Thread by @Desis4Pete

In another thread, @Asians4Pete asked how we first encountered @PeteButtigieg. My story is kinda long (or maybe I'm just long-winded), so I'm starting a different thread. The operative word is "long" 😬. 1/31

https://twitter.com/Asians4Pete/status/1124404443489951744

I moved to the US to attend Notre Dame. One of the first people I met was the chair of the English department there. So basically, unlike most of my fellow Americans, for as long as I've lived in this country, I've known how to pronounce Buttigieg. 2/31

(Aside to @Chas10Buttigieg: Buddha-judge is not how you pronounce Buttigieg. As any #desi will tell you, that's not even how you pronounce Buddha.) 3/31

That department chair was Joe Buttigieg, Gramsci scholar, Marxist thinker, and teacher extraordinaire. Joe died this past January. Here's an article about his influence on #MayorPete. 4/31

marieclaire.com/politics/a2686…

Unfortunately, I didn't pay any attention to the pudgy, bespectacled kid who sometimes hung out in Joe's office. I mean, nobody alerted me that he was going to be President some day. Unlike #MayorPete's vision, hindsight is 20/20. 5/31

Between school and work, I ended up living in South Bend for over a decade. Times were hard occasionally. One summer, I got by on one PB&J sandwich for lunch and two for dinner, every day for several weeks. That was all I could afford to eat. No breakfast. 6/31

Eventually, my luck turned, and I got what was a wonderful job by South Bend standards. Today, the income per capita there is $19,626. More than a dozen years ago, I was already making over $30,000. 7/31

areavibes.com/south+bend-in/…

I liked my job. I liked the low cost of living. South Bend was friendly and amazingly liberal for its location. For example, there were four and a half gay bars, and LGBTQ folks from all over Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan would flock to the city on Saturday nights. 8/31

Housing was plentiful and cheap, and my job was secure. I began to think about buying a house there. I started to look around. Then I thought: really? You're going to buy a house here? You'll commit to South Bend? 9/31

You have marketable skills, a decent résumé, and a degree from an elite school. You're young. You're gay. You're a person of color. You're an immigrant. Do you really want to live out the rest of your life in South Bend? 10/31

Studebaker has been gone for almost 40 years, and people still haven't gotten over it. Why would anybody with prospects live in this dying city that's stuck in the past? What kind of life can a gay guy with a funny name expect to have in South Bend? Go west, young man! 11/31

So, as #MayorPete says in "Shortest Way Home", like all ambitious young folks in South Bend, I fled at the first opportunity. And then in summer 2011, a few years later, I went back to visit. 12/31

My friends who still lived there, mostly Notre Dame faculty, told me that Joe Buttigieg's son was running for Mayor. They were simultaneously excited and bemused. 13/31

Me, I rolled my eyes. Didn't he go to Harvard? What on earth is he doing running for mayor of this god-forsaken hell-hole? Well, whatever floats his boat, I guess. I got back on the plane and flew home to California. 14/31

But I was curious. And also cynical. I read about 1000 homes in 1000 days, and I thought, "Right, that's going to work." 15/31

I was deeply familiar with the urban blight that characterized South Bend. I lived west of downtown (near Colfax and Chapin, for 'Benders who are reading this). I'd walk by boarded up houses every day. I'd hear gunfire at least twice a week. 16/31

And I thought, if @PeteButtigieg thinks he's going to make a dent in that city's problems—if he thinks this crazy idea will actually work—he's in for a rude awakening. South Bend is just too far gone. 17/31

Well, he pulled it off. My jaw dropped. That wasn't all; I kept hearing more. Smart streets. Smart sewers. And the streets and sewers were not, as I would have expected from having lived there, the same thing. 18/31

Others began noticing too. In 2014, the Washington Post called him "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of." Well, I'd heard of him, but aside from that minor detail, yes. 19/31

washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/w…

Then one day in 2015, four different people mailed me an op-ed from the South Bend Tribune. #MayorPete had just come out. 20/31

southbendtribune.com/news/local/sou…

That's really courageous, I thought. Too bad his career's over. I guess he'll be moving back to New York after November. After all, to quote yourself from several years and tweets ago, what kind of life can a gay guy with a funny name expect to have in South Bend? 21/31

South Bend surprised me. He was re-elected with 80% of the vote. I was clearly wrong: about the mayor, the city, and the people. I began to think, you've made a good life for yourself here out West; but you know, maybe staying on wouldn't have been all that bad. 22/31

I continued to watch his leadership transform South Bend. Then came Frank Bruni's 2016 article in the New York Times, asking whether @PeteButtigieg could be the first gay President. 23/31

nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opi…

After the disastrous 2016 election, President Obama said in the New Yorker that Buttigieg represented the future of the Democratic party. 24/31

newyorker.com/magazine/2016/…

Around the same time, #MayorPete himself wrote an essay for Medium about how the future of the Democratic party depended on articulating values that spoke to people in the heartland. 25/31

medium.com/@buttigieg/a-l…

The essay's diagnosis of the nation's ills and its prescribed remedy struck me as spot-on. I've now lived in California for a lot longer than I lived in South Bend, but my sense of America is shaped by my first encounter with this country, in that Midwestern small town. 26/31

Even so, when @PeteButtigieg announced in January that he was going to explore a run for President, I didn't think his candidacy would catch fire. Like Pete himself, I thought that he'd spend a lot of time simply trying to get his name out there. 27/31

And I thought that he had too many minuses: Gay. White. Male. Unpronouncable. Young. Inexperienced. I thought that like his run for state treasurer or for DNC chair, this run too would go nowhere. 28/31

I was wrong, again. Just as I had misjudged #MayorPete when I thought he could never transform the city, or misjudged the people of South Bend when I thought that they would never re-elect a gay mayor, I had misjudged the hunger that America has for a voice like his. 29/31

As he himself says, running for office is an act of hope. So is voting. I was bitter, jaded, and cynical. Now I have hope. And I'm all in. 30/31

https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1124422274579345419

#MayorPete hasn't just made South Bend a better city. He has made this former South Bender a better human. And he will make this a better country. #Pete2020 31/31