From Mayor Pete: "None of this is theoretical for me.

I didn’t see Afghanistan on the news, I saw it through the armored windshields of the vehicles I drove or guarded on dozens of missions outside the wire, and as a Reservist I could be sent back to war if a reckless president leads us into peril.

I don’t think about gun violence as an abstraction, not when I’ve had to attend funerals and console the mothers of victims in my city — and swear in police officers alongside family members who pray they will come home safe every day.

Marriage equality isn’t a political rallying cry for me, it is a legal fact without which my future family cannot even exist.

Obamacare isn’t a political football for me, it’s a matter of household finance: it’s how my partner pays for his health care and how his mother pays for the chemotherapy on which her life depends.

Climate change isn’t about polar bears for me. It’s about the South Bend families whose homes I stood in last summer, their basements flooded with muck and excrement while children wandered around the porch the night before school started, because our city had just experienced one of those unprecedented rainfalls that science kept warning us about.

Commentators have focused on candidates and their antics as though that mattered most. But politics, for our city and for most Americans, isn’t about The Show. Its consequences don’t happen in the Beltway or on Twitter or on television. Politics happens in, and to, our homes, in the lives of the people we care about, like the people in my household, my family, and my community. That’s why this all matters so much. The process matters because of what it means to us voters as human beings, not the other way around."

- Pete Buttigieg