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A Fresh Start for South Bend
Ten weeks after my statewide political defeat, on January 21, 2011, Newsweek ran a story called “America’s Dying Cities.” The authors analyzed demographic data, especially declines in the population of young people, to arrive at the conclusion that ten communities in particular epitomized urban decay and were on their way out. Most were in the Midwest; South Bend was number eight. The short commentary concluded with this: “What is particularly troubling for this small city is that the number of young people declined by 2.5% during the previous decade, casting further doubt on whether this city will ever be able to recover.” I had just turned twenty-nine.
South Bend reacted intensely. A Facebook thread from the time captured the range of opinion. “Doesn’t surprise me a bit,” one resident said, summing up a general pessimism among many who had seen employers, jobs, and stores disappear. “The demographic, the workforce, even the economy is all going downhill,” said another. But in the comments and coverage of the time, you could also see the stirrings of a resistance to the doom-and-gloom narrative—especially among young people. On the same thread, a classmate of mine commented: “If you live here, quit complaining and do something to fix this town.”
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.
Governor Kernan is a picky eater. He likes green peppers on his pizza, but prefers to add them himself at the last minute, so their moisture doesn’t make it soggy. (“It droops, Pete,” he once explained, holding up a slice to demonstrate and staring intently yet warmly at me from under his thick white eyebrows.) The governor also does not care for pumpkin, for the understandable reason that he ate little else during his eleven months as a POW in Vietnam.
Now he was retired from politics, but his name was inseparable from South Bend. He’d been city controller, then got elected mayor in 1987, before being offered a slot as Frank O’Bannon’s running mate when O’Bannon ran for governor in 1996. Loving the job of mayor, he first refused the offer but then reluctantly accepted, and then won. In his second term as lieutenant governor, Joe faced a decision about whether to run for governor himself. He weighed the decision with friends, family, and allies, before making his decision: he would not run. Party faithful were shocked, since he was expected to be a shoo-in for the nomination if he wanted it. But he and his wife, Maggie, were ready to go back to life in South Bend. Throughout 2003, other candidates began preparing to run the following year, raising money and competing for endorsements.
Then a death changed his plans. While visiting a trade conference in Chicago in September of 2003, Governor Frank O’Bannon suffered a massive stroke, and died a few days later. Unexpectedly and immediately, Kernan went from being a lieutenant governor, preparing to retire from politics, to a sitting governor called to lead the state in the wake of a tragedy. And serving as governor changed his outlook. It was no longer a decision about whether to compete for an open seat; it was a reelection, and he decided to run and seek a full term. But he had missed crucial time to build up a campaign organization, while the Republican Party had been rallying around Mitch Daniels, a former White House official and a senior executive at Eli Lilly and Company, perhaps the most influential firm in the state. Daniels defeated him soundly.
Maybe this history explains why, after I worked up the nerve to ask him whether he thought it made sense for me to run for mayor, he stared at his basket of french fries in silence for several seconds before taking a breath and saying, “So much, in politics, is outside of your control.”
He didn’t tell me I should or shouldn’t, but described his love of the city and of the job. In fact, he said, “It’s the best job I ever had.” That was impressive, coming from someone who not only had held the top job in state government, but also went on to live out the boyhood fantasy of being president of his hometown baseball team. After his defeat, Joe had organized the purchase and rescue of the floundering single-A South Bend Silver Hawks, and divided his time between presiding in a memorabilia-filled office at the stadium, teaching a course on leadership in a seminar room under the Golden Dome, and traveling the world with Maggie and his Notre Dame Class of ’68 golfing buddies. It seemed like a pretty good life to me. Yet even now he looked on his days as mayor—not governor or lieutenant governor or baseball team owner or naval aviator—as the best job he’d ever had.
Lunch by lunch, coffee by coffee, I gathered advice around town—and began to realize that my own certainty about a run was growing. My friend Mike Schmuhl, architect of Joe Donnelly’s unlikely 2010 reelection, promised to run my campaign if I decided to go for it, and many of the community leaders I respected most were offering not only to support me if I ran but also to help raise enough money to get me started.
All eyes were on the incumbent, the longest-serving mayor in history. Steve Luecke had taken over for Joe when he became lieutenant governor in 1997, and Joe himself had been our city’s longest-ever serving mayor at that time—which meant the city hadn’t seen an open seat for mayor in twenty-four years. The small-city rumor mill had Mayor Steve announcing his intentions by Thanksgiving, but the holiday came and went with no word. Finally, on December 8, local TV stations showed him standing by the flags in the mayor’s office, flanked by tearful staff, announcing that he would not seek another term. The seat was open; the race was on.
By this point there were two credible candidates in the Democratic primary, neither of whom was me. Easygoing and relatively young himself, Ryan Dvorak had been a state representative since 2002, when he was in his late twenties. His father, Mike Dvorak, had held the same state house seat for sixteen years before Ryan, and was now the county prosecutor. The Dvoraks were almost a political party unto themselves, operating phone banks for fellow Democrats from a stand-alone headquarters separate from the party office. Thanks to his statehouse career, Ryan had the support of some labor groups, and a healthy campaign account. Lobbyists with business in Indianapolis were reluctant to cross him, as were lawyers in the area who wanted to stay in his father’s good graces. But many in the community were skeptical that he was the right choice for mayor. Some viewed him as a bit too partisan, while others remembered with displeasure his father’s legislation to prevent South Bend from annexing the suburbs around it, a bill that was popular in the unincorporated community of Granger but perceived as anti-city by South Bend residents. Awkwardly, Ryan lived on my block, and the back of his house faced that of my parents, so we crossed paths even more than normal as I explored a run.
Ryan’s rival for the nomination would be Mike Hamann. With salt-and-pepper hair combed in a sensible part, he looked like the coach and family man that he was. A well-liked teacher at Saint Joe High, Mike had been county commissioner as a Republican, then switched to the Democratic Party and was now on the county council. Like Ryan, he had the benefit of an enormous Catholic family—not only his own kids, but, by marriage, the well-liked Murphy family, which seemed to be one degree of separation from just about everyone in town. More conservative than Ryan, he was especially appreciated in pro-life Democratic circles, and he was the choice of the local Democratic Party chairman, Butch Morgan.
Asked to describe his opinion of a troublesome politician, Butch once said, “If I ever write a book, he’s going to be a chapter.” Butch would rate his own political biography, if someone wanted to write about how politics worked in South Bend when I was growing up. He once wielded influence in our county in the tradition of the urban Midwestern party boss, an enormous man with a baby face behind huge aviator glasses who more or less personally directed all aspects of the local party (except for the rebellious Dvorak wing) for years. From behind a desk heaped with walk sheets, clipboards, tote bags, chocolate wrappers, flyers, and campaign swag, he ran things mostly through the old touch-tone phone on his desk. If you went to see him in his office, he would receive and place several phone calls during the meeting, without breaking his train of thought. If someone’s name came up in conversation, he would call them on speakerphone for a ninety-second conversation, as if he were hollering to them in the next room. If his phone rang, he would take the call, give some instructions, hang up, and resume midsentence. An embodiment of the old school, he had lately taken to using email as well, but typed laboriously, with one finger, this, too, in the middle of a conversation. He was known sometimes to sleep on a couch by the phone bank; politics was his life.
Butch was deeply religious, and had become a teetotaler at some point long before we met. (“If I could get rid of three things in this world,” he once said to me, “it would be alcohol, abortion, and racism.”) He specialized in retail politics of the sort that had driven local officeholders for years—chicken and spaghetti dinners, lawn signs an
d nail files bearing candidates’ names, parade entries, and puckish charm. His shtick on being introduced to someone for the first time had become a well-worn routine:
YOU: “Hi, I’m so-and-so, nice to meet you.”
BUTCH: “Do I owe you money?”
YOU: “Um, no?”
BUTCH: “Then I’m very glad to meet you, too!”
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.
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