When he showed up at an event, his face was usually obscured behind an enormous gift basket he was bearing from the South Bend Chocolate Company to be auctioned off or given out as a door prize. He was so unassuming, genially disheveled, and absorbed in old-fashioned retail politics that it was easy to underestimate him. But, while closely managing the local politics around him (he seemed obsessed with getting the right candidate for County Council District H), he was also one of the most powerful figures on the Indiana State Central Committee, close with most of the state’s top Democratic officials.
Butch was also capable of various kinds of political mischief in order to get the outcomes he wanted. When a candidate named Cheri Schuster ran against Phil Dotson for county recorder without the blessing of the machine, Butch persuaded a loyal party volunteer with the surname of Schafer to enter the race as well. She conducted no campaign activities, but the names were similar enough that voters were confused about whether they had meant to vote for Schafer or Schuster, splitting Cheri’s support and helping ensure victory for Phil.
Butch had been very encouraging during my race for treasurer. But now, from behind his heaped desk, Butch affably made it clear that he was not going to support me for mayor if I got in. “I’m concerned about your age,” he began, before ticking off a number of other reasons why he didn’t think I was the right pick. And Butch had done his homework on the local landscape to see where I might get support. At one point, I mistakenly told him I had a shot at earning the backing of Karl King, the influential coauthor of the “Benchmarking South Bend” study, whom I had come to think of as a mentor. Butch called Karl on the spot, on that indestructible speakerphone, and got Karl to make it clear he was backing Hamann, while I looked on awkwardly. Not that I had expected Butch to weigh in for me—I had gone to see him more as a courtesy than as an attempt to win his support—but it was clear as I left headquarters that we would have to outmaneuver the party in order to win.
At least I knew the Schuster/Schafer trick wouldn’t work on me. With a name like Buttigieg, I’d be hard to miss on the ballot. I figured the name might even help me. Needless to say, the Maltese vote was sparse: I knew of four total Maltese-American voters in South Bend, including my dad and myself. But an unpronounceable, ethnically ambiguous name is practically an asset in northern Indiana politics. Depending on their own background, people could assume it was Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Czech, or Belgian—all of which carried their own tribal loyalties in the area. The roster of local elected candidates around here is like a tour of Eastern Europe: Niezgodski, Zakas, Kovach, Wesolowski. For every black, German, or Irish candidate with a name like Morton, Davis, Dieter, Bauer, or O’Brien, there was a Kubsch, Kruczynski, Kostielney, or Grzegorek. Most illustrative of all was the former County Councilman Randy Przybysz, pronounced something like “sheepish” and spelled without the involvement of a single vowel.
THE STAKES OF RUNNING FOR MAYOR of my hometown would be a lot higher than they had been in a long-shot race for a state office few had heard of. Lose once in an uphill race your first time out of the gate, and you can still impress people by running respectably. Lose twice in less than a year, and you’re probably done with politics, at least for a while. But this was home. I cared about this race even more than I had cared about Chrysler when I challenged Mourdock.
The reason to run—the ideal reason to seek any job—was clear: the city’s needs matched what I had to offer. The city was fearful of losing its educated youth, and I was a young person who had chosen to come home and could encourage others to do the same. Its politics were mired in the struggle between two factions of the Democratic Party, each with its own candidate in the race; I belonged to no faction, and could arrive without strings attached. And as the administration struggled to generate economic growth and maintain confidence in the business community, I had a professional background in economic development and was fluent in the language of business—even while having fought and bled politically for organized labor in the auto industry. This didn’t just feel like an opportunity; it felt like a calling.
It would come down to whether that match looked as clear to the voters as it did to me. Once again, I began to go through the motions of laying groundwork for a campaign. I enlisted Mike to organize a team, and he started recruiting local talent and colleagues from his last campaign. We got a booster of my potential run to donate some office space that he owned. I signed the paperwork to set up a new committee, and bought a couple new dress shirts. On Saturday, January 29, 2011, about a week after that Newsweek article said South Bend was dying, I officially announced that I was a candidate for mayor.
SATURDAY MORNINGS IN JANUARY in South Bend don’t exactly invite you to leave the house, and my campaign staff of three was not sure how many people would materialize for our campaign announcement in the empty downtown storefront, next door to a small Thai restaurant, that would be our headquarters. With neither the Dvorak family nor the local party organization behind us, it was vital that we pack the room in order to show this was kicking off as a serious campaign. Luckily, the phone calls and cups of coffee over the preceding weeks had paid off. By the time I took the podium, the windows facing Main Street were fogged up with the breath of over a hundred supporters.
Standing behind the podium in the better of the two suits I owned, I gave a speech that ran headlong into the issues surrounding the campaign. I opened by talking about that “dying cities” article, saying, “This is not an occasion for denial, it is a call to action.” I took up the age issue, too, reminding the audience that our city was founded by a thirty-three-year-old fur trader named Pierre Navarre and that the University of Notre Dame was the creation of a twenty-eight-year-old frontier priest, Father Edward Sorin. I promised to grow jobs by simplifying business process, to set up a 311 line for customer service, and to deal with the hundreds of boarded-up vacant homes in our neighborhoods. As soon as the speech was over, volunteers settled into folding chairs at plastic tables to hit the phones, and I went out to trudge up snow-covered porch steps to knock on doors, just as we had in Iowa three years earlier. This time the campaign was for the future of my hometown, and the name on the flyers and buttons was my own.