Pete Buttigieg had jokes for the DNC Wednesday night. “Here is a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself saying. I’m Pete Buttigieg, and you might recognize me from Fox News,” he began. Buttigieg then wasted no time jumping to his first topic: Trump’s vice presidential candidate choices.
Of Trump’s former vice president, Buttigieg added, “At least Mike Pence was polite. J.D. Vance is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life that he has in mind for you, then you don’t count. Someone who said that if you don’t have kids, you have, quote, ‘no physical commitment to the future of this country.’”
“You know, Senator, when I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then,” Buttigieg continued. “Many of the men and women who went outside the wire with me didn’t have kids either. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.”
Choosing Vance as the nation’s next vice president would be “doubling down on negativity and grievance,” he added. “Darkness is what they are selling. The thing is, I just don’t believe that America today is in the market for darkness. I believe America is ready for a better kind of politics. Yes, politics at its worst can be ugly, crushing, demeaning, but it doesn’t have to be. At its best, politics can be empowering, uplifting. It can even be a kind of soul craft.”
The hope, he continued, is that our elected leaders help us bring out the best parts of ourselves. “Right now the other side is appealing to what is smallest within you,” he said. “They’re telling you that greatness comes from going back to the past. They’re telling you that anyone different from you is a threat. They’re telling you that your neighbor or nephew or daughter who disagrees with you politically isn’t just wrong, but is now the enemy.”
Buttigieg acknowledged that the idea of electing a candidate who is pushing joy might sound naive, but he arrived at the conclusion thanks to a typical dinner time experience in his home, “When the dog is barking and the air fryer is beeping and the mac and cheese is boiling over, and it feels like all the political negotiating experience in the world is not enough for me to get our three-year-old son and our three-year-old daughter to just wash their hands and sit at the table,” he said.
“It’s the part of our day when politics seems the most distant, and yet the makeup of our kitchen table, the existence of my family is just one example of something that was literally impossible, as recently as 25 years ago, when an anxious teenager growing up in Indiana wondered if he would ever find belonging in this world.
“This kind of life went from impossible to possible, from possible to real, from real to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime,” Buttigieg continued. That kind of change didn’t happen overnight, but was “was brought about through idealism and courage, through organizing and persuasion and storytelling, and yes, through politics, the right kind of politics.”
“I don’t presume to know what it’s like in your kitchen, but I know, as sure as I am standing here, that everything in it, the bills you pay at that table, the shape of the family that sits there, the fears and the dreams that you talk about late into the night there, all of it compels us to demand more from our politics than a rerun of some TV wrestling death match,” he added.
This November, voters have a choice to “choose better politics.”
“That is what Kamala Harris and Tim Walsh represents. That is what Democrats represent. That is what awaits us when America decides to end Trump’s politics of darkness once and for all. That is what we choose when we embrace the leaders who are out there building bridges and reject the ones who are out there banning books. This is what we will work for every day to November and beyond. So let’s go win this!”
You can watch Buttigieg’s speech in the video above.
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