A key fact of life that candidates are loath to admit: Governing well is difficult, and good intentions are rarely sufficient to generate good outcomes.
Assume that South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg does not want to see young black men killed by police officers. Nor does he want the crime rate in South Bend to be high. He would like to see a world where African-American residents and South Bend police work together to make communities safer.
In mid-June, white South Bend Police sergeant Ryan O’Neill shot Eric Jack Logan, a 54-year-old black man, and killed him. Logan allegedly approached the officer with a knife; O’Neill shot Logan, who was taken to a hospital and soon after was pronounced dead. O’Neill was treated for minor injuries. O’Neill’s body camera was not running during the encounter and O’Neill failed to turn it on at any point.
A week later, Buttigieg sat alongside the city’s police chief at a town hall event. The crowd “repeatedly shouted him down” and the mayor was “met with profanities and heckles.”
“You are lying,” one attendee shouted at Buttigieg. “We don’t trust you,” said another.
After the meeting broke up, a visibly emotional Buttigieg told reporters that it was difficult to see “people I’ve known for years anguished,” angry at the city and at him, adding, “and I’m angry, too.”
“Right now, I’m not really thinking about the politics of it,” Buttigieg said. “I hope people can see what it’s like for a city to face up to the demons that racism has unleashed.”
Meanwhile, the South Bend Fraternal Order of Police issued their own blistering reaction, declaring that Buttigieg’s focus during this incident “solely for his political gain and not for the health of the city he serves.”
Mayor Buttigieg has in no way unified the community. Mayor Buttigieg continues to only focus on one incident and one family. Buttigieg has yet to comment on the largest mass shooting in the recent history of South Bend or on one juvenile killing another earlier in the week. Buttigieg’s focus on one family has left several others ostracized. He has not spoken to the families involved with the Kelly’s Pub shooting, the South Bend Police Family or the family of Sgt. O’Neill, all of whom are suffering greatly.
The reaction to Buttigieg outside of South Bend has been scathing. David Axelrod declares Buttigieg offered “answers were delivered in a factual, almost clinical, manner, more in keeping with his prior life as an analyst for McKinsey & Co. than the ministerial role called for by an episode in which a life was lost.” Everyone on The View ripped him. New York Magazine asks how badly he’s bungled the response to the shooting. and a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist argues that Buttigieg is proving himself an empty suit, coasting on image and evading scrutiny of his record, driven by “media coverage that lavished praise on Buttigieg while largely ignoring his strained relationship with people of color — particularly when it comes to policing.”
We are constantly reminded that Buttigieg has the golden résumé: Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey. And yet for all of his brains and accolades, Buttigieg is stumbling because governing in situations like this is difficult and requires telling people things they probably don’t want to hear. The South Bend police probably don’t want to hear that the disabled body cam sounds extraordinarily suspicious, and that the African-American community’s distrust of the police didn’t emerge out of thin air. South Bend African Americans may not want to hear that if Logan came at a police officer with a knife, then Sergeant O’Neill had the right to defend himself with deadly force. And it is probably impossible to successfully manage a crisis like this and run for president at the same time.
But keep in mind, a racially charged police shooting is probably one of the milder or more routine crises a city can face. It’s not New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots, New York City after 9/11, or the sunken Deepwater Horizon platform dumping oil across the Gulf Coast and threatening to wreck entire industries. It’s not an earthquake, tornado, or deep recession. And as bad as it is, a racially charged police shooting isn’t nearly as difficult as the problems the president is likely to face in January 2021: North Korea, Iran, the return of trillion-dollar deficits, the debt stretching past $22 trillion, hostile states developing artificial intelligence, robotic submarines, hypersonic missiles, etc.
Governing is hard and being a successful president is extremely difficult. But you won’t hear much talk about that on the debate stage tonight.