Shortest Way Home — Book Review & Quotes
Review
I, like a lot of people, was struck by Pete Buttigieg’s demeanor during his SXSW Town Hall. More than anything, what I saw was someone not that far off from me in terms of his stage in life. The route he took, while drastically more impressive, is not too dissimilar from a lot of people I know my own age (hold the 29-year old Mayor-ship).
I read this book because I wanted to hear his story. While the story didn’t disappoint at all, another facet of criticism was left unaddressed, and that’s a lack of specific policy outlines. I don’t completely know where Buttigieg stands on a lot of key issues, several of which always make it difficult for me to vote for a Democrat. One takeaway that he mentions in the book and has mentioned repeatedly on the campaign trail is the idea that the office of president can not only be for leading in policy, but setting a national narrative or tone. What feels like is happening is Buttigieg is more focused on the latter, setting that tone. In an ocean of policy players, he’ll probably stand out better that way.
Beyond the lack of meat and potatoes when it comes to policy, Buttigieg is a talented story teller and able to paint a pretty stellar picture of standards and experience out of fairly mundane life events.
Highlighted Quotes From The Book
“But in the horror of that sunny Tuesday, [on September 11th 2001,] all we could make out was the onset of a major shift. I remember thinking that suddenly our generation’s project had been abruptly reassigned — that yesterday we had been absorbed in Clinton-era concerns around globalization, the distribution of wealth, and the consequences of technology, but now we were being plunged into a different realm, dominated by things like warfare and terrorism.”
“Today, it has come full circle; we see how often war and terrorism are driven by the dynamics of globalization, the distribution of wealth, and the consequences of technology. Like laws of physics, these forces were animating our affairs all along.”
“Like Mark Peterson, another experienced local reporter, he has a way of looking at you as if you are about to say something very interesting and important, which of course makes you want to oblige, rather than stick to your talking points.”
“But the more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.”
“I had begun to wonder what it would be like to be involved in public service directly, instead of reading or watching movies about it. Could political action be a calling, not just the stuff of dinner table talk?”
“The basic premise still holds: that candidates for office can easily develop “an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power.’”
“By junior year, hearing the same sort of thing, you would have matured enough to realize you were the recipient of a kindness, the treatment that is instinctual to a politician who knows that you will be best to work with if you have first been made to feel good about yourself.”
“Doing History and Literature together meant that I could also study pretty much anything that had a past — ideas, politics, foreign countries, and global affairs.”
“Until then, I had considered the Puritan years to be the most boring period in all of American history, full of dour and interminable sermons by the likes of Cotton Mather. But to Bercovitch, the Puritans were the key to American identity. His seminal book The American Jeremiad described a distinctly American form of rhetoric that goes back to Puritan sermons and persists in our culture even now: a way of castigating society for failing to live up to its sacred covenant, while reinforcing the sense of promise in what we could become.”
“As people were still being pulled out of the rubble and grief provoked us to say things like “We will never be the same,” America felt more decent in mourning. Articles were written about the death of irony, and for a moment it felt as if the vengeful return of history would give us all the seriousness of historians, grappling with the complex forces that had brought us to this point. We seemed, for those few days, not just wounded but morally aware.”
“The top priority of the terrorist — even more important than killing you — is to make himself your top priority. This is why protecting ourselves from terrorist violence is not enough to defeat terrorism, especially if we try to achieve safety in ways that elevate the importance of terrorists and wind up publicizing their causes. We all want to avoid being harmed — but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.”
“We might have had, in those years, a more serious conversation about what each of us owes to the country in a time of conflict. We might have been asked to weigh what risks we are willing to tolerate, personally, in order to remain certain that this is a free country. But after those first few seemingly enlightened days, the country’s leadership showed little interest in helping us confront the choices we would have to make between safety and freedom.”
“In retrospect it was a homeward spiral all along: the more my worldly education grew with lessons from abroad, the clearer it became that this long and winding road was leading me back home, to find belonging by making myself useful there.”
“Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world.”
“This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.”
“Most new and useful of all, perhaps, was a rigorous training in economics. I had taken an economics course in college, but had known nothing like the intensity of the tutorials at Pembroke College. These one-on-one or two-on-one sessions with faculty were the backbone of instruction at Oxford. In the case of my economics course, they felt less like the friendly and personalized instruction conjured up by the word “tutorial,” and more like a weekly oral exam on whatever I had managed to teach myself in the preceding six days. But the system worked.”
“Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and the buyer have different levels of information about the product.”
“For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.”
“I’d become aware of Obama when I was a senior in college and he was running for Senate in 2004; someone sent around a video clip of him speaking in a church, and it sounded different from any political rhetoric I’d heard before: If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen on the West Side of Chicago who can’t afford her prescription medicine . . . that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent.”
“The proportion of members of Congress who were veterans had fallen from 70 percent in 1969 to 25 in 2004, and fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress had a child who was serving.”
“For him and his generation, a college education and a military career went hand in hand; for me, education had somehow made military service seem more remote. Yet all around me, especially in small towns and rural areas, men my age and much younger were making themselves available for the defense of our country. The more I reflected on it, the less it seemed I had any good excuse or reason not to serve.”
“To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life — or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.”
“In American political culture, you are not supposed to admit you have any interest in running for office until the moment you declare. I didn’t even realize this was a particularly American quality until studying in England, where I would often meet students who made it clear they would stand for Parliament at the earliest opportunity, and then did exactly that. It’s hard to say where this norm of ours comes from; I’d like to think it has something to do with the premium we place on humility. There is something jarring about the idea that anyone thinks himself truly fit to perform the tremendously difficult and sensitive tasks of public office, and so putting yourself forward to do so seems immodest.”
“Campaigning for office is enormously difficult, but in a way, it’s not very complicated. You have to persuade voters to vote for you, raise money so you can reach more voters, and get other people to help you do those two things. Half the battle is name recognition.”
“Up to that moment, at virtually every juncture in my life there was a powerful brand name associated with whatever I was doing. Harvard. Rhodes. McKinsey. United States Navy. When you are connected to an institution with that strong a name, people use it as a shortcut for understanding who you are. And if you’re not careful, you use it as a shortcut, too, taking on the shape of that name yourself over time.”
“As with any other job, there is no better way to learn political candidacy than by doing it.”
“Sticking out your hand to introduce yourself to a stranger enjoying his pork tenderloin at a county fair, you learned that it was a lot better to start a conversation by asking about his goals than launching right into yours.”
“The call time was the hardest.”
“I spent hours on this daily, and often wonder if most Americans realize this is how many elected officials spend most of their time. It’s not unusual for a member of Congress to spend twenty hours a week doing this, and you have to wonder whether, like spending too much time typing or sunbathing, it does something unhealthy to you over the long run.”
“On the same thread, a classmate of mine commented: “If you live here, quit complaining and do something to fix this town.”
“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.”
“Everyone needs that benchmarking.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In the detailed demographic “cross-tabs” at the back of the book of results that came back from the pollsters, there was a curious detail: the older the voter was, the more likely he or she said it was a “positive” that I was twenty-nine years old. To this day, I wonder why. Is it that senior voters are less likely to see distinctions between twenties, thirties, and forties? Did I remind them of their children? Whatever the reason, we took the data as a reminder that you should never assume who will or won’t support you.”
“Korea vets in flannel shirts down from Michigan, accompanied by ruddy grandsons in Under Armour camo jackets, coexist peacefully with Montessori moms navigating strollers between clumps of grandparents eyeing big baskets of apples and small ones of plums. Trucker hats are worn without irony here; the hipsters are welcome but not in charge.”
“One of them asks how much longer it will take to get those potholes on Jefferson taken care of, and as I stand there with a razor in my hand and a towel around my waist, I share my official views on the progress of the road-funding bill in Indianapolis while fighting the urge to insist on a rule that I believe should be understood implicitly: anyone not wearing pants should not have to talk about work.”
“Small talk felt unnatural in the midst of grief — but isn’t that what we need, sometimes, when grieving? Just someone to talk to, about nothing in particular. Nothing profound. Just being there.”
“Reading David Kennedy’s book Don’t Shoot, which explains the approach in detail, I learned of the dramatic drop in violent crime in some cities that successfully executed the strategy.”
“On issue after issue — safety, neighborhoods, growth, race relations, and traffic — I learned this lesson: symbols and ceremonies very much matter because they establish the tone for all of the work we come to do in the public square.”
“Leonard Bernstein printed on its side: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
“Using data in a transparent way exposes leaders to the vulnerability of letting people see them succeed or fail. Being vulnerable, in this sense, isn’t about displaying your emotional life. It has to do with attaching your reputation to a project when there is a risk of it failing publicly. The more a policy initiative resembles a performance where people are eager to see if the performer will succeed, the more vulnerable — and effective — an elected leader can be.”
“The result was an extensive report explaining the various conditions and issues to take into account. The sophistication of the analysis was at a level South Bend had never seen before. But I was also fearful that we had just done one more exercise in describing the problem, without actually solving it. And I knew the residents of our city had no use for a data-obsessed mayor who didn’t know how to turn analysis into action.”
“Anyone who has sat on a big committee with lots of experts knows the feeling when people around the table display their expertise by mentioning one complication after another, admiring the dimensions of the problem in an ever-deepening discussion that cries out for some modicum of simplicity so that there can be action.”
“But a university is not like any other large organization. Its students, faculty, and staff have characteristics different than any other community-within-a-community. However important their presence as residents, taxpayers, employees, and voters, the unique thing about them is the substance of their work. And if their intellectual endeavors are connected in the right way to the life of the community, the results are so profound that I now believe that a mayor who is granted one wish for any feature to add to her city — a stadium, a major corporate headquarters, a state capitol — should find the answer obvious: pick a world-class research university.”
“More than just a clever use of sensors, it proved how a city could gain by allowing itself to be a guinea pig for an interesting new technology. The researchers benefited from the chance to deploy their work in a real-world environment, while the city wound up getting key technology at a deep discount that ultimately saved us a tremendous amount.”
“Hoping for more positive experiences, we have since intentionally styled South Bend as a “Beta City,” sitting at just the right scale and level of complexity for new ideas and technologies to be tested.”
“This style of city-university collaboration has become the pattern for what I would call College Town 2.0, a framework in which cities look to universities not only for the size of their endowment and the capacity of their students to spend money, but in terms of the substance of their work.”
“We inaugurated the MetroLab Network, an association of city-university pairs across the country that committed to work together along such lines. Soon the network had over forty participants, working on issues from bus reliability in New York to air quality detection in Portland, Oregon.”
“After estimating that predatory lending in our area costs low-income South Bend residents $ 3.5 million a year, he gathered some interested friends to launch a micro-lending nonprofit called JIFFI. Working to create alternatives to check-cashing lenders, the organization continues to serve residents on our West Side.”
“Some University departments have fairly obvious inroads to collaborate with their surrounding communities, working in fields like urban planning, civil engineering, or law. But some of the most compelling partnerships grew out of departments that I had never expected would be so well equipped to engage in the life of the city — such as the neuroscience students I met one night while visiting a support group for mostly ex-offenders at a community center on the West Side.”
“This could be the future of what it means to be a college town, as students and faculty at the top of their fields get more involved in the life of the cities around them. Those at the university can come to see community members not as the subjects of a service project but as genuine neighbors who can draw benefit from their work, while helping to educate them in the realities of the problems they are trying to solve. The residents can offer the students a far richer education than they can get on campus alone, and in the process the students form a relationship with our community not just as a place they passed through but as part of what shaped them, no less than the university itself. If talent continues to prove the coin of the realm in today’s economy, then this is a style of development we have only begun to understand — one in which talent is reinforced through a community that knows how to connect talent with purpose.”
“We’re in my conference room going through numbers and flowcharts for the quarterly “SBStat” meeting for parks. Inspired by the “CitiStat” model that brought modern performance management to Baltimore under Mayor Martin O’Malley and became a template for data-driven local government everywhere, SBStat is a sequence of intensive meetings where we identify issues and vet new ideas, with rigorous analysis by city staff as the basis for our conversations.”
“Sometimes, Pete, when you talk about your data-driven government, I think of Robert McNamara.”
“But the outcome of the war — and David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest — made the sum total of his brilliance seem dark and ironic, as he and the other geniuses of the national security establishment led our nation into quagmire and defeat.”
“For all the power that data analysis represents — and I’ve worked to build a reputation for running one of the country’s most data-oriented city administrations — it also has its limitations, and the potential for mischief. You might spend lots of time and resources gathering data that will never be used, or accumulate data that winds up telling you things you already know.”
“At a tech conference, I once saw a pitch from a start-up that would automatically detect patterns of opioid use by scanning for trace amounts in sewage. The technology is brilliant, and may do a great deal of good in some places. But in South Bend, our problem wasn’t knowing how much opioid use was prevalent in this neighborhood compared to that one; it was a lack of mental health and addiction resources to deal with the issue wherever we found it.”
“He was a business-minded technocrat, with very little interest in the social issues that were used to rile up electoral bases in campaign years but left communities divided long after their political usefulness expired. Instead, he was extremely focused on economic issues and interested in making government work well, even achieving the improbable feat of reforming the Bureau of Motor Vehicles into an efficient and user-friendly customer service organization. (Since the BMV is the one state office that virtually every citizen uses, it was also a politically clever thing to do.)”
“The most important thing I learned was that it has little to do with stretching or changing your beliefs. The governor and I did not persuade one another to become more centrist on any particular issue; rather, we found the areas where we had common goals and stuck to them. Plus, by collaborating on a specific, measured effort, we gained ground in trust and familiarity that would be helpful in the future.”
“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 language of the bill seemed innocent enough: “a governmental entity may not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion,” unless there is a compelling governmental interest at stake. But “person” was defined to include companies, building on the legal theory of the 2014 Supreme Court Hobby Lobby case, which interpreted federal law as giving corporations the same religious rights as people. Effectively, this meant that any place of business, from a restaurant to an auto mechanic shop, could refuse to serve an LGBT individual or couple, provided its owner cited religion as the motivation for discriminating. It could even be interpreted to protect an EMT or physician denying care to a gay patient. And it would wipe out South Bend’s own local ordinance, passed in 2012, which prohibited workplace and housing discrimination against LGBT residents. Despite the name, its purpose was not to “restore” religious freedom — after all, religious freedom is already guaranteed in the Constitution. The bill’s actual purpose, its sponsors would later reveal, was to legalize discrimination.”
“Desperate to stanch the reputational bleeding, the Republican state assembly hastily composed a clarification to the law, specifying that it could not be used to justify discrimination. The bill’s original backers complained loudly that this “clarification” defeated the whole purpose of the bill, which was true — and revealing. Their objection exposed the deep truth that, contrary to Pence’s protestations, discrimination had been at the heart of their project all along.”
“When I was in high school NHS, our volunteer projects had to do with things like litter cleanup. Now, in post-2016 America, there were whole new categories of things you can volunteer to do — such as consoling and entertaining six-year-olds while their terrified immigrant parents gather in a school gym to get legal advice on how to keep their families from being torn apart by federal agents. It was another reminder that the reality of politics is personal, not theoretical. Tip O’Neill’s dictum was right: all politics is local. Especially national politics.”
“I recognized one man, with a small white mustache and a light-colored blazer, from a Kiwanis Club appearance I had made nearby. He was a certain kind of old-school, dignified small-town gentleman for whom being Republican was synonymous with being respectable, someone who likely voted for Trump without enthusiasm but out of reflex, reinforced by a decades-long antipathy to all things Clinton. He grew indignant as he described how he and his conservative friends expected the new president to go after criminals, not members of the community in good standing. It emerged that even Helen had voted for Trump, never expecting this.”
“Here was a kid — a very American kid — who wanted the most natural thing in the world: the company of his own father. And because of politics, he couldn’t have it. A law said that he and his father were not of the same country, and a series of decisions meant that they could not live together. This — not some trading of rhetorical points on CNN or electoral up-and-down — is where political choices hit home. Not at the polling place itself, or a campaign rally, or in the halls of Congress, but in the eyes of a bewildered and utterly innocent eight-year-old boy.”
“But it was clear that I would have to work harder than ever to make myself useful, after these reminders of the precariousness of existence not just in war zones but in general. If this loss had happened while I was still deployed, it might have propelled me to try even harder, perhaps dangerously so, to make gains for my vanishing unit. But my war was over. If I wanted somehow to earn the luck that had brought me home safe from Afghanistan, I would have to do it from home, in South Bend.”
“I had gotten a crash course in urban planning after becoming mayor — both literally, in the form of a seminar organized by the National Architecture Foundation and the Conference of Mayors, and figuratively, in meetings and meals with members of my administration trained in architecture and New Urbanism. All of them seemed to agree that our city’s downtown was nothing less than a tragedy of misguided “urban renewal.”
“From developing better infrastructure to navigating the toughest issues around race and policing, experience at home had taught me that the best policy and political solutions were emerging far from presidential politics, and far from Washington in general.”
“To gather my thoughts, I wrote an essay on the future of the party, called “A Letter from Flyover Country,” and published it online. Seeking to offer a Midwestern, millennial mayor’s perspective on where our party had gone wrong and how we could do better, the essay suggested a values-oriented approach and a much greater concentration on the stories and lived experience of Americans getting through life in our hometowns. I also believed that this kind of approach could move us beyond a superficial political strategy based on capturing constituency groups individually, with no unifying theme.”
“First, it had become clear, we needed to stop treating the White House like it was the only office that mattered. By the end of 2016, Democrats were shockingly at the lowest level of congressional and state capitol influence in nearly a hundred years, having lost over a thousand state and federal seats in less than a decade. As the Obama White House learned to its great frustration — and as I was experiencing firsthand as a mayor in a state with a Republican legislative supermajority — even when you are in power you can only get so much done without control of legislative seats and governorships. Much of the anguish in Democratic circles at that time understandably focused on the disaster of losing the presidency, but for these reasons it seemed clear to me that the party would have been in serious trouble even if we had won the White House in 2016.”
“Every restored house, improved street, and good job we helped deliver in South Bend had shown me that practical leadership guided by progressive values could deliver results in a part of the country that had simply been written off. In political terms, there was great opportunity to present a hopeful economic message to blue-collar workers experiencing major economic disruption, as an alternative to the litany of resentments being offered by the other side. Beyond South Bend, many of the smartest and most original politicians I had met were state and local elected officials, quietly doing impressive work in the American heartland.”
“Reflecting on the experience of running, I also had something to say about the moral basis for leadership. It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a “draft-dodging chickenhawk” during one of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping with how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters, but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that failed to call us to our highest values.”
“Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in “Make America Great Again.” Beneath the impossible promises — that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn’t even real — is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses restored, and thus no new ways of life required.”
“We don’t actually want to go back. We just think we do, sometimes, when we feel more alert to losses than to gains. A sense of loss inclines us, in vulnerable moments, to view the future with an expectation of harm. But when this happens, we miss the power of a well-envisioned future to inspire us toward greatness.”
“I’ve learned that great families, great cities, and even great nations are built through attention to the everyday. That lesson, once I began to understand it, proved to be the unexpected and consistent theme of two decades’ education and work. Seeking wisdom and purpose at the age of eighteen, I rushed to escape the hometown that had shaped me. Then, slowly and imperceptibly, like one of those muted winter sunrises over South Bend, a pattern became visible across all I’d learned in philosophy and literature, business and service, politics and love. At last there is now enough light to see that the meaning I sought was to be found very close to where I had begun, on a path that proved in my case to be the shortest way home.”
