There is a photo from that spring of 2013 showing me with Mike and Karen Pence in the M.R. Falcons club on the West Side of South Bend. The M.R.’s (not to be confused with the Z.B. Falcons on the Far West Side), is one of those old-fashioned social halls and civic associations that long revolved around working-class civic commitment, neighborhood ties, and Polish identity—hence a major stop for the Dyngus Day experience. Though Dyngus Day, as I described earlier, has traditionally been a Democratic-focused affair, more Republicans have realized its value for mixing it up with regular voters. Responding to my invitation to come to town anytime, the new governor and first lady had decided to experience the sausage, cabbage, and camaraderie firsthand.
Unfortunately, his office was less responsive to my advice on exactly when to come during the day’s festivities. Local politicians know from experience that it is best to conduct their Dyngus Day activities as early as possible, since the beer, music, and sausage are already going strong at daybreak, and things only get more, well, festive over the course of the day. The Pences turned up in midafternoon, pretty much the peak of the day’s eating—and drinking.
In the photo, I have my arm around the governor as if he were an old friend. I certainly sought to be a friendly host, but the main reason my hand was at his back was that I was trying urgently to get him out of that room. Not only were the revelers into their revelry, but worse, his detail had dropped him off at the entrance that led to the bar full of some of our younger citizens taking advantage of beer specials, as opposed to the larger room containing the more elderly and sedate visitors enjoying their kielbasa and noodles.
Retail politics is never fun among the intoxicated. If a voter who doesn’t like you has had a lot to drink, you get an earful. It’s even worse if a voter who does like you has been drinking. The handshakes last way too long, they begin repeating themselves, and it takes a well-practiced art to get away from them and move on to talk to someone else—which is futile anyway, since the same person will find you later and try to have the same conversation. So my immediate concern was to get the governor and first lady out of the bar and into the dining room before they regretted coming altogether; my arm was around him in order to push him, as quickly as a mayor politely could, into the other room.
I don’t know if it was because of that visit or in spite of it, but the governor seemed to remain determined to be a friend to South Bend. His office was always open to me, and he often appeared in our area for factory tours, ribbon cuttings, and other events, always with something good to say about our city. He even appointed Jim Schellinger, a well-known Democrat and architect originally from South Bend, to chair the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Most helpfully, Pence championed a visionary economic development effort called the Regional Cities Initiative, which helped change how we position our cities for growth.
The basic idea behind Regional Cities was that economic development is no longer just a game of luring factories—what some call “smokestack chasing”—from other locations, using tax incentives essentially to buy jobs. Instead, at a time when many people first choose where they want to live and then start looking for a job, it makes sense to recruit people, not just employers. The best way to do that is to enhance the appeal of the community, often called “quality of place,” and the initiative’s focus was on supporting projects that would do just that.
The other main idea of the Regional Cities program was that communities in the same area should work together. For years, cities and towns would view their immediate neighbors as economic rivals, trying to lure jobs across a city limit or county line. But since many workers commute across these boundaries anyway, it does no good to add jobs at the expense of the next town over. If South Bend focused on picking off employers from nearby Elkhart, it wouldn’t matter much to the regional economy. Using tax incentives to achieve this would simply give away revenue while rearranging economic value within the same area.
Sensibly, some metro areas have entered into economic nonaggression pacts, in which each city promises not to use incentives to lure employers away from its neighbors. But true regional collaboration— proactively working with other cities by sharing resources to grow the economy—was still rare in Indiana. To incentivize better behavior, the state offered a major grant for local economic development work, not to a city but to a region. In order to compete with the funding, all the counties and cities in an area would have to band together, show they could collaborate, and submit a joint application showing how they would share the funds.
We competed for the grant, and won a $42 million package of state matching funds to help with projects in our area that ranged from accelerating the electric train to Chicago, to enhancing parks and trails along the river. I viewed it as a great policy by the state—not just because we were happy to have the funding, but because the focus on regionalism and “quality of place” helped improve the habits of local leaders and economic development players.
One spring day in 2016, I attended a press event in a former Studebaker factory being renovated into a technology center, with help from the state program. Inside a vast, empty space with high brick walls and broken windows, civic and business leaders gathered around the dream of a different economy, perhaps even a “Silicon Prairie” of data centers in our part of the Midwest. I described the governor’s signature program as “visionary” and thanked him for the work he had done to make it happen. After I returned to my seat, Pence rose and spoke generously about me and our city: “South Bend, Indiana, is so blessed to have an energetic, innovative, forward-looking, creative mayor in Pete Buttigieg.”
There was plenty to disagree on, as with Mitch Daniels, but once again I hoped that we could stick to common ground. While I objected to Pence’s handling of early childhood education funding, labor policy, refugee resettlement, and several other issues, I saw other opportunities to work together on promoting growth. If Mike Pence had kept his primary focus on economic development, our mutual desire to work across the aisle could have anchored a bipartisan friendship that might continue to this day. Then again, if he had stuck with economics, he would probably still be governor—and would never have become vice president.
BY THE TIME PENCE CAME to our area to celebrate the Regional Cities funding, working with him had become, for me, a demanding exercise in compartmentalization. I knew that he held the keys to economic policies that would advance our city’s interests and our region’s growth. But he had also revealed himself to be gripped by hard-right social ideology in ways that would make even my old rival, Richard Mourdock, look moderate. It was part of my job to work well with anyone who could help the city. But Pence’s fanaticism was hard to overlook, knowing how it had impacted me as a mayor—and as a person.