Reddit mentions of Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

Pete Buttigieg is ranked at 63, let's do this people.

>There are movie wars, full of fire and fury, and then there are the real wars familiar to anyone who's served in a combat zone: 85 percent routine, even boring, duty, interrupted by moments of gut-churning terror.
>
>So it was with Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor making an improbable presidential run, who served nine months in Afghanistan as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer. As a low-grade ensign, Buttigieg was assigned to the NATO coalition's Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell in Kabul that tracked the enemy's money. Sure, he handled secret intelligence, but the rest of the time he basically served as his boss's armed chauffeur, he says—albeit in life-threatening conditions. Think NCIS, in rebel-infested Kabul.
>
>"It's funny, the way it worked out," Buttigieg said in a Newsweek interview. "I'd get up, maybe I'd do a little bit of work with some documents or [reports] traffic. Then I would be asked to drive the boss over to maybe an Afghan counternarcotics cell that we were working with. And I'd just be Uber, basically, driving or guarding that vehicle."
>
>The terror came whenever he went "outside the wire," exiting the heavily guarded, high-walled headquarters compound. Buttigieg's training with the Army before he deployed taught him to take note of "a suddenly empty neighborhood. A nervous-looking lone driver of a vehicle with a heavy trunk load. An obviously male hand coming out from underneath a woman's blue burqa," he wrote in his book, Shortest Way Home, published in February. He carried a locked and loaded M4 carbine on over 100 of such forays across the capital, which has been wracked by frequent terrorist assaults involving masked gunman, suicide bombers and Taliban agents dressed in Afghan military uniforms.
>
>"I was a little jumpy at first when I came back," he told Newsweek, "but in the longer run, I think knowing the difference between an emergency and an emergency, I think has served me well, coming back into the political space."
>
>
>
>Men who served with then-32-year-old Buttigieg said he never advertised that he had graduated with honors from Harvard, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and been elected mayor of South Bend—much less that he was gay.
>
>"He just told me he worked for the government," recalls Chuck Murray, his intelligence training officer. That was "not a big deal," Murray says, because the reserve unit was filled with FBI agents, cops and city and state employees from around the Great Lakes area. Only when Buttigieg had to fill out a form did Murray learn that he was a mayor.
>
>"Somebody said there was a mayor among us. So I looked him up on the internet, and there he was," says Jason McRae, a "battle buddy" of Buttigieg's during combat readiness training before both shipped out to Afghanistan. But he doesn't remember talking much about that. "We just focused on family and so on."
>
>During intelligence training, though, Buttigieg stood out. "He was astute, he asked great questions, and he was able to put together the [intelligence] linkages really well, figure out what the information gaps were and what we needed to know," Murray said by phone. "If somebody asked a question, he was able to assemble what we did know and what else we needed to know quickly."
>
>He seemed to have preternatural skill at seeing patterns, Murray and others who served with him told Newsweek. That included a facility with languages. His mother, Anne Montgomery, is a linguist who taught at Notre Dame for 29 years. Buttigieg, who spent the summer of 2005 studying Arabic in Tunisia, answered questions from an Oslo film crew in Norwegian and offered condolences in French to a Parisian news outlet after April's fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. He's also familiar with Dari.
>
>A typical day in Kabul, he told Newsweek, included "some video teleconferences, and maybe checking in with one of our allied countries or another agency that we were dealing with. There was a lot of interagency stuff because the Threat Finance Cell was commanded by a DEA agent, partly housed within Treasury," he says. "I was in the military element. And then we were working with everybody across the civilian spectrum in the intelligence community"—the CIA, NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency. Buttigieg's military record was first obtained by reporter Clifton French, an Iraq war veteran at South Bend's ABC-57 TV station.
>
>The long-ago war in Vietnam colored his views on Afghanistan. He devoted his 2004 Harvard honors thesis to the Vietnam War, using Graham Greene's The Quiet American, a brooding novel of spies, war and politics set in mid-1950s Saigon, to examine the messianic streak in U.S. foreign policy. The novel features a recklessly idealistic CIA agent who thinks he can derail the coming communist overthrow of the corrupt regime through a poisonous brew of foreign aid and covert action. He gets people killed.
>
>"It's brilliant," Buttigieg says of the novel. "To me, it's about how Americans can persuade ourselves to do all kinds of things, based on the idea that our interests by definition are good, and morally good. And it just doesn't work that way. Even for an exceptional country like us, it is not true as a matter of course that anything that appears to make America better off is the right thing to do."
>
>In Buttigieg's view, American foreign policy has to be "one, grounded in core American interests, two, vetted against American values." But how would that play out in regard to Saudi Arabia, a corrupt theocracy that murders dissidents? "I get that you always can find yourself in complicated alliances," he tells Newsweek. "After all, this is a country that teamed up with Stalin in order to deal with Hitler. So you don't have to do a purity test on your values to ever do business with a foreign country. But...put it this way: When you do that, you gain a certain amount of leverage that you ought to use in the defense of your values."
>
>Same goes for China's brutal repression of its Muslim Uighurs, he says: The U.S. is losing a chance to put Beijing on "its back foot" when it looks the other way, as the Trump administration has. "Look, we're going to have a lot more moral authority when we're calling for human rights if we're doing it in a consistent way," he says. "We can be selective about how hard we push it and when, but we should never be at cross-purposes with our own values."
>
>As for Afghanistan, "I think we had to act after 9/11 and so the authorization for use of military force in Afghanistan made sense, to a point," he told Esquire in a March interview. "I think the open-ended commitment did not." But from Vietnam onward, he says, successive American administrations have tended to look for quick, opportunistic fixes to complicated problems. "You could argue there's a pattern," he says, "from the unsavory friends we were making in Vietnam, because we thought it was the lesser evil...to the way that we took steps that helped unleash al-Qaida a generation later." (That's a reference to the Ronald Reagan administration arming Islamic jihadis, including Osama bin Laden, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.)
>
>Why, then, did Buttigieg volunteer for the Navy, and then Kabul? No draft boards were breathing down his neck, the way they did in the 1960s. By 2009, when he was commissioned an ensign, Americans' interest in, much less enthusiasm for, the war in Afghanistan had evaporated. Did he enlist to shore up a future political career?
>
>"No," he maintains. "I'd always had this vague idea that I would serve." Poor eyesight clouded his teenage dreams of being a pilot, he says. But at Harvard, he felt pulled to follow in the footsteps "of John F. Kennedy and these other figures who had Ivy League educations."

So I assume you know that Biden, Bloomberg and 'Mayor Pete' have all released (and profited from) books while holding office?

If so, what qualities do those three candidates have which makes you look past them using their political brand and position to profit?

Excellent post. I'd wager a bet that Mayor Pete's disposition and example of patience and empathy is what draws so many to him. On his interview with Ezra Klein he said,

>How people feel about you is largely driven by how you make them feel about themselves.

Pete operates from the world view that everyone wants to be known for being kind. From Shortest Way Home,

>In the struggle for equality, we do well to remember that all people want to be known as decent, respectful, and kind. If our first response toward anyone who struggles to get onto the right side of history is to denounce him as a bigot, we will force him into a defensive crouch–or into the arms of the extreme right.

​

Me too! I've been thinking about this for months! You might also want to check out his book, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future (Book

>Howey said that Buttigieg is friendly with Republican Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and had a decent working relationship with Vice President Mike Pence when he was Indiana’s governor.

It literally does talk about that in the third paragraph and beyond.

If you want another source where Pete talks about working with Republicans maybe read his book where he talks about reaching across the isle repeatedly?

Here's a link. Its rather illucidating.

That's the danger with this candidate, no different than Obama. His vapid but flowery speeches allow anyone to put any belief they have into this vassal. You yourself claim that he would never try to work with republicans but he's repeatedly stated otherwise in Iowa, in his own book, and during his time as mayor. You're simply making things up because it feels good to you, despite clear as day evidence stating otherwise.

I agree that he needed to add a detailed list to his website, but everyone who thinks he has no stand on issues is crazy.

https://meetpete.org/

https://smile.amazon.com/Shortest-Way-Home-Challenge-Americas/dp/1631494368?sa-no-redirect=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqyBgXoUbdU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGwv8BMWSeQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqvYL3ZoVBk

I would argue that your initial premise about Nathan Robinson is wrong. Anyone who can't do the work to re-examine their stated prejudices hasn't "meticulously studied" anything.

From that article:
> let me be up front about my bias. I don’t trust former McKinsey consultants. I don’t trust military intelligence officers. And I don’t trust the type of people likely to appear on “40 under 40” lists, the valedictorian-to-Harvard-to-Rhodes-Scholarship types who populate the American elite. I don’t trust people who get flattering reams of newspaper profiles and are pitched as the Next Big Thing That You Must Pay Attention To, and I don’t trust wunderkinds who become successful too early.

I find his bias against a Harvard Rhodes scholar funny, considering his own background.

As a veteran who worked with (and for) many fine intelligence officers, I find his mistrust of that group laughable and slightly offensive. Laughable because it's quite obvious that he has no actual knowledge of what intel officers actually do. Offensive because baseless prejudice is stupid and hurtful.

As for his bias against consultants, he never once mentioned what Mayor Pete actually did at McKinsey. He analyzed data to help inform grocery chains how they could reduce their prices. That's right...reduce. when you're a college grad with an entry-level job at a firm, how much influence do you have over their corporate choices? It's like blaming the kid at the drive thru for the pink goo in McDonald's burgers.

As for the article itself, which is essentially a book review of an autobiography, the cherry-picking of incomplete and out-of-context quotes from both the book and an article in the Indianapolis Star leave me questioning Robinson's motiv...oh wait, I know his motive. This is a man who is further left than Bernie, basically an anarcho-socialist, for whom no candidate will ever be as good as Bernie.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind Bernie and I will vote for him if he wins, but the close-mindedness of his followers sometimes turns me off.

If you'd like the complete story of the South Bend housing stuff, read this article. It's the same one Robinson uses, but has the actual outcomes of the situations he decries.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/21/pete-buttigieg-democratic-presidential-hopeful-south-bend-indiana-turnaround-city/3165477002/

Or you could watch this short video, that specifically talks to the two women of color whose conclusions Nathan so conveniently dismisses:

https://www.indystar.com/videos/news/politics/2019/03/21/how-mayor-pete-buttigieg-changed-course-help-neighborhoods-south-bend/3231290002/

Even better, you could read or listen to Pete's book yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Support your local library