This is a short one, but an important one.
Pete Buttigieg, who is still the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has chosen to cancel big fundraisers planned for Los Angeles on Wednesday in order to stay in South Bend and help his city address the shooting by a South Bend police officer of a black citizen.
For those who think that time spent as a Mayor is not relevant experience to the Presidency, I ask you to ponder this: How a Mayor leads his city through a moment of tragedy, heightened emotions, and potentially heightening tensions is not only a microcosm of experiences that Presidents will confront, but it is both good training for the Mayor and a great opportunity for us, the voters, to evaluate that Mayor’s skills. Indeed, the press is watching this developing situation closely, with the Washington Post noting:
Now, after the shooting death of a black man in South Bend by a police officer, Buttigieg will have to show the depths of his knowledge about the concerns black Americans regularly have with law enforcement in the city he leads — and the country he hopes to.
Mayor Pete is off to a good start in dealing with this crisis. He not only has halted campaigning, he has taken an open-minded and engaged posture towards the incident:
“The community is tested when there is an incident like this,” Buttigieg told local journalists. “The relationship between police officers who are sworn to keep this community safe and everybody who lives here is among the most important things we have as a city.”
Buttigieg said he and others in his administration will meet with “faith leaders, neighborhood leaders, activists, anybody who cares enough about the city that they’re concerned to know not only what happened but how we as a community can do a good job of healing, even as we wait for more facts to come in.”
Contrast Mayor Pete’s dedication to his responsibilities as Mayor with the acts of President Trump in responding to similar situations and the contrast could not be more stark.