Inaugural:-

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

It’s a twist on Mario Cuomo - A Tale of Two Cities:-
And that is what Buttigieg is talking about:-

It’s quite clear in article:-

Buttigieg announced his 2011 campaign two weeks after Newsweek featured South Bend as one of “America’s Dying Cities.” People had been promised a return of manufacturing jobs for almost half a century, Buttigieg says — “a little like Trump in coal country.”

And what is quite clear is like the coal mining - Trump is lying, the manufacturing jobs are not coming back:

From 1902 to 1963, the city was the home of carmaker Studebaker, which employed nearly 25,000 local workers at its peak, before going belly-up. The city never recovered. When he was growing up, “a lot of people would still talk about the closure like it happened yesterday,” he says. “When I ran, we had to paint a picture of the future that did not translate into nostalgia.”

Buttigieg is quite correct:- For the dying cities and towns in the rust belt ‘America Is already great’ is a poor slogan.

And ... as he has said many times in interviews, the good old days were not so great for African Americans and other disenfranchised minorities.

This quote from early January was reposted by bots. It’s a hit job.