Thread by @DavidWright_CNN

Pete Buttigieg on @NewDay: "Coming from a party that ...my party, the Democratic party -- seemed to have lost touch in the last election with the middle of the country, maybe it makes sense to have more voices from the industrial Midwest"

Buttigieg on South Bend: "I think we are living proof that the formula for reaching the hearts of the industrial midwest doesn’t have to be nostalgia, or resentment, or promises that can’t be kept to find greatness in some impossible -- again, by turning back the clock."

Pete Buttigieg on green new deal: "I don’t think a goal should alienate people. And lets be honest, the green new is in its current form more a set of goals than a fully articulated set of policies or a road map. But I think our goals need to be more, not less ambitious."

Buttigieg: "As a mayor, I have [had] to activate an emergency operations center in South Bend for what should be a historic level of flooding. One was 500-year and one was 1,000-year. And they happened 18 months apart. That means that climate really is an emergency."

Buttigieg: "We need to treat [climate change] as a national emergency that has the same destructive power as something like the Great Depression or a world war."

Buttigieg on green new deal: "I don’t think that elected officials will be devising all the technical measures to get there any more than President Kennedy was calculating rocket trajectories when he said that this country should go to the moon ... But we need to set the goals."

Pete Buttigieg on Afghanistan: "I’m very concerned that what you have right now is a process of engaging the Taliban in peace talks that seems to be leaving the Afghan government ... that we helped create the conditions for it to arise, it is leaving them off to the side."

Pete Buttigieg: "I think the word socialism has begun to lose its meaning. I think that’s a process that started when the right referred to the Affordable Care Act as socialism, even though it was a market-based policy that was invented at the conservative Heritage Foundation."

Buttigieg: "This is a word that seems more a piece of political rhetoric than a rigorous explanation... of a set of ideas. When we are talking about socialism are we talking about Venezuela, that nobody wants? Or are we talking about a situation, like what there is in Denmark?"

Buttigieg: "We need to make sure whether an idea is labeled as right, left, capitalist, socialist or otherwise, that we just evaluate whether the idea makes sense, whether it is good and whether there is evidence that it will work."

Buttigieg on VP Pence: "He’s written that he thinks cigarettes don’t kill. He seems to believe people like me just get up & decide to be gay. His world view is one that is way out of step with the American mainstream. And we saw it in Indiana when he really embarrassed our state"