Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  “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 jalapeños (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.)

  I’ll spare you the deeper nuances to this fair-food geography; the important thing is that Franklin County is in chicken territory, and the people there had been looking for a way to make the Canoe Festival more exciting that year. So they decided to get their community into the record books by filling a canoe with the most chicken ever placed into a single container. The previous world record was held by some KFC distributor in the Persian Gulf who had put twelve hundred pounds of chicken on a giant hummus plate a few years earlier.

  In the glint of the evening summer sun, we gathered near the county seat, Brookville, population 2,596. The atmosphere was somewhere between jolly and crazed. I met a Colonel Sanders impersonator who pointed out that the Colonel had actually been born in Indiana, not Kentucky. Signs saying things like MAKE CHICKEN NOT WAR and BEAT KUWAIT ringed the canoe, while people streamed in from every corner of town, bearing Styrofoam coolers full of fried chicken from restaurants and family kitchens. Eager to please, I tried to make myself useful by carrying a few coolers from a staging area to the boat, where the chicken was promptly dumped in. When the president of the Canoefest Fryers Club announced the official weight of the chicken—1,645 pounds—the applause heralded an authentically achieved moment in the life of the community. Then, of course, we ate it all.

  Some of the rural counties blurred together; others you can’t forget, like Crawford County, where a faithful intern and I pulled up to what we thought was the county courthouse in a town called English and found no one there at all. Nolan, the intern, was as confused as I was; after dutifully following the GPS device, we stepped out of my tungsten-green Taurus into steamy air and overgrown grass and looked, blinking, through the midday glare at the brick-and-cinder-block courthouse. The parking lot was empty. The building was locked and, on closer inspection, definitely abandoned. We looked for signs of life nearby, and found no one. Not only was the courthouse empty, but the whole town was literally deserted.

  It turns out that was the old courthouse, before a series of floods prompted the town council to relocate not just the courthouse but the entire town. Thus there was Old English and New English, and we were in the wrong English. By the time we sorted it out and got uphill to New English, we had missed our appointment with Jerry Brewer, the local Democratic chair who was supposed to meet me there.

  Crawford County being pretty small, the lady in the clerk’s office who saw me looking for him told me we could just call him at home. She dialed the phone on her desk and held out the handset for me to take as it rang. When he answered, he told me he wasn’t going to be able to leave his farm that day anyway, because the harvest was coming early and they had to pull up the corn as quickly as possible. Assuming this meant our meeting was canceled, I was about to say goodbye when he explained that we could still meet—as long as I didn’t mind taking the meeting in the cab of his tractor while we did a few rows of corn. So that’s where we met.

  In the middle of the field under an August sun, it felt in the air-conditioned cab like we were in some kind of vessel, gliding over the top of the corn as though sailing in an infinite sea of tasseled ears and husks. In front of us, the machinery calmly devoured six, maybe twelve rows at a time. At one point, we came to a sort of clearing in the vast cornfield and stopped to talk to the farmhand, a bearded, tattooed, burly man whose eyes looked somehow too young to belong to someone as bearded, tattooed, and burly as he was. He was fresh back from serving in Iraq, Jerry said, and was helping in the fields for the summer. We got out of the tractor while Jer
ry and his employee did something involving a trailer hitch that I did not fully understand, and then we were back on our way, leaving the young man doing whatever he was doing out there as we kept on a straight path along the rows toward the tree line in the distance.

  YOU CAN READ THE PROGRESS of the campaign calendar in the condition of the corn. After you announce and begin campaigning in the early spring, you drive between great squares of rich black soil, freshly turned up, with innocent two-leaf sprigs ornamenting the earth geometrically with dots of green. Then the stalks grow into fair and parade season, well past “knee-high by Fourth of July” if all goes well. When you can’t see over the top of the corn, such things as corn mazes become possible, and it’s almost back to school. Harvest means it’s right around Labor Day, and by now you also have at least a rough sense of what kind of year it’s going to be for your party.

  You’re in the home stretch when the harvest is over and you can again see across the fields over the tops of the chopped-off stalks. Rumbling through them in the passenger seat of Jeff’s hybrid Saturn SUV, I would think of the nineteenth century Hoosier dialect poet James Whitcomb Riley:

  The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still

  A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill.

  If it was too early or late to call someone, I might listen to Lyle Lovett’s “Up in Indiana” and thumb through news stories on my iPhone, seeing more and more evidence that this would not be a good year for Democrats in our state or anywhere else.

  Democratic members of Congress were still licking their wounds from the tongue-lashings they got in town halls across America over the summer of Tea Party rage, heaped with abuse from voters who had been led to believe that the health care bill amounted to red socialism, complete with “death panels” and all manner of evil. Conservatives were energized in ways not seen since the early Bill Clinton administration, and the makings of a wave were under way. This was not good news for me. In a state like ours, a down-ticket Democrat stood a chance of winning only under the best of circumstances, and these were clearly not going to be the best of circumstances.

  In the final days, the obscurity of our race added to a sense of doom. We had gotten some good press coverage, and my fundraising events and phone calls had even yielded enough money to do a few TV ads, rare for a campaign like this. But outside of party activists, organized auto workers, and public finance wonks, most voters had still never heard of me. On November 1, the day before the election, I woke early in South Bend and headed down to Indianapolis to campaign at an early-voting site, hoping to catch the occasional voter near their County-City Building. It was humbling, a reminder that campaigning for office often resembles nothing so much as your first experience handing out flyers for something. In 2008 there would have been a line around the block as Obama drew record-breaking numbers of early voters, but this November morning in 2010 felt like the sorriest, quietest Monday that plaza had ever seen. A lone intern joined me, having driven me down from South Bend, holding a MEET PETE sign duct-taped to a stake as I looked vainly for someone to shake hands with. At one point the police stopped by to make sure the two of us did not constitute an unauthorized demonstration.

  I perked up when one person came over and said he recognized me from my commercial, but then he explained that he was not able to vote because of his felony convictions. At one point there was no one at all to talk to but a man walking up and down the block in a sandwich board from Paddy’s Legal Beagle Pub advertising a $5.99 lunch “speacil.” Figuring he was a voter, I introduced myself, drawing breath and winding myself up for one more, “Hi, my name’s Pete, and I’m running for—”

  But he interrupted: “I’m not big on elections, I’m a monarchist myself.”

  I must have stared dumbly at him for a minute, so he clarified that he was awaiting the King of Kings, and therefore not particularly interested in the democratic process.

  The road home went through Kokomo, and past those big Chrysler and Delphi plants one more time. I stopped at the ITP2 for a last round of handshakes with the UAW guys before returning to headquarters in South Bend to work on two speeches, one for each outcome, and a bunch of thank-you notes that I would need either way. At seven in the evening, I excused myself to go to Saint James for the All Saints’ Day service, then headed back to the office, where my next-door neighbors had dropped off sandwiches for me and the small team. Finally there was nothing to do but go home and go to bed. At home, I asked myself in my journal: “Are we walking into a buzz saw, or does a phenomenal surprise await?”

  At least a buzz saw is quick. But Election Day itself is torture for candidates. You’ve made the arguments, raised the money, and shaken the hands, and there’s not much left to do but tell reporters you’re confident of victory and go make phone calls or knock on doors like everyone else. Other than that, you are powerless. In Indiana the polls close at six in the evening, a terrible policy when it comes to voter participation but a small mercy for candidates who find Election Days interminable.

  It didn’t take long after that for me to officially find out which one of my two prepared speeches I’d be giving. I had worked harder on the concession speech anyway. By eight p.m. it was clearly over, and I called my opponent to congratulate him. I offered my well-wishes and anything I could do to help the state. Mourdock was gracious, and I was exhausted. Together with volunteers around the state, dedicated interns, and a paid staff that peaked at three people, we had treated this race as though it were the tightest and most closely watched campaign in the country. I had crisscrossed the state for months, generated almost exclusively positive press coverage, made friends in every corner of Indiana, and raised more money than any candidate for this office had in years. And yet we had finished with less than 40 percent of the vote. Technically, I can claim that I led the Democratic downstate ticket, since I got slightly more votes than my running mates for secretary of state and state auditor. But that did little to take the edge off the fact that the very first time I put my name on a ballot for office, fully one million people had voted for the other guy.

  Taking the stage at the West Side Democratic Club in South Bend, I faced a hall full of friendly faces, festooned with campaign signs and banners. It was my chance to thank supporters for everything they had done to help. I had been clobbered and so had many other Democratic candidates that night, but the atmosphere was far from grim. Joe Donnelly, our member of Congress, had managed to survive the Republican wave—one of a tiny handful of endangered congressional Democrats to get reelected that night.

  After congratulating Joe and talking to everyone who was at the watch party, there suddenly nothing left to do. My team and I finished the night at Club 23, a dive bar named for its address on State Road 23. Unpretentious and friendly, it was the kind of place where your shoes would stick to the floor a little bit, a mostly dark and quiet space brightened by the orange pleather chairs, the dartboard, the pool table, and a few neon signs. Behind the bar, Mo (yes, Mo), the owner and bartender, presided with a sharp gaze and a tight grin. I planted myself at a stool, trying not to look at the TV mounted off to the side where the local news was reviewing the election results.

  “How’s it going?” Mo asked.

  “I lost.”

  “I know,” he answered, as he glanced at the TV and reached for the tap.

  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER BEATING ME, Mourdock got to work on his true objective: running for Senate in 2012. Using the treasurer’s office as a platform, he challenged the Republican incumbent, Dick Lugar. Lugar, a towering statesman who had had the misfortune of announcing his candidacy for president in 1995 on the same morning as the Oklahoma City bombing, was a moderate best known for brokering strategic nuclear arms reduction treaties with the post-Soviet countries in the aftermath of the Cold War. Helped by his far-right credentials and loyal Tea Party base, Mourdock won the primary, ending Lugar’s thirty-six years of Senate service.

  In the general
election Mourdock faced Donnelly, who had entered the Senate race after his House district got redrawn unfavorably by the now very Republican state legislature. During the final debate in the last days of the election, Mourdock made another national splash—this time by saying he believed pregnancies resulting from rape were an expression of the will of God. An outcry followed and national Republicans distanced themselves from him, allowing Donnelly to beat the odds and win the seat.

  We didn’t know any of that would happen on that November night in 2010, but I did know better than to feel bitter or pessimistic. Buoyed by the support of friends and strangers, I had learned how to leave a comfortable world to take a big risk in defense of the people and ideas I cared about. Even in total defeat, I was proud of the campaign and the people who had been part of it. Old friends had dug deep to send donations. The nine- and eleven-year-old children of the Montgomery County party chair had marched at my side in countless parades, distributing flyers and toting the MEET PETE sign, expecting no reward beyond a visit to Dairy Queen later. My neighbors in the union hall had become friends and allies. Everyone who had been involved became a new kind of community, one that I knew I would be able to turn to in the future. Most of all, I had received a priceless if humbling course of education, a fitting conclusion to a decade of learning.