Tributes and scorn in Rust Belt town transformed by ‘Mayor Pete’
In South Bend everyone knows “Mayor Pete”. They can also pronounce his surname. And most are in no doubt that he is ready, aged 38, to become the leader of the free world. “Absolutely, he can be. He’s smart, kind, compassionate, very intelligent but a great listener,” said Peg Dalton, 55, owner of Peggs restaurant, where for years the mayor popped in for lunch, usually avocado on toast.
“I felt ecstatic when he won Iowa. It was very surreal, I’m thrilled, but honestly I’m also not surprised,” said Ms Dalton. “I know he hasn’t been the mayor of New York, but just look what he’s done here in South Bend. He’ll beat Trump by staying positive.”
Mr Buttigieg is now the most famous person to emerge from South Bend, surpassing several IndyCar drivers. The city of 100,000 on the St Joseph River, two hours’ drive east of Chicago, is the 308th largest in the US.
If he becomes president it would be akin to the leader of Oadby and Wigston council in Leicestershire, 308th largest district in England, taking over No10. Rival Democrats say this leaves him woefully ill-prepared
The tale of South Bend is one familiar across the US Midwest.
For decades it was dominated by the Studebaker car factory, which employed up to 45,000 people. Production lines stopped in 1963, a long decline set in, and the city lost one third of its population. It was an earlier, and smaller, version of Detroit.
When Mr Buttigieg took office, aged 29, South Bend had been named by Newsweek as one of “America’s Dying Cities”. The mayor had a leaky office on the 14th floor of City Hall, a dreary tower block, from where he could see the city dotted with relics from the industrial glory years. Over the next seven years he masterminded a minor economic miracle, attracting tech companies to invest. The massive former Studebaker plant became the Renaissance District for tech start-ups. A benevolent millionaire bought the local minor league baseball team, a new hotel went up in the city centre. Mr Buttigieg overhauled the road system so cars would stop in South Bend and use its businesses, and set about demolishing crack houses. The city’s population began rising again.
“What I thought when I first met him was ‘Boy, he’s smart’,” said Jack Colwell, a columnist for the South Bend Tribune newspaper, who has chronicled the city since the Sixties.
“South Bend was really in the doldrums for a long time, since Studebaker closed. The city kind of developed a kind of ‘can’t do’ attitude. Pete has a ‘can do’ attitude and it caught on. He was the catalyst. When he announced for president I still thought he was a long, long, long shot. Now he’s just a long shot, and maybe not even that long. I never dreamed Donald Trump would be elected, so why not a mayor from South Bend?”
While South Bend is one of the “Rust Belt” centres that Mr Trump appealed to in 2016, Mr Buttigieg grew up differently to many of his struggling constituents. His childhood was spent in a comfortable threebedroom house, worth $183,000 (£142,000), on a leafy road across the river from the city, in the shadow of the golden dome of the University of Notre Dame, where his parents taught. At his private Catholic high school, St Joseph’s, they knew he was destined for great things. In his yearbook, fellow pupils named him “Most Likely To Be US President”.
Aged 17 he won the John F Kennedy Presidential Library national essay contest, writing about being inspired by the “political courage” of senator Bernie Sanders, who he is now fighting for the Democrat nomination.
Should he win the White House, Mr Buttigieg would be handling an annual federal budget of $4.45trillion. This time last year he was launching Love Your Block, a $50,000 project to revitalise South Bend neighbourhoods.
Other political battles he waged as telegraph.co.uk/ US2020nl mayor included a plan to sell the public golf course, which he dropped amid local opposition. Another flagship programme was 1,000 Houses in 1,000 Days, in which he tore down derelict properties, easily exceeding the target. However, he was criticised particularly in the predominantly black west side of the city, for not building replacement affordable housing. Some of the houses he knocked down still had owners and the mayor “pushed out poor people and people of colour”, his critics said.
Nearly one third of South Bend’s population is black. More than four in 10 black residents live below the poverty line. Investment in South Bend’s shiny, compact centre has not trickled out to the west side. Boarded-up liquor stores and dilapidated shops remain and homeless people still sit shivering in the snow. In 2016, when Donald Trump became the world’s most powerful man, these were the issues Mr Buttigieg was dealing with.
A month after the election The Daily Telegraph, looking at potential 2020 candidates, was the first international news organisation to interview Mr Buttigieg. He told this newspaper: “The attention is very flattering. But we still have potholes [in South Bend]. I’m in no hurry to be famous.”
Three years later, he is very famous. People from Tokyo to Tasmania are busy mangling his name. And he has a credible shot at becoming the youngest, first openly gay, president.
Local Republicans, however, said there was no room for sentimentality. Mr Trump won Indiana by 19 points over Hillary Clinton, and Mr Buttigieg would almost certainly lose his home state to the president. “I don’t think he was a very good mayor, and I’d never vote for him as president,” said VR Sheets, 77, a Republican semi-retired businessman having a coffee in South Bend’s high street. “Trump would destroy him in the debates … It’d be an absolute landslide for us.”
An elderly neighbour of Mr Buttigieg, who remembers him as a child, added: “If you guys in the media all want to say he’s wonderful, that’s up to you. Personally, I’m not a fan.
“Pete’s idols are Ted Kennedy and JFK so that tells you everything. I support the one [president] we’ve got at the moment. Hasn’t he made your life better? Aren’t you better off? You wouldn’t be with Pete.”