From Pete’s Rules to Joe’s Code
How one Mayor Pete volunteer learned to stop worrying and love Joe Biden
I rode the subway to Boston’s North Station to meet a Pete Buttigieg volunteer named Dan. This was in January – cold, a pandemic ago. I was all in for Mayor Pete.
Dan and I greeted arriving commuters with “Pete 2020” signs and gave away blue and gold “Pete” stickers. Most people rushed by, pretending not to see us. A few grinned knowingly and stopped for stickers before rushing into their days.
Later that morning I posted an audio account of the experience. I said I’d felt nervous before the “Rock the Rails” event, worried that “Bernie Bros” might hassle us. This was after supporters of Bernie Sanders had disrupted a campaign event for Pete in South Bend.
Ali Mischke, my volunteer leader in Boston, texted me her thanks. She also suggested that my social media swipe at Bernie’s campaign might have strayed from Pete’s Rules of the Road.
I knew right away which rule she was talking about. It was Respect, the first of 10 guidelines Pete wrote for his campaign:
In our thoughts, words, and actions we cultivate a sense of respect. We respect one another on this team, we respect the office of the Presidency, and we respect every individual we encounter on the campaign trail, including our competitors.
Busted. I felt embarrassed and immediately deleted the offending comment. I was impressed to see how values in Pete World meant more than pretty words. They motivated and guided thousands of supporters, like a secret language we were proud to share.
This wasn’t the only time I would hear Pete’s Rules of the Road invoked. They became known by their initials, ROTR, and I bought a black T-shirt with all 10 printed on it. We held each other to ROTR, because they embodied our candidate’s character and his once-in-a-generation leadership promise.
During South By Southwest 2019 in Austin, I had a seat in the audience for a CNN Town Hall on March 10 featuring Tulsi Gabbard, John Delaney, and the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana. That was the night Pete broke through to a national audience.
David Axelrod tweeted, “I have rarely seen a candidate make better use of a televised Town Hall than @PeteButtigieg is on @CNN tonight. Crisp, thoughtful and relatable. He’ll be a little less of a long shot tomorrow.”
At the time, Pete stood at 1 percent in polling for the Iowa caucuses. In 331 days he would win the caucuses, topping a field that began with more than 20 candidates.
I had arrived at SXSW supporting former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a deeply decent, competent, and likable former brewpub owner. Darlene and I had volunteered for John when he improbably won his very first race and become Denver’s mayor in 2003.
As a Hick partisan, I was frankly irritated when I learned that his opponents included the mayor of a city of 100,000 people in Indiana. Really? What a waste of time, I thought.
That all changed when three days before the CNN Town Hall, I watched Pete dazzle a much smaller audience of about 50 people.
The Texas Tribune hosted a series of interviews with Presidential candidates, featuring Hickenlooper, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, and Pete, among others. Each was paired with a journalist, and Pete drew Ana Marie Cox, host of Crooked Media’s “With Friends Like These” podcast.
Cox began her hour-long conversation with questions like “Where do you get the nerve to run for president? You’re barely old enough to drink.” When she asked, “When was the last time you prayed?” I thought, “You can’t ask a candidate that!” and assumed Pete would say it’s private. Instead, he paused as if to review an imagined calendar and replied, “Wednesday. Ash Wednesday.” Apparently, he saw it as a fair question. He explained that he tends to pray as part of a congregation, in his case Episcopalian, instead of alone.
With 15 minutes left, Cox said, “I promised myself that I would wait till this point to fight with you.” Her bone to pick with Pete had to do with the Democratic Party’s, in her view, misguided effort to bring white working-class voters back into the fold. “Why can’t we let that go in the same way that we let go of other things that aren’t coming back?” she asked.
Pete parried her points, arguing that Democrats should not give up on white voters who feel dismissed by party elites.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was about to see the only instance in the entire campaign where an interviewer provoked Pete to poke back in a way he instantly regretted.
As Pete was stating that voters can detect from the blogosphere an attitude of condescension by Democrats, she interrupted with, “Oh, so those guys are reading blogs? No, they’re watching Fox News!”
“No,” Pete countered. “They’re watching what their liberal cousin posts on Facebook and beats them over the head with and makes them feel small.” He reached slowly for a sip of bottled water and asked, “I mean, are we just going to give up on people?”
“No, don’t give up on people, and we should enact policies that benefit those people,” Cox said, her voice rising.
Pete handed her words back to her like a speeding ticket:
“Those people.”
He looked directly at her. He lowered his voice. At this point the audience was with him and began applauding. Cox waved her arms and corrected her slip to “Yeah, people.”
“Yeah,” Pete said.
Cox shifted in her seat and kept going. “I mean, like I am, I live in Minneapolis, right? I live in the Midwest!”
Pete put her out of her discomfort with his apology.
“That was a cheap shot, sorry,” he said. “But you know what I mean? We see them as ‘those people’ and…”
“I don’t see them as ‘those people,’” Cox insisted. But it was clear that she did. She regained her equilibrium, and the interview concluded with an amiable speed round on policy questions like court packing and the filibuster. “You’re going to do very well on national television,” she said after the dust settled.
“I hope so,” Pete said.
Three days later, his debut on national television went very well indeed.
The Ana Marie Cox encounter convinced me that the mayor of South Bend was not in over his head as a presidential candidate. In a single hour of conversation with a barbed questioner, he displayed poise, wit, empathy, toughness, original thought, and an electrifying mastery of language.
I called Darlene from Austin after the Town Hall and announced that I had a new candidate. After watching Pete in videos on the Internet, she was all in.
“After Obama, I never thought I’d feel excited enough to work for another candidate,” she told me. “Pete has integrity. I love how he can make a complex issue understandable. I could listen to him all night, just like Obama. Pete’s real. I’d be proud to have him in the White House.”
We traveled from our home in Denver to South Bend for Pete’s official announcement on April 14, 2019.
Rain had forced the event indoors, to an unheated former Studebaker building with a leaking roof. Our first volunteer gig of the campaign was to carry clipboards up and down a multi-block line of people waiting to get in, logging their contact information.
Volunteers were let in early, so we stood just a few heads away from the stage. It took a couple of hours for the crowd to file in. I ended up sitting on the concrete floor, because my knees were in pain from standing. When the rally began, two guys helped me back up, so I could witness what we’d traveled to South Bend for — a moment in history, a ringing declaration:
My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete. I’m a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for President of the United States.
We spent two nights in South Bend. If Pete really had done something amazing during his two terms as Mayor, I thought we would be able to detect it by speaking with residents and taking in the city’s vibe.
The Muslim hosts of our Airbnb told us how Pete had supported their mosque with frequent visits way before his eloquent letter to the congregation after the terrorist attack in New Zealand. The 30-something hostess at Peg’s downtown restaurant told me she’d attended high school with Pete. “What you see now is exactly the way he was then,” she said. “He’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
Darlene and I went on to volunteer in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada.
In Des Moines, we walked beside Pete and his mother amidst a jostling crowd from an outdoor rally to the Liberty and Justice Dinner. Inside the Wells Fargo Arena we shared a table with several Elizabeth Warren supporters, exchanging friendly stories from the campaign trail.
We returned to Iowa just before the caucuses, canvassing and serving as official observers. Those were the days when you could knock on someone’s door and end up being invited in for a tour of a remodeling project. We appreciated how seriously Iowans took their early roles in the national conversation.
The day before the Nevada primary, I volunteered as the driver of a big, black Suburban ferrying top campaign staffers. My job was to keep up with the professional driver of the car ahead of me carrying Pete. We raced from event to event along Las Vegas streets and interstate highways. No staffers were harmed.
We attended a fundraiser in a big, brick home in Brookline, Mass. A staffer took a photo of us with Pete, using a real camera.
After Pete’s talk in Brookline, Darlene found herself standing next to him, beside the piano in the living room. “What should I tell people who say you’re too young to run for President?” she asked him.
He thought for a moment as a staffer motioned that he was running late for the next event. “Well,” he said as if he had all the time in the world, “you might tell them that if age equated to wisdom, we would now have the wisest President in our history. It’s also true that on Inauguration Day I will be older than the current presidents of El Salvador, New Zealand, and France were when they took office.”
When Mayor Pete abruptly ended his campaign on March 1, Darlene and I were devastated.
It felt like a death in the family, the end of a dream, and a car crash all rolled into one. He had conducted himself with such empathy and brilliance. I thought His policies on climate, health care, systemic racism, income inequality, and democratic reform were bold and smart. I had no doubt he would be a transformational president.
When I took his yard sign in from our driveway I carried it gently and let the tears flow.
The following day in Dallas, Pete Buttigieg endorsed Joe Biden.
That day and in subsequent interviews and social media, Pete emphasized Biden’s decency and empathy. That rang true to me. It fit with my own sense of Biden, especially during his eight years as Obama’s VP.
I also recalled meeting a solitary but upbeat Biden staffer on a residential street in Las Vegas where we were both knocking on doors. He was a tall, earnest, handsome young man, a native of D.C. We each professed respect for the other’s candidate, then headed in opposite directions with our brochures and door hangers. I hope he’s still with the campaign, headed for a job in the new administration.
When I saw Biden’s campaign release “Joe’s Campaign Code,” I smiled, seeing a clear connection to Pete’s Rules of the Road. Biden in the introduction to his 11 guiding principles called out the mayor by name.
“We’re not the first to establish a set of guiding principles,” Biden wrote. “Harry Truman had ‘The buck stops here,’ and more recently my friend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign was shaped by his team’s ‘rules of the road.’
That’s when we started making phone calls and sending text messages for Joe.
Lately Pete seems to be everywhere.
His new book, Trust, America’s Best Chance, was released October 6th. It’s a treatise on how important trust is, why America has lost it, and how we can get it back. Trust also contains behind-the-scenes glimpses from the campaign of great interest to those of us who took part.
“Of course, having come so close, it was also hard not to think about how things might have gone differently,” he writes. “I wondered what really would have happened with the momentum in our campaign if our Iowa victory had been officially called the night it happened, and not three weeks later.”
Ouch. Oh how I remember that exhilarating, frustrating night. Darlene and I stood for hours in a university gym in Des Moines, waiting for Pete to appear. Finally, choosing his words carefully, he took the stage to say:
We don’t know all the results. But we know, by the time it’s all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation, because by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.
Pete’s recent viral interviews on MSNBC and Fox have generated broad appreciation of his rhetorical power. When Jonathan Capehart read from Amy Coney Barrett’s just-released confirmation hearing statement, Pete gave this impromptu reply:
At the end of the day, rights in this country have been expanded because courts have understood what the true meaning of the letter of the law and the spirit of the Constitution is. That is not about time traveling yourself back to the 18th century and subjecting yourself to the same prejudices and limitations as the people who write these words. The Constitution is a living document because the English language is a living language. And you need to have some readiness to understand that in order to serve on the court in a way that’s actually going to make life better.
It was actually Thomas Jefferson himself who said that we might as well ask a man to still wear the coat which fitted him as a boy as expect future generations to live under what he called the regime of their barbarous ancestors. So even the founders that these kind of dead-hand originalists claim fidelity to understood better than their ideological descendants, today’s judicial so-called conservatives, the importance of keeping with the times. And we deserve judges and justices who understand that.
That clip, which has garnered more than 4 million views, prompted one admirer to tweet:
I have a PhD in American History and it would take me a month to create something as articulate as Pete did on the fly after being told about Barrett’s opening statement in the middle of an interview. Gah!
Mary McNamara in The Los Angeles Times tagged Pete with a new handle, “Slayer Pete,” because of his potent surrogate work for Joe Biden on Fox News and elsewhere.
“Now we know that what lies behind that white shirt, dark tie and ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ face is not a policy wonk but a rhetorical assassin,” McNamara wrote. “With a loving husband, a really nice kitchen and deadly aim.”
Anyone who wore a Rules of the Road t-shirt during the primaries could have told you about Pete’s power with words. “We seek to serve and unify a diverse nation,” he wrote in Belonging, the second rule. He makes words like fidelity, touchstone, stewardship, audacious, and marvel seem natural – just right, not showy.
The last rule, Joy, concludes with this:
The American presidential election is the world’s greatest civic and democratic ritual. It will shape us but we can shape it too. Let us shape it, partly, by spreading the joy of working for our beliefs.
Pete never mentions himself or Donald Trump in the Rules.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, is doing very well on his own behalf lately, ahead of Trump by double digits 17 days before the election.
Joe’s Code is scrappier and more personal than Pete’s Rules, drawing on oft-told family stories.
Biden quotes his Grandpa Finnegan’s telling him, “Joey, keep the faith,” and his grandmother’s correcting her husband by adding, “No, Joey, spread it – spread the faith!” In Empathy, we learn that Biden’s father used to say, “Joey, I don’t expect the government to solve my problems – but I sure expect it to understand them.”
Joe says Joy, the second item in his code, energizes us for the long haul. Joe’s Code ends with “No Malarkey.”
Folks who know me know that I’ve been opposed to malarkey my entire life – I’ve never once backed down on that issue. No one has been stronger on it, either; a Washington Post investigation a few years back found that I called out “malarkey” more times than any American lawmaker since at least the 19th century. For us, I mean this as a model of behavior: No drama. No fighting. No malarkey. Just get it done.
Pete’s Rules and Joe’s Code share two elements in common, Respect and Joy.
“Respect doesn’t mean that we’ll always agree on everything,” Joe says. “But it does mean that we’ll always start from a place of common humanity – that we’ll look for the best in people, even when we disagree.”
As I noted at the outset, Pete’s description of Respect includes respect for our competitors. That’s the one I got called on by Ali. Pete goes further. He describes the team’s respect for each other as a way to overcome skepticism about his unlikely presidential bid.
“The better we hold up this value among ourselves, the better it will reflect outside,” he wrote of Respect. “It will represent a quiet antidote to the idea that this project is too audacious to be taken seriously.”
As for Joy, Pete’s Rules and Joe’s Code offer similar reimaginings of the often discouraging political fray.
“Amid the great challenge we have accepted, let us be joyful,” Pete writes. “We are privileged to be in the very center of the most important conversation in the world. We are assembling a team of wonderful human beings. Along the way we will all get many opportunities to lift one another up and lift up those we encounter.”
Ditto for Joe. His code concludes by stating that “our joy for this work sustains and rejuvenates us for the battles to come.”
I don’t know anyone on the Trump campaign who might be able to share a similar statement of values, written by the President. I Googled “Trump campaign code” and found nothing. If one exists, please let me know, and I will make an immediate addition to this essay.
Until then, let’s assume that one reason Joe Biden is leading in the polls has to do with the personal values that Pete bore witness to in his endorsement.
“We need a politics that’s about decency, that brings back dignity,” Pete said in Dallas. “And that is what we sought to practice in my campaign. That’s what Joe Biden has been practicing his entire life.”
Pete continued:
He is somebody of such extraordinary grace and kindness and empathy. From taking time to talk to somebody who struggles to speak to taking time for a family that is struggling with loss. He will bring the exact kind of empathy that is so badly lacking in this White House — and along the way in his campaign will draw us together as we need a leader to do.
I’ve often heard Pete say that he doesn’t believe the world is divided into people who are all good and people who are all bad. He also said you can’t love your country if you hate half the people in it. He concluded his endorsement of Joe with this:
I believe that each of us can have good things and bad things brought out of us, and that’s why leadership is so important. I’m looking for a leader, I’m looking for a President who will draw out what is best in each of us. And I’m encouraging everybody who was part of my campaign to join me, because we have found that leader, in Vice President, soon-to-be President Joe Biden.
Standing behind Pete, Biden briefly rested his hands on the younger man’s shoulders during the endorsement, a poignant gesture that caught Pete by surprise. When it was his turn to speak, Biden began by addressing Pete’s supporters. As we watched at home, I felt as if Joe was talking directly to Darlene and me.
“You supported a man of tremendous integrity, a fellow who has as much moral courage as he does physical courage,” Biden said. “This is clearly a man who is brilliant as well as decent.” He said Pete reminded him of his late son, Beau Biden, who died of cancer.
“Folks,” Joe said, “I promise you over your lifetime you’re going to see a hell of a lot more of him than you are of me.”
From here on the coast of Maine, Darlene and I spend at least six hours a week making calls to Colorado for Joe and John Hickenlooper, now running for U.S. Senate. Talking with real voters lifts me above the panic I feel while doomscrolling Twitter for the latest twists in this bizarre and bitterly fought campaign.
“Can you text me that web site?” a Latino voter in Florida asked me two days ago when I told him how to request a Colorado mailed ballot. “You bet,” I said. When he saw the link to GoVoteColorado.com on his phone, he said “Thank you, Len! I will fill this out tonight and vote for Joe as soon as I get my ballot.”
I will not soon forget Ali’s correction when I strayed from Pete’s campaign values after “Rock the Rails” at North Station.
As Pete said in ROTR about responsibility:
The conduct of a campaign can be as influential as its outcome. Everyone on this team has a responsibility to live up to our values, and every participant, from a first-time volunteer to the candidate and top staff, must model this. When there is a mistake, we take ownership, learn, adjust, and move on. Missteps are inevitable, but they should never be repeated. We own our choices and our work.
Words and values matter.
No malarkey.
