(Inspiring music) Hello.

I'm Shawn Turner, general manager of WKAR, and I'm pleased to share with you this special presentation of the governor, Jim Blanchard Public Service Forum an evening with US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

Secretary Buttigieg previously served two terms as mayor of his hometown, South Bend, Indiana, where his work on transportation was nationally recognized.

He served seven years as an officer in the US Navy Reserve and was a presidential hopeful in 2020.

Former Michigan governor and MSU alumni Jim Blanchard sat down with Secretary Buttigieg for a candid and engaging conversation as part of the Jim Blanchard Public Service Forum, a discussion series created to allow our community to hear and learn from national and international leaders, diplomats and writers.

WKAR is pleased to bring you Governor Jim Blanchards conversation with Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Recorded live from the Kellogg Center on the campus of Michigan State University.

We hope you enjoy the program.

Governor, it's a real honor.

And I'm humbled to be in your presence at all, and certainly to be to be recognized in this way.

So to Governor Blanchard, to Janet Blanchard, thank you for welcoming me and for this occasion, I've been thinking a lot about 2050, not in the futuristic, marveling sense, although it's fun as well as frightening to indulge in trying to visualize and guess how our technological and physical landscapes will have changed by then.

But in a more direct and practical sense and thinking about what our world will be like in 2050.

But then my children, who are now two years old, will be early in their careers.

I will be hopefully getting close to retirement.

And if you're an undergraduate today, you in 2050 will be roughly as far removed from your college experience as I am today from mine, which does make me feel old all of a sudden.

And you'll be in a position to hold anybody who is in a position to make a decision today about anything accountable for how we did.

By definition, there are a lot of things that we can't predict about what things will be like by 2050, But there are some things that we know that are at stake right now that we're dealing with as a country and as a society will be at stake then and will have produced some kind of answer by then.

The development of artificial intelligence, the geostrategic and economic competition between the United States and China, the effect of what we now call social media on our individual as well as collective psychology.

I think all of them will have reached a new stage by then, and some answer will have been returned on a lot of the questions we're asking about those things right now.

And a lot depends on what those answers will be.

Also, by 2050, we'll know something.

I think that that is an open question right now, the answer to the question of whether we will live in a real democracy that carries on the American pattern of rights and freedoms, having expanded such that each generation knew more rights and freedoms than the generation that came before, or whether we, the generations now living, will have lived to see the high watermark of rights and freedoms in America before they began to be withdrawn.

I think that's maybe the biggest thing at stake in our lifetimes in America.

Now, there are some who might say that we are already giving ourselves a little too much credit for our democracy.

I think any fair reckoning of history would note that even just by the narrow definition of being able to vote, we didn't really fully become a democracy until the 1960s.

And even that is being eroded and chipped away in from the edges.

But I would also insist on this while our democracy has never been perfect.

Two things are true that America is the most consequential democracy in the world, and that the fact of our democracy is the most consequential fact about America, that without it, we're just another country out there.

So I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how our democracy is looking and what we can do about it.

And part of the answer to that question is our democracy's in trouble.

And I don't just mean the assault on voting rights, although that I think is troubling for anyone committed to Democratic values.

One of many reasons that I'm thankful to be a michigander or we're such good work is being done to secure and expand voting rights.

I also think that a vital part of shoring up democracy is shoring up confidence in democracy, which depends on trust, not only political trust, but social trust.

I would argue that democracy rests a trust equation between our society as a whole and our individual roles as voters and as citizens.

As citizens, we trust a system to have enough power that we all have to live by the rules that it comes up with, including the ones that we disagree with.

And meanwhile, in order to earn and have legitimacy with that kind of power, with that kind of trust, that system, more specifically, the government has to come back to us, the people, for approval in elections.

You might not trust a particular elected official.

You might not even like them.

So you get to vote against them.

But whether they win or lose, you have to trust and you have to have good reason to trust the mechanisms that bring them in and out of power based on a sense of trust that your participation helps construct a system that delivers results.

And the results are the key to the whole thing.

If you have witnessed mostly policy failure in your lifetime, which many young people feel is true, then you will be less trusting not only of your politicians, but of your politics.

And conversely, the more results you see, the especially when it comes to taking care of the basics, the more trust you may be willing to place in that system and the more you might be willing to put on the line in order to defend it.

Which brings me to my day job and what any of these high minded statements about the structure of democracy have to do with fixing the damn roads and building bridges and improving roads and all the things we work on all day.

And what I'd say is the connection is this a politician is judged based on their ability to work within a political system to make improvements in people's lives.

A system, though the system itself is judged based on whether it can deliver results, in particular, whether it can take care of the basics.

Because whatever is most consequential and searingly important in your life, whatever makes you tick your fidelity to your your love for your children, your interest in an enterprise or project, whatever it is, you only are empowered to go after that meaningful thing in your life if there's not a hole in the road on your way to work.

You have to think about it in order to wonder whether you're going to get a glass of clean, safe drinking water out of the faucet when you go downstairs.

It is so important that you not have to think about those things so that you can think about the things that make life meaningful.

And being able to take care of the basics is the mark of a good government.

And importantly, that's true no matter the system.

I can't tell you how many times I've been in a room with President Biden, especially in the months when we were fighting to get that infrastructure law done.

And the moment somebody said infrastructure, the first thing he started talking about was Xi Jinping.

Not out of admiration for what was going on in China, but out of an awareness that it was being said in some circles that that authoritarian approach was going to help deliver better infrastructure.

I can give you a another and darker example from right around the United States, because there were times the last time when it was widely common to speak questioningly about democracy and approvingly of fascism.

1930s in the 1940s, where people had a go to phrase for why Mussolini maybe wasn't that bad, and it was that he made the trains run on time.

By the way, he didn't.

That's a different speech.

I can walk you through the history of that, but that's what they said.

And I would also say to take a less dark example that so much of why American democracy, as well as our free market system became the envy of the world in the 20th century, was that by the early 20th century, it was clearly producing some of the best infrastructure and transportation in the world.

Then we lost some of that.

We began to dis invest in that, and that's why we worked so hard in this administration and in the knowledge led by the president to restore faith in democracy, we had to prove that democracy could deliver on those basics.

And that's where transportation comes in.

As the governor mentioned, the passage of the president's infrastructure package with bipartisan support was itself something of a political modern miracle.

That legislation was declared dead countless times, and there were moments when passing it seemed impossible.

But the president never stopped fighting for it.

So many people worked to make it happen.

And this month we marked the two year anniversary of what is now the largest investment in infrastructure that has happened in modern times in any country.

But of course, what's more important than getting a law passed is what it is doing to make people's lives better.

I want to share a couple of examples.

I was in Tell City, Indiana, not from the end of Indiana that I grew up in, where you can see Michigan from the mayor's office in southern Indiana, across the Ohio River from Kentucky, kind of small rural community that went decades without the resources that they really needed.

And we had a chance to go there to announce funding to rebuild their river port and support that is, you did used to offload crude iron, pig iron from barges that come up the river and get it up to a foundry nearby In that town of 7000 people, 1000 jobs depend on that foundry.

And that foundry depends on that port.

And the port consists of a floating one crane operation.

And when the Ohio River is a little too high or a little too low, that crane can't do its job.

So about one and a half million dollars out of the $1.2 trillion that we have been investing in infrastructure, we're able to put that crane on land and change what's possible for that community in Los Angeles, which could not be more different from Tulsa to Indiana.

I had a chance to see the work we were doing on the airport, and the most exciting thing wasn't a runway or a taxiway or control tower, all of which are things that I personally consider sexy.

It was a conversation we had with workers who have been working on the facilities there, who are part of a program called Higher L.A.X., which insisted on recruiting people from the zip code, the very economically disadvantaged zip code in which L.A. exits, give them the chance to work in the lucrative high skilled building and construction trades, jobs that are involved in some of the renovation and building going on there.

And some of them some of them had faced incarceration, some of them had faced housing and food insecurity.

All of them were now not only working and making good money, but standing up taller in the knowledge that their lives were different and that they were providing for their children differently.

Earlier this year in Buffalo, I visited a historically black neighborhood that was bulldozed to make way for a highway called the Kensington Expressway that cuts like a gash through the city and cuts off many historically black neighborhoods from downtown where of the Jobs and Opportunity are partnering with the state of New York.

We are decking over that highway so that it actually connects rather than divides.

By the way, similar project going on in Detroit with 8375, which we're so excited.

I try not to go too heavy on the mission Michigan examples, but but that means so much so so my point is that these projects have an opportunity not just to restore physical infrastructure, but I think to restore trust through getting results in ways that can help build up the legitimacy of democracy itself.

The other thing, though, that I think will be absolutely necessary for democracy to survive and thrive is the willingness of people like young people at a place like Michigan State to be part of something bigger than themselves.

And all of our willingness, as so many people that I've already met this evening who are so public spirited, have demonstrated a willingness to be part of ourselves across space and across time.

What I mean by being part of something bigger than ourselves across space is, of course, the idea that that we're working as part of a body team, a state, a country with a shared future.

And in that you can build an incredible amount of trust.

I saw for myself in the military when as so many people learn, when the needs of the Navy or whatever branch of service send you to war, you might think you know what you're skilled at.

But Uncle Sam has other ideas.

I thought my Arabic might come in handy.

I thought my naval training might come in handy.

I was sent to a landlocked country, Afghanistan, that doesn't speak Arabic and given a job with some implications for my future transportation career, which is driving a vehicle which which turned out to be no small thing.

If that vehicle needed to go outside the wire between a place like Kabul and a place like Bagram Airfield, especially because I didn't have a lot of people who reported to me.

So if I wanted enough people to safely operate that vehicle, I had to convince them on the strength of not much more than a handshake to go on that mission with me.

And they did.

People who could not have been more different from me in terms of their background, their income, their faith, definitely their politics.

Somehow we learned to trust each other with our lives just because we were part of something bigger and we had to.

Public service can do that.

And in the course of doing worthy things, we can get to know each other in ways that will thicken the connections that make democracy itself possible.

The other thing I want to mention is being part of something bigger than ourselves across time.

And what I mean by that is laying foundations for things that might take years or decades or generations to deliver.

I often call some of the biggest projects that we work on the cathedrals of our infrastructure.

Not long ago I was a as a at the celebration of funding for the Hudson River Tunnel.

It's going to take about $16 billion.

It's going to put tens of thousands of people to work.

And it will be one of the biggest public works projects in modern American history.

And some folks have picked up on how I like to call these the cathedrals of our infrastructure.

But when I call them cathedrals, it's not just because it's a poetic way to describe something that's large and expensive to build.

It's because things like that require great faith in the future to work on them.

Today.

That project, alongside so many of the thousands of the smaller other projects, like some of the ones I just described, is incredibly exciting.

But you can only work on it if you're content with the fact that it might not get done on your watch.

Even if I were to wind up as by far the longest serving Transportation Security secretary in U.S. history, which is not my intention.

And even if we figured out a way to do it in half the projected time, there's no way I will still have this job When they cut the ribbon on that new tunnel.

But then that's all the more reason that we have to start right now.

We tend to romanticize the past.

Growing up, fascinated by the 1960s, I was I would always tell my parents that that I kind of envied them coming of age in such a fascinating time.

And that what they reminded me was that it might seem fascinating now, but it was incredibly challenging and frightening and painful to live in that time.

I am hoping by the 2015 we will have done a good enough job now that we will have the luxury of romanticizing the struggles of the 2020s just a little.

Partly there's no question that we will look in horror at how close we came to the edge of the cliff on threats to our democracy, on violence at home and abroad.

That indifference to searing and fundamental issues like and racial inequality and climate change.

But then I hope and believe we will look in admiration at how those issues were addressed with determination and with skill and with personal and political courage.

And part of my faith in that possibility is that I know things can turn like that and often very quickly from experience.

When I was a student in college, imagining the 2020s the way you undergraduates might imagine the 2040s or 2050s, I didn't dare to imagine the life that I have now.

And I don't mean the life of a politician.

I mean the most important part of my life, which is coming home at the end of the day to a husband and two amazing, exhausting, hilarious two year old twins.

Because when I entered the military, it remained the policy of my country to fire me from that job if it came to light that I was gay.

When I ran for mayor, it was abundantly clear that I could have a dating life where I could have a shot at public office in Indiana, but I absolutely could not have both.

And we were talking ten or 15 years ago, not some bygone era when I came out.

The marriage that is now at the core of my personal life would not have even been legal in my home state.

I saw that change.

I mounted a serious campaign for the presidency when just five or ten years earlier.

The idea of a gay candidate doing that would have been not just uphill, preposterous.

And just a few decades after, you couldn't keep a job in the federal government as a geographer, let alone a soldier, let alone a presidential appointee, just a few decades after that.

I had my husband at my side as vice president.

Harris swore me in to the president's cabinet.

So I know how things can change.

I know that all of that happened because so many people who stepped up to ensure that rights and freedoms in our democracy would in fact expand and not contract in our time that the circle of belonging that defines not just our polity but our society would grow and include more and more people.

And if we can hold to that work and go after that task in all of our capacities as professional personal citizens, as officials, as students, as whoever we are, if we can do that, I think 2015 is going to look pretty good.

Thanks so much for the chance to be and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Well, that was great.

Inspirational.

You know, I had one of my first questions.

How kid you not was when you were a student at Harvard, did you ever think you would have a husband and twins?

And you've already answered it.

So, yeah.

No, I didn't.

Or again, if I did, I mean, I was so deep in the closet when I was a student, it barely mattered.

But.

But if I ever really thought about it seriously, I would have known that I could have.

I could have that or I could have a career in public life and not both.

And isn't it amazing how things can change?

Yes.

And it is inspirational, particularly for the young generation to think big, think positively.

Hmm.

Now, you're a self-described introvert.

How do you square that with being a candidate and a leader in public life and politics?

How do you do that?

The being an introvert doesn't mean that you don't like people or be like being around people.

It does tend to mean that you draw... you use energy when you're with people and you draw energy from from being alone or for being from being in a pretty intimate setting with a loved one or a couple of friends.

And I guess that's how I am.

And strangely, it can sometimes mean that it's easier to address a few hundred people than it is to address ten.

But I'd like to think it gives me a slightly different perspective than the prototypical political, political figure.

Yeah, interesting.

And speaking of perspective, so we have let's see, we have Bill Clinton was elected, reelected actually for his comeback in 1982, the year you were born.

You were born in January.

That fall, he got he had his comeback and the rest is history.

I was elected that year as well.

My question is, how do you think your generation looks at the world differently than mine or his mine is actually Silent Generation and Clinton was on the first hand, along with Bush and Trump of the baby boomers.

How do you think your generation looks at the world differently than us?

Well, I think if you belong to my generation, especially my slice of my generation, which you might call elder millennial, I think when I got to college, it was a period that that was being referred to as the end of history.

That was kind of the smart take.

Right?

Toward the end of the 1990s 2000, it was the end of history.

The Cold War was over.

Yes, there were politics and geopolitics happening, but but basically we were trending maybe irrevocably toward a general pattern of liberal democracy around the world.

And then 911 happened my sophomore year registration day.

I could never forget it.

And I think it shook my generation into realizing that a lot of things that we were being led to suspect we were immune to things like war and peace that just seemed like they happened in other countries and other times were very much on our plate, just as they had been for other generations.

I mean, that was a chain of events that ultimately led to, to me being in Afghanistan and many others.

Of course, in my generation too, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it almost changed the assignment, reassigned what our generation was going to have to be about.

The other thing is when I got to college, Facebook, YouTube, iPhones, none of those things existed.

By the time I was done with grad school, all of those things did.

Yeah.

And so I think we're on the bubble.

My generation of knowing a world without all of that and inhabiting a world where you can't imagine living without it.

So here we were in the year 2000, your mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

You're 38 years old.

2020.

I was in high school in 2000 I'm sorry, 2020.

You know, it's all a blur.

It's all a blur.

All right, here we are, 20 20.

I'm glad you're listening.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No one else does, but I do anyway.

2020.

You're mayor of South Bend.

You're 38.

You're from a solid Republican state.

Few have ever heard of you outside of the political community of Indiana.

And you run for president on the Democratic ticket.

What were you thinking?

When I heard that, I said, Oh, he's too young.

What's that?

You know?

And then I realized, wait a minute, I was that young when I ran for governor.

So.

Yeah, but what were you thinking about there?

I mean, did you grow up wanting to be president?

I grew up wanting to be an airline pilot, actually.

as you might imagine, did not run for reelection as mayor in 2015.

Supposing that if I had a successful second term, I'd immediately turn around and seek the presidency.

But every decision I've made to run for office and several decisions I've made not to run for office have been based on a I would argue a pretty simple process where or at least a straightforward process where you you think about what the office calls for, what it needs, what it what it in that particular moment, in that particular place calls for.

And then you think about what you bring to the table and what you have to offer.

And what I saw was that my party had lost an election, was struggling to connect, in particular in the industrial Midwest, had struggled to reach certain parts of a newer generation and was ready for voices that could be emphatic about rejection of many of the things that we had seen happen from 2016 into those years that I decided to run and at the same time do so with a sense of a proactive, positive sense of what the future could be like.

So that was kind of my assessment, right or wrong, of what the office needed.

And then I thought, Well, I'm young, I'm from the industrial Midwest.

I've, uh, I come from a non Washington background at a time when people are frustrated and impatient, even us or our people, so to speak.

Democrats were impatient with Washington, but I had established a, a record in government and maybe, maybe what I had to offer was was going to meet the moment.

And if you actually think that's true, then you have an opportunity, maybe an obligation to find out whether you're right or whether you're nuts.

And the world will tell you very quickly.

Well, but you ran you won Iowa caucuses and you ran a close second in New Hampshire.

So to the neighboring guy who had that thing locked up early.

So you weren't really off on that at all in terms of the need for generational change?

I think.

I think so.

Look, you know, the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire and then Nevada and South Carolina, I came in first, second, third and fourth.

The proposal did it in that order.

And if you if you want to win, you needed to go the other way.

But, you know, if obviously I didn't win the nomination, I gladly enthusiastically endorsed President Biden.

And then when he became president, he asked me to serve.

But but I think we demonstrated that we had something to say and that the fact that this campaign was successful in Iowa and was taken seriously, validated so much of what we had to say, so much of which, by the way, I see at play now in the policies I get to work on under the president's leadership.

It's interesting, though, after South Carolina, which was the big Biden came in like fifth in New Hampshire, I was up there.

I mean, nobody gave him a chance.

But his strategy was to win South Carolina and win big.

And he did.

But what was so remarkable was that you and Amy Klobuchar, eventually Kamala Harris, shortly Beto O'Rourke, others all dropped out in favor of him, which was in my lifetime, the most remarkable thing.

Normally people end up getting out, but wait much later and give some excuse.

And you guys rallied around Joe Biden and he came here and knocked the socks off, carried all 83 counties and locked it up early, was respectful of Bernie Sanders, as I'm glad it was.

And Sanders has been helpful ever since.

But that was a remarkable thing that all of you did that.

How did that how did that come to happen?

You know, I think movements and parties are sometimes hardest on our own.

The most ferocious political contests are the the the intramural ones.

And so one thing I really would give that whole field of candidates of whom there were 20 who debated.

One thing I would give that field a lot of credit for is that decision to quickly coalesce around the idea that we had shared values at stake and that there was something much bigger than any one of our campaigns or in any one of our can a personal brand or power that that we had to come together quickly and Im glad that we did.

You went a lot of places during that campaign.

What was the most unusual, Unusual thing you saw from beginning to end in 2020?

So many ways I could take that question.

It was you see lots of unusual things when you run for office and certainly when you're when you run for president.

But the most moving and powerful thing I saw was how people who had very different experiences could feel that they were part of the same story.

I remember one moment when when someone who now has become a friend, I've kept in touch with a high school student at the time she approached me on a rope line at an event and talked about how our campaign had helped her feel included.

I thought I knew exactly where she was going with this, but then she said it helped her feel included as she was navigating being a high school student with autism.

And I thought, you know, I care about autism.

I've had a couple of policies that touched it, but I don't know much about autism, and I didn't talk much about autism.

And yet for this student, our campaign had somehow signaled to her a sense of belonging that made her feel that her story was connected to my story and the stories that I frequentl a dreamer who's terrified that she's going to lose access to the only country she's ever known has in common with someone who worked in a tool and die shop in St. Joe County, Indiana, for 17 years and is now told mid-career by some well-intentioned retraining organizations, how you lost your job as a tool and die maker.

But we've got a great career for you in in nursing and it's going to be great for you.

And it might be a great career, but it's not who he thinks he is.

That search for belonging was something that I found in so many different versions reverberate to the same general tune.

And it was something that that I think about all the time.

Now in doing what seems like very nuts and bolts work on transportation.

But but in many ways is about making sure people belong, that they're included, that they can get around.

You can navigate your own community, literally the most literal sense.

And it's part of why inclusion or exclusion in or from transportation means so much.

You know, so you get tapped to be secretary transportation.

I mentioned earlier the Senate vote was 86 to 13.

That's big, actually better than most people, I think, that were nominated.

What are the 13 that didn't vote for you?

What were their reasons?

What did they say?

Who are those guys anyway?

I'm just curious.

Did they have anything other than you just were a Democrat or you were too close to Biden or?

What was it?

They all Said some reason or another.

I still take their calls when they want to get a project done.

Well, let's let.

And that and that gets us back to the infrastructure bill.

This huge you point out 1.2 trillion.

how are you doing on spending that money in a way you think is is intelligent, helpful, unifying and do people who vote against it show up at ribbon cuttings and stuff?

Oh, and how!

I mean, none other than the speaker of the House.

I couldn't believe it was Monday or Tuesday toured an airport project that that I that I signed off on with a local member of Congress and neither that local member nor he had voted for the funding that we're using to build the thing.

And you know, there's there's many things you could say about that, but one thing you could say about that is must be a really great project.

We've got 40,000 projects underway around the country that that have been identified and counting that had been identified as getting funding through the IIJA.

Some of them are six figure grants to improve road safety in a small community that can be done in one construction season.

Some of them are what I was describing earlier the cathedrals of our infrastructure.

We got a tunnel to be known as the Frederick Douglass Tunnel.

The legacy tunnel is the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel outside of outside of Baltimore.

It's 150 years old, massive project, but from the biggest to the smallest.

What they all have in common is that they have something to do with safety, jobs and in many cases, climate inequity too, making sure that we are smarter about those things, that we're including instead of excluding that transportation that was sometimes used with federal funding to divide in the past is being used to unite this time around that we recognize that if transportation is the biggest part of our economy, contributing greenhouse gases, then it has to aspire to be the biggest solution because part of the solution to climate change and of course, just plain getting people around effectively and affordably and safely, that's what we're working on.

And nothing is more fulfilling than going to a community that's been trying to get something done for ages.

And I'll give you another example from Monroe.

Just because we happen to be there today, there's a railroad crossing West Elm there that that that is right by the YMCA, right by a school.

And that backs up emergency vehicles when the train is in the way.

We're going to get rid of it.

We're gonna do an underpass so that the trains and the vehicles aren't competin Thousands of those across the country.

It's exciting, but it's daunting cause at the end of the day, we need to be able to say that America got $1.2 trillion of value out of $1.2 trillion in taxpayer money.

I think about the proportions of this.

Just do the math.

I'm not quite quick enough on my feet to do the mental math, but talking about a lot of money for every man, woman and child in the United States of America, we're all paying quite a bit into this.

We feel that pressure to get it done well and effectively and to get those results.

Student Question What is the Department of Transportation's plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

Okay, so like I said, transportation biggest sector in the U.S. economy emitting carbon pollution.

So what we need to do is replace shift or improve trips.

What I mean by that first replace, it may be that if you look at the really, really big picture, especially really, really big dollars on the table, we can actually better integrate the design of communities with a philosophy of transportation that means, for example, that in order to go get your kid from school and then pick up groceries and then meet somebody for dinner instead of driving three very different places, you can kind of do it all in a loop or you can do some of it on foot.

This isn't going to work everywhere, but in many places we can actually work with with cities, states, counties, communities to reduce the need for certain trips.

That's one.

Two is to shift trips.

And that means giving people better options.

In other words, you know, we were all I think as Americans, we were generally very attached to our cars.

But you shouldn't be forced to bring a ton of metal along with you everywhere you go.

And so the more excellent transit options exist, the more people will take what is even with the greenest of EVs, the more climate friendly mode, which tends to be transit.

And I'm not just talking about people movement, but goods movement.

It's why is as much as when people hear about ports and waterways, they're usually thinking about work, like what we're doing in Port of Miami, where we're helping expand a berth or Long Beach, where we're helping get on dock rail there or in Monroe.

Did I mention Monroe when I was there earlier?

We have Judge Joe Costello here.

That's right.

So hes here.

but also moving things on barges that would have otherwise had to go on a truck, all of that as part of the solution.

And then of course, making sure that if if it's the same trip, it hasn't been shifted to a different mode.

It hasn't been the need for the trip hasn't been eliminated, that we can improve the emissions of that particular trip, which is what things like making sure America wins the EV era is all about.

You know, that's related.

Another student question Do you see support for passenger rail service in the US increasing, if at all?

And what role can the department play?

I do.

I and obviously my boss is famously a passenger rail enthusiast too.

So this is I don't get to claim to be the number one passenger rail advocate in this administration.

But I think I'm a close second.

And I think more Americans would feel the same way if they had experienced it.

The reason President Biden is such a big believer in trains is because he depended on one every day to get home from Wilmington to be with his family when he was a senator.

And seeing really is believing it's true of good rail in general is definitely true of high speed rail.

I think so many Americans have had the experience of going abroad and then thinking, why can't we have that?

Of course we make cars here, you know.

Yeah but, they make cars in Germany and they have good trains, too.

We shouldn't have to pick.

Good answer.

And what what do you what is your personal car?

is that a Chrysler maybe?

Sure is.

It's a Pacifica.

It's the Pacifica.

By the way, as Secretary of Transportation I don't endorse any particular brand or company or anything like that.

But as a dad, that's that's what Chasten and I drive.

And and it's a plug in hybrid, which means and I think for for many Americans this will be how they begin to experience EVs is because it... for us.

And before that we had a C-Max which we got used for about 14,000 bucks when I was when I was mayor of South Bend.

And I thought that you needed some elaborate contraption to charge a car.

Of course, all we did was just plug it in the regular plug on the wall.

I think the more Americans experience, the fact that if you are fortunate enough to live in a single family home with a garage, which ironically is most true in rural and some might say redder areas, you already have charging infrastructure, it's in the cities that code as more politically liberal and are considered to be where EVs will be more readily adopted that we actually have more work to do to make charging accessible anyway.

Point is, that's how we get around.

That's how we get the kids to where they need to be.

You're following our Gordie Howe Bridge?

Yeah, I've worked on that for ten years, so as a consultant, I'm not now.

I just I do it for free now.

But anyway, speaking free I will say that that, that large infrastructure projects that don't require any taxpayer dollars or are or any federal dollars are a special category and always welcome.

It's good.

It's good.

All right.

So let's again I know you're not Secretary of State, but, you know, you thought about, you know, being President, so you want to comment.

I mean, it would seem to me that the tragedy in the Middle East has is now overshadowing Ukraine and harming President Zelenskyy's effort to defend Ukraine against Russia.

You want to comment on that?

And then let's talk a little bit about the Middle East, But comment Ukraine, because I understand you were there sometime a short time ago.

Yeah, a few weeks ago I went to Ukraine.

I've been in frequent contact ever since the beginning of the invasion with my my counterpart the Minister for Infrastructure, who I admire the work that that that team and their railways are doing.

We saw what the railways are doing.

They have adapted train cars to turn into mobile ICU units to get Remember, they don't have civil aviation in Ukraine right now, even though it's a very modern country.

Imagine, imagine if we could have everything.

Never mind the war.

Imagine if we could have everything we have in America except there was suddenly no aviation.

So one thing they've done is they've adapted their trains in order to into ICU movements that move soldiers to to medical care.

I saw they did that.

I saw the vision that they have even while their infrastructure is still being destroyed by Russian bombardment to rebuild and not just to put it back the way it was, but to put it back on terms that will help this country to to grow and succeed on on more interconnected and more pro-Western terms in the future.

I met with President Zelenskyy, who is very focused on some of the details of how to make sure the transportation systems in his country work in part because they are needed to move grain on the Black Sea, which is of consequence for feeding the world, and also a consequence for fueling an economy that needs to be strong enough to finance a war effort.

It's incredible what they are doing.

And I would also argue, as somebody who has always believed that any foreign policy needs to be one you can explain in East Lansing or in South Bend, and not just in a in a think tank or or in Washington, DC, that it's a pretty good investment because that Russian aggression won't stop there if it is not stopped.

There.

And Ukrainians aren't asking us to go and fight with them.

They're asking us to help them fight.

It's a good deal.

You care to comment about the Middle East?

There's much pain.

There's always been.

But but everything about what has happened, especially since October 7th, the pain of what the families and the hostages and those who were murdered by Hamas terrorists have gone through.

And the pain of what so many civilians in Gaza are going through.

And that pain in what is not just a contest between Israeli and and Arab or between Muslim and Jew, but really is a contest between hope and hate has reached us in so many shocking ways.

An unbelievable rise in anti-Semitism in the United States, a horrific rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Islamophobia, including the what we saw happen in Vermont, including the killing of the six year old boy.

Why do you feel me?

Whatever you think about anything in the Middle East, you know that is not a six year old boy's fault.

And what we know we have to do is to hold true to our values and our alliances.

And I think also hold true to something that the President has made clear, which is that the future we're building, which is obviously not something for the United States unilaterally to build, but it's something we must support in the right way is one where it cannot just be what things were like on October 6th, not for the Israelis, who did not have clearly the kind of security that many thought they had, and certainly not for the Palestinians.

Yeah, there is, as you know, and it's talked about a lot, a real rise in antisemitism on the campuses, not just this year, this month, but the last few years and a certain amount of Islamophobia as well.

And what do we need to do about that?

Is that is it a lack understanding, a lack of civility?

What a narrow view of the world?

What what do you I mean, we don't have if we had quick answers, we.

I don't I don't claim to have a quick.

Yeah.

I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts here.

We're on a university campus.

It's a concern.

The university officials are concerned.

The students are concerned.

Well, what I know is that a university is a place where by design, people are here to learn as much as they can about themselves and, about the world around them.

And part of that means building and expressing the commitments that you form through your study of the world and your introspection about who you are and the time you spend with others challenging one another and the commitments and the beliefs that people form and hold true to will include ones that are that are sometimes ferociously different, all of which is not only acceptable, but necessary, especially at a university.

The university being maybe the greatest invention ever, but also there's something that comes alongside that, which is a fidelity to certain principles of mutual respect.

And the word civility has been so tortured, I don't even know if we can use it in a way now that doesn't get mangled, but a basic regard for one another and an understanding of the importance of the freedom to have those ferocious disagreements on respectful terms.

and by the way, respectful can also be noisy, really.

And that's okay.

But with regard for one another's humanity, especially when those disagreements are coming from a place of pain, which is clearly so true when it comes to, among other things, the pain that is reverberating from what's happening in the Middle East right now.

Thank you.

Thank you for your thoughtful Do you speak with the president often?

I was with him on Monday and I think I might be with him one more time this week.

It's not like we sit around over coffee.

He's very busy President.

But I have had so many opportunities to be with him and see him.

First of all, defending and building and negotiating his key policies, notably the infrastructure law.

I saw the way that he worked in good faith with with Democratic and many Republican Senators and House members to get that done.

And and now I see him challenging us across the administration and certainly across the Cabinet to deliver.

Were going have a convening tomorrow, the Investing in America cabinet to assess two years after he signed that law where we are and what we need to do next.

And I'll tell you he is a demanding and and a great boss.

Do you speak with senators and congressmen frequently?

Every day.

Every day?

Somebody calling you and you're going to return the call of course.

Of course.

How many do call them?

So the relationship with Congress is is obviously critically important.

What I try to do is keep it on as non-partisan terms as possible.

And, you know, for everything that's really ideologically freighted and there are especially labor and environmental issues, the kinds of things that come up when I'm testifying in the House sometimes, but, you know, wanting a road fixed or wanting a tunnel done or getting an airport right or unsticking some bureaucratic issue is not that ideological.

And so I find that I'm able to work in good faith with with members on both sides of the aisle often and and we're looking to Congress to do some things right now.

We're looking to Congress to advance an FAA reauthorization at a time when we need more air traffic controllers and better technology.

We're looking to Congress to pass a budget and appropriation.

Very important.

And I'm concerned because even with all the bipartisan consensus around transportation, some of what we've seen, especially from from the House, GOP, would short some very important things, including rail safety and aviation.

We're working with the House and Senate.

We're urging them to advance a railway safety act.

We're getting pretty close to the one year anniversary, the one year mark since the derailment in Norfolk, the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio woke up the country to just how many rail accidents happen and always have.

And we've taken a number of steps since then, but we could be doing so much more if Congress can act.

And I don't want us to get all the way to a year looking back for that to happen.

So whether I'm asking them for something or they're asking me for something, I'm I'm certainly spending a lot of time with Congress.

When you were in high school, you won to contest, an essay contest, for the John F. Kennedy Library.

I was on their board at one point.

Yeah, I had no vote on that, by the way.

But you won the contest.

What motivated you to submit an essay and, you know, you went there, you met, you met with the family.

How old were you then?

17?

18?

17.

18.

Something like that.

Must've been, you know, that was exciting.

Yeah.

So, so the way it works is, is President Kennedy obviously a big believer in public service.

Matter of fact, I'm the product of a of an institute that was there when I was in college, not unlike some of the work I see happening here at Michigan State, designed around motivating people to to to run for office, partly in memory of the fact that President Kennedy, who thought he would be a journalist when he got to college, emerged.

Something happened while he was there.

Something lit a spark in him, and he emerged on a trajectory that would ultimately make him a president and a great one.

Anyway, for that reason, they sponsor this essay contest on public service in the name of the Profile in Courage, A book that he wrote to provide comes the Profile in Courage Award.

There's an essay contest, and I had a government teacher who I think suggested that I that I write by then.

I still want to be an airline pilot.

I was getting more and more interested in public service and and so I picked somebody.

What you do is you write about somebody that you think is a kind of profile in courage.

I spent a week researching and writing and found this this, this figure that I really believed in and I was looking up one last detail a day or two before it was due on the very, very early Internet.

You know, the country at the dial with the little dots in the middle.

And I realized something that today you would notice much more quickly if you Googled it, that the person I was writing about had already been the subject of a winning essay a couple of years earlier.

So I'm back to square one.

And I thought about who else is there, who, whether I agree with them in every particular or not really says what they're about.

At a time when it seemed to me this is in the late 1990s that a lot of leaders in both parties were kind of willing to kind of drift away from what they most believed in in order to just look like they were part of the consensus and get along with that that mood.

And I was looking for for I was thinking about examples of people who really were exactly who they said they were, even if it meant they weren't going anywhere politically.

And there was Representative Bernie Sanders, who I admired for that reason, didn't agree with them on every single thing, but admired for that reason.

And I wrote an essay.

It was pretty good.

And then I won and I got to go to the Kennedy Library, be there when they gave out the the Profile in Courage award, who which went to John Lewis.

I think I was there.

I think Janet and I were there actually.

You probably were.

We didnt meet you though.

We should have we.

You probably you may have met me, but you wouldn't have noticed me because, you know, I was the kid.

I mean, they had the kid who won the essay contest, and then they get to, you get to John Lewis.

You don't remember the kid who won the essay contest.

You remember John Lewis, who gave that incredible speech that I've since seen him give more than once about how they literally had to hold that house together in a storm and who was one of those people.

There's not many.

The very few, you know.

You know, I met so many, obviously great and extraordinary political figures and learned in that process, as you do that most of them, no matter how impressive they might be more experienced than I am, they might be more intelligent than I am, but they're not on a different plane of existence.

You realize the humanity of of of even political figures you admire when you meet them.

But then there's that tiny handful.

And John Lewis is the best example I can think of who really do seem to be on a different plane of existence.

He just got somewhere else as a matter of consciousness.

Something about putting his life on the line and very nearly losing it for what was right.

I don't know if you could feel it right.

Yeah.

When you were Absolutely.

It was incredible.

We we had so many of you.

We're here.

We interviewed him like this.

And you could hear like, tonight you could hear a pin drop, I might add.

And it was a wonderful night.

But you're right about John.

Well, he kind of just ascended up there.

I mean, he has did as even a young man.

You know, I saw him not not long before he died.

It was the last day of my campaign.

I had I woke up knowing it was time to drop out, but I still had to put my best face forward because we hadn't announced it yet.

And we were in Plains, Georgia.

President Carter and Mrs. Carter had welcomed us.

Mrs.. Carter, who of course just just passed away.

And there's such beautiful tributes to her.

They welcomed us to to their home.

They had done it once before and we had breakfast.

And I had come there in hopes that that that we might be able to earn some some support from them.

But it was clear that things were not going my way by that morning.

And I, uh, President Carter asked me how things were going.

I just lost South Carolina.

I said, Well, we had a setback.

But I think, you know, I think there's a lot of things going our way.

And, you know, I'm really proud of this campaign.

And I said “what do you think?

” And with the biggest kindest smile on his face, he said, “I think you oughta drop out ”.

and he said it just quietly enough that nobody else at the table heard it.

But if nothing else, I knew that that the direction I was heading in that day was the right one.

Wow.

That's quite a.

Have you ever told that anybody?

Uh, once or twice.

Yeah, maybe not to this many people.

And then and then we flew up to Selma because it was the commemoration of that Bloody Sunday.

And everybody, every candidate or most of us were there.

Civil rights figures.

Reverend Jackson, Al Sharpton, everybody you could think of was there.

And we marched to that bridge and it was a sea of people.

And then we knew that John Lewis was very ill.

But this car almost miraculously just wove through the crowd.

When we got to the bridge and out came John Lewis and he stood up and you knew you you could tell that he was ill, but you wouldn't have known it just listening.

He still had a booming voice.

And I just remember him saying, “I thought I was going to die On this bridge ”.

And then he talked about how important it was that everybody vote, that everybody use that right, that they had fought so hard for.

And I remember tears streaming down my face, watching him knowing it would almost certainly be the last time any of us saw him.

And I feel I got to tell you, you telling me on in the same speaking speaker series is him, makes me feel about this big right now.

But I'm so glad you're able to do that with him.

Well, you are big.

Thank you very much for being with us.

This has been a special presentation of the Governor, Jim Blanchard, Public Service Forum: an Evening with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, I'm Shawn Turner.

Thank you for watching.