Pete Buttigieg is sitting in an auditorium of South Bend residents who are furious about the recent police killing of a black man named Eric Logan. “We don’t trust you!” somebody screams. A woman listens carefully, her middle finger raised. A man tells Buttigieg, “Do your job just so you can have a moral compass when you leave this place, dawg.”

Buttigieg, who is still their mayor but also running to be the Democratic presidential nominee, looks cold and wooden in comparison. “This is the beginning of the conversation, not the end,” he intones.

CNN commentator and former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod is not happy with the performance, Buttigieg’s communications director Lis Smith tells her boss afterward. Next, we watch as the campaign’s comms staff relentlessly preps Buttigieg on how to “connect with people” about the killing. “Try to keep your hands above the podium,” one tells him. They insist on using the grammatically tortured “officer-involved shooting.” In a bizarre inclusion of footage, given the circumstances, one communications guy mocks Bernie Sanders’s New York accent.