(NETWORK INDIANA) South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg was in New York City last night as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS.
Colbert and Buttigieg talked about a variety of topics related to his possible 2020 Election bid for the White House. Colbert asked Buttigieg, who is only 37, why he is thinking about running for president now rather than waiting “to get a little salt and pepper” in his hair.
“I don’t think you do this just to do it ‘someday.’ I think you run for any office because you think the needs of the office meet the moment and what you bring to the table,” Buttigieg said.
“In many ways, I think being from a younger generation it’s one of the main reasons to do this. I belong to the ‘School Shooting Generation.’ I was in high school when Columbine happened, our generation provided most of the troops for the conflicts after 9/11, and we’re the generation that’s going to be on the business end of Climate Change. No one has more at stake right now than young people coming up.”
Buttigieg, who has been Mayor of South Bend since 2012, added that he is the better fit for the White House than anyone in the current administration.
“I have more experience in government than the president,” Buttigieg explained. “I more executive experience than the Vice-President and I have more military experience than anyone to arrive at that desk since George H.W. Bush.”
Buttigieg is a former Naval Intelligence Officer who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 with the Navy Reserve, right in the middle of his first term in office in South Bend.
He also talked out coming about as gay while he was in office and how different revealing such a personal fact is now compared to just a few years ago in an election bid.
“On one hand, I’m very conscious of the historic nature of a candidacy like that,” he said. “I hope it makes it easier for the next person who comes along.”
“I was really hard trying to figure out how to come out, I was Mayor already. I had reached the point in my life were I wanted to have a personal life. Inconveniently I was also in the middle of a re-election campaign.”
Buttigieg said that in spite of coming out as gay in a “socially conservative state” he was re-elected as Mayor of South Bend with 85-percent of the vote. That also meant another term of working with Vice-President Mike Pence, who Buttigieg was critical of again when Colbert asked him if he had ever directly worked with Pence while he was Governor of Indiana.
“It’s the job of a mayor to work with anyone who will benefit the city,” Buttigieg said. When Colbert asked if Pence was a “good guy,” Buttigieg said he was “nice to your face” but that he is also “fanatical.”
“He seems to think people like me wake up in the morning and decide to be gay,” he added. “The thing about it is that if that was a choice, it was a choice made way above my pay grade. So, what he doesn’t realize is that his quarrel is with my creator. My marriage has brought me closer to God and I wish he respected that.”
Right now, Buttigieg is in the exploratory phase of his election bid. He says if all the pieces are there , he will run for president in 2020 as a Democrat.