Pete Buttigieg on fatherhood – CBS News

When it comes to dealing with two young children, Pete Buttigieg, the unflappable Transportation Secretary, can seem a little jet-lagged. Pete and her husband, Chasten Buttigieg, raise their two-year-old twins, Penelope and Gus, in Traverse City, Michigan, where they recently moved full-time from Washington to be closer to family.

The kids call Pete “Daddy” and Chasten “Daddy.”

Asked if they are a good cop/bad cop duo, Pete replied: “I don’t know if it’s the good cop/bad cop’s fault. , it is not?”

“You’re 100% a pushover,” Chasten acknowledged.

Their journey to parenthood began nine years ago when Chasten raised their children on their first date. The two married in 2018 — the professor and the hyper-motivated Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar, Navy vet and mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

A year later, Pete launched his historic run for president at age 37.

Chasten said, “I think the presidential campaign aged our marriage by five years. So when it was over, I think we both really understood that we were ready to start a family.”

They chose adoption, a campaign in itself. “Like so many adoptive parents, there were some false starts and some sadness,” Pete said. “Sometimes you get a call, but it turns out it’s not O to call.”

Chasten said there were five false alarms: “We would go to bed thinking maybe the next day we would be parents, and then we got a call and a different family was selected, or something else happened.”

Then it came O to call. “I get so worked up — oh, man, I get so emotional every time I talk about this! They were so little; they weighed, like, ten pounds. And I remember we walked into the room, we were frozen, and the nurse said, ‘Parents, you can hold them.'”

That joy turned to fear when her son Gus contracted RSV, a common virus that can be deadly to children.

“Most parents don’t think you’re going to be the kind of parent who knows their way around a children’s hospital – and the next thing we know, it’s us,” Pete said. “Work never completely disappears. Sometimes I would have to take my laptop into the bathroom in Gus’s ICU room, close the door, and put on a virtual Zoom background.”

These days, Penelope and Gus are hard to keep up with. But Pete described the importance of this moment in their lives: “I think for any parent, you’re trying to move from task to task. And then you have to stop for a second and realize that these are some of the best and most important parts of your life, not just your day!”

For Pete Buttigieg, work It is all consuming. He is the lead project manager and salesman for the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill to help rebuild America’s aging roads, bridges and rails.

In April, he helped open the nation’s first high-speed train in Las Vegas carrying passengers between Sin City and the Los Angeles area. “It’s ambitious,” he said, “but you know, America is built on ambitious, aggressive plans to do great things. … I mean, this will be one of the cathedrals of American infrastructure.”

But there are other cathedrals collapsing. During his tenure as secretary, Buttigieg faced a series of crises: port congestion, the airline collapse during Christmas, the train derailment in Ohio, the Boeing plane explosion and, recently, the bridge collapse in Baltimore.

Asked if he sees a systemic problem, Buttigieg said: “When we got here, we were facing the most intense, multifaceted disruption to our transportation systems since 9/11; that was COVID-related. But that’s not the only problem. of underinvestment has accumulated over about 40 years.”

Vigliotti asked, “If President Biden is reelected, how long will you remain secretary?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t intend it to be a political response, although it may seem like it,” Buttigieg responded. “I don’t think I’m going to bring longevity records to this job. I love this job, but I also know it’s a job you can only do for so long.”

The political prodigy, who embraced fatherhood and embraced the makeshift, was asked: “Is there a world where you see Penelope and Gus living in the White House in 2029?”

“I don’t know about that,” Buttigieg responded. “That’s not how I’m thinking, not even in the near future. In fact, having children so young makes you think more than anything about the really long-term future, past when I’m around.”

Vigliotti asked, “When you had your first meeting with Chasten, did you imagine you would be here today, in this place in your life?”

“Part of what’s amazing about falling in love and getting married is that you’re on this journey and you just don’t know where it will take you,” Buttigieg responded. “But I can’t imagine I could have asked for anything better. Not that it wasn’t difficult, but if you asked me that summer night nine years ago, told me what would happen and that? It would have seemed greedy to expect to have all this nine years later.”

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Story produced by Dustin Stephens. Editor: José Frandino.

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