Buttigieg takes on protester at Chicago fundraiser
Answers criticism during campaign event in the Loop
Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg stood on stage at a Chicago fundraiser Saturday afternoon in the ballroom of a tony Loop social club, trying to answer questions on slips of paper in a fish bowl, but the shouts of a protester kept interrupting him.
“I appreciate your activism, but I’m going to have to ask you to respect our format,” Buttigieg said.
More than a year into his presidential campaign, Buttigieg is no stranger to the occasional protester making a scene at one of his rallies, usually with criticism over his failure to win support from black voters or his handling of a fatal police shooting in South Bend last summer.
What made Saturday’s disruption unusual is it came at one of Buttigieg’s own fundraisers — an event aimed at raising money from Chicago donors as he makes one last stop on his way to Iowa, where he’ll spend the next nine days campaigning in the state’s first-in-the-nation Feb. 3 caucuses.
So, as donors sipped on $12 glasses of wine and $8 beers at The Standard Club in the Loop, Buttigieg tried to move on from the protester and get back to the fish bowl of questions.
“I need you to respect me and respect my question and respect the people of South Bend!” the protester shouted before making a reference to the Buttigieg campaign’s “Rules of the Road” that call for respect and teamwork. ”You’re saying solidarity, you’re saying rules of the road and you’re not following them yourself. You don’t love me. You won’t let me ask my question.”
The presidential hopeful replied, “I respect your activism, but sometimes love is not expressed by interruption. Sometimes love is expressed in a different way.” Buttigieg then offered a common political tactic to encourage a protester to quiet down — he promised to meet afterward.
The protester remained undeterred, shouting some more. That prompted a campaign donor to yell, “You’re not the only one in the room!” After the disruption went on for more than three minutes, Buttigieg finally relented, “You know what? Just go ahead. Let’s do this.”
The protester, who identified themself as queer and nonbinary but did not give a name, brought up the South Bend police shooting death last summer of a black robbery suspect, Eric Logan, by a white police officer. The shooting, which the officer’s body camera and dashcam failed to record, remains under investigation.
“Mayor Pete, as somebody who says you want to unify communities, as someone who says they want to follow the rules of the road, there are police officers in South Bend who kill people. What’s his name Logan …” the protester said, trying to recall the name of the shooting victim.
“Not what’s his name,” a visibly perturbed Buttigieg said. “His name is Eric Logan.”
“There’s so many, I can’t keep track anymore,” the protester shot back. “That’s false,” Buttigieg replied.
Then, finally, came the question: “How can we trust you will show up for queer and trans people and people of color when there were eight community meetings in South Bend about a police officer who killed someone in your community and you did not go to them?”
Buttigieg replied by noting he set up the series of community meetings with “rank-and-file officers to elected leaders to some of my harshest critics, and people who have been in my administration all along” to “empower the community” to help come up with solutions for better policing in South Bend.
“We wanted the conversations to be real. We wanted them to lead to actual change that could be implemented,” Buttigieg said. “In order for that to happen, we had to have conversations that got out of the circus and into the heart. And so those conversations, I knew, would be at their best when they were as far away as possible from presidential politics.”
As a result, Buttigieg explained, he attended only one of the meetings, unannounced, to thank the participants for their hard work.
The former South Bend mayor, whose second term ended earlier this month, then went on to acknowledge some of the shortcomings of his tenure on the issue, including not recruiting and retaining enough black officers.
“I’m not standing up here, as I hope to earn your vote, saying that I have earned it by getting everything perfect, that racism, poverty, homelessness and exclusion have come to an end in my city during my time as mayor any more than they’ve come to an end anywhere,” Buttigieg told the protester. “But we have made so much progress.”
He then emphasized that he has support from minorities in South Bend, some of whom he’s featured in campaign ads and brought on the campaign trail with him in recent weeks.
“The president doesn’t have any more of a magic solution than a mayor does, but there are concrete things that have to be done using the powers of the presidency to deliver greater justice, especially when it comes to issues around race. It matters,” Buttigieg told the almost entirely white crowd. “And I am asking voters to send in somebody who knows the good, the bad and the ugly, who knows what is at stake and what can be done in order to get these things done.”
Buttigieg’s winding answer was met with a loud and long round of applause.
After receiving criticism from fellow presidential contender Elizabeth Warren for conducting his highdollar fundraisers behind closed doors, Buttigieg opened up the events to the news media late last year. As part of that policy, one print reporter is allowed into the fundraisers to cover the event for the entire media at large. The Tribune covered Saturday’s fundraiser under that policy, which does not allow for photos to be taken or for attendees at the fundraiser to be interviewed.
Buttigieg also was interrupted by a second protester who forced a question that criticized him for not offering free college to all. The former mayor contended that having the top 10% of the population pay their own way was the proper approach, one he said had been embraced by fellow competitor Bernie Sanders until more recently. Sanders has proposed tuition-free public college for all, regardless of income.
As he closed his 25 minutes of remarks, Buttigieg sought to use the disruptions at the fundraiser to make a broader point about the need for the Democratic Party to unite as one to defeat Republican President Donald Trump in November.
Throughout the campaign, Buttigieg has pitched himself as representing a new generation of leadership and as the candidate best positionedto unite what he described Saturday as “Democrats, independents and a striking number of what I like to call future former Republicans.”
“It’s going to be messy. We are talking about the most vulnerable moment our republic has faced in our lifetimes, but I am also still convinced — more convinced after a year of campaigning — that there is a powerful American majority that wants the same things,” Buttigieg said. “At the end of the day, we’re going to have one nominee. The 25 people who didn’t get to be the nominee — and their supporters — are going to have to come together around the one who does, because we know what we’re up against in this country, and it is not each other.”
Then, the protester tried to interrupt again as Buttigieg finished his close. The crowd of more than 300 erupted into more than two minutes of roaring applause, drowning out both the demonstrator and the candidate.