give me time—the redevelopment commission president, the head of the local community foundation, the most respected black pastors on the West Side—to see what they thought of the city’s future, and to gauge what they might think of me.
I sought out former Mayor and Governor Joe Kernan, who still lived in town and had taken a liking to me during my doomed run for treasurer, perhaps out of affection for me as a fellow Navy man. If I were a serious contender for a job like mayor, I should be able to look a former mayor in the eye and tell him I was thinking about it—and his reaction would tell me a lot about whether my candidacy might be taken seriously. I asked him to lunch, and he agreed to meet me at Joe’s Tavern, a smoky neighborhood dive bar on the West Side not far from the minor-league baseball stadium.