EXCERPT:
BUTTIGIEG: "Yeah, I mean, it’s vulnerable to being caricatured. And again, this is very similar — I mean, the elimination of cows is very similar to, you know, death panels. It’s these things that are being thrown out there. And what we need to do is concretize this and talk about what’s actually happening. I enjoy going down to get a cheeseburger in South Bend. I just want to not have the city flooded while I’m on my way there, right? And there’s a common sense way of talking about this that I think people, regardless of ideology, at least most people can get. You know, it’s not written in stone that the middle of the country has to be conservative. I mean, much of the best American progressive tradition comes from the middle of the country. You got — it goes all the way to back to John Brown in Kansas, you think about William Jennings Bryan from the middle of the country, Eugene Debs, outright socialist from Indiana. So it’s not that a certain part of the country has to be right or has to be left. It’s that we have to explain these things in terms that remind everybody what’s at stake, and I would argue that in an agricultural area, so you know, my part of the country, we got a lot of corn and soy. We have a whole lot at stake in these issues and we need to have the vocabulary and the argument be about that, not about farting cows."