On the world's biggest stage Thursday night, Pete Buttigieg looked confident and crisp on national television as he answered Democratic debate questions about health care, student debt, climate change and international relations with China.
What a difference a few days makes. On Sunday afternoon, the 37-year-old mayor had been somber and browbeaten as black South Bend residents gave him an earful at a chaotic town hall after a black man was shot and killed by a white police officer whose body camera was deactivated.
When debate moderator Rachel Maddow finally asked why the South Bend police department had actually gotten less diverse under Buttigieg's tenure, the mayor sounded more confident than he had at any moment when talking to his own residents earlier in the week: "Because I couldn't get it done."
Buttigieg said he was not allowed to take sides in the ongoing investigation into the shooting, he acknowledged, "It's a" _ Buttigieg stumbled for a beat _ "a mess."
He said the problem won't get fixed "until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism."
But then former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper stepped in and talked about his own police reforms as Denver's mayor. "The real question America should be asking is why, five years after Ferguson" _ when protests and rioting broke out over policing in Missouri in 2014 _ "every city doesn't have this level of police accountability," Hickenlooper said.
Buttigieg responded with one of the Democratic race's rarest sightings: embracing a union's denunciation of him. In this case, it was his city's police union, the Fraternal Order of Police _ which had put out a statement upset that the mayor had implied that racism was at work in the police department.
"The FOP just denounced me for too much accountability," Buttigieg said.
"If the camera wasn't on, and that was the policy, you should fire the chief," California Rep. Eric Swalwell replied. "If you're the mayor, you should fire the chief, if that's the policy and someone died."
Self-help guru Marianne Williamson interrupted before Buttigieg could respond.
Buttigieg fixed an icy stare at Swalwell for nearly four seconds afterward as the debate continued.
