Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point.
Buttigieg's contention is a valid one; imagine that you are writing a novel about going into space. Except you have never been to space. In fact, you've never even been on an airplane. You're a third grade algebra teacher in a failing inner city school. You can imagine the fear inside you as take off nears; you can imagine the feelings of apprehension, of weightlessness, of homesickness for those you have left behind, but you can never really properly explain how being aboard the Challenger feels because you have never done it. What you can do, though, is write a heartfelt and honest novel based in a failing inner city school with a protagonist who makes a difference in the lives of his third grade algebra students.
Politics, and policy making, are like this, according to Buttigieg. Although you are not going to be an expert on everything, having some experiences that enable you to empathize with the people whom your policies are affecting is key when creating public policy that is hopefully going to improve the lives of the citizens you govern. This is his goal for both national government and for city government, and it is perhaps even more important when it comes to the latter because each city has specific needs that only someone who has lived there can understand.
Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that might be made better or worse by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.
The central point here is that politics gets in the way of actually governing a city, a county, a state or a nation in a way that leaves it better than it was on the day you took office. In today's political world, it seems that both sides are determined to prove the other wrong without first looking to see if there is any common ground that can be worked on instead. Bi-partisan communication is paramount; for example, if there is high unemployment in a particular area, and one party takes office and creates jobs, it is a positive thing for those who now have a job to go to, yet this might be overlooked by the opposition party who want to highlight the fact that big business have created these jobs and are therefore only doing so in order to earn more money for themselves, rather than on celebrating the fact that where there was no jobs, now there are jobs to offer. If a plan works, and when implemented, a policy improves lives, does it really matter who thought of it, or how nicely it was worded on a piece of paper?
Buttigieg's point also suggests that too much time is spent politicking and not enough time is spent on doing. Sometimes politicians are deeply focused on semantics, on oratory, and on outwitting each other with a clever and witty epithet, rather than on working towards a common goal of better lives for everyone. The most difficult thing about creating workable and beneficial public policy is getting politics out of the way.
