Shortest Way Home, by Pete Buttigieg: on Jobs

Pete Buttigieg: 2009 auto bailout was worthwhile; it saved jobs and pensions

But I wonder, sometimes, whether Mourdock talked to any of the families whose livelihoods could have been wrecked by his legal adventure. Did he think about the stakes for them, or was it just numbers on a page to him?

To Mourdock, it seems, the most important issue at stake in the auto rescue was that investors on the bond market would have to take a haircut. To the rest of us, the most important issue was that families lives could be ruined by the same kind of economic disaster that had nearly killed my hometown half a century earlier.

To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology.