68 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
wall of cameras or talking to me about the guilt or in-
nocence of American turncoat Alger Hiss. This may
seem like a low bar, but many presidential candidates
never reach it.
Buttigieg’s achievements could be construed in
a Tracy Flick-esque manner, but no one is better at
self-inoculation. I mentioned to an Indiana political
reporter who has covered Buttigieg’s campaign from
the larval stage that, given Buttigieg’s black-voters
deficit, maybe the mayor should skip Fallon and go
build a house in an urban neighborhood with Jimmy
Carter. The reporter sent me a photo of Buttigieg
building a house in 2018. That weekend, Buttigieg vis-
ited Carter at his Sunday-school class.
Buttigieg is the only child of Joseph Buttigieg, a
Notre Dame professor (spoiler alert: a Joyce schol-
ar) who immigrated to America from Malta and met
his wife, Jennifer, in New Mexico. They soon moved
to South Bend, where Joseph taught and Jennifer
worked as a linguist. Despite Pete not understanding
the game completely, Joseph and his son had covet-
ed Notre Dame football season tickets. His parents
insisted on staying in the city while other professors
and professionals fled to the suburbs. (Pete and his
husband, Chasten, live in a house on the same block
where Buttigieg grew up.) Joseph protested Ronald
Reagan’s appearance on campus over the president’s
Central America policy, but still took his son to the
airport so he could see Air Force One.
In high school, Buttigieg was president of the stu-
dent council and voted most likely to be president of
the United States. He won a trip to Boston as a senior
for an essay on why he thought Bernie Sanders was a
courageous politician. His campaign staff urged that
I talk to his AP-economics teacher for color. In his
spare time, Buttigieg learned multiple languages and
played piano and guitar.
Buttigieg even turns his repressed sexuality to his
advantage. I ask him if he regretted missing romance
and liaisons while he was in his twenties. He turns
that angst upside down.
“If dating had been available to me in my twen-
ties, I’m not sure I would have achieved much of any-
thing,” Buttigieg says. “There’s a lot of energy in your
life that’s got to go somewhere, so it went into work.”
Maybe it’s true. His twenties were a Best and
Brightest track to Harvard, a Rhodes scholarship
during which, according to The New Yorker, he
learned Norwegian while in the loo. He joined the
Navy Reserve in 2009 as an intel officer, and conduct-
ed mayoral meetings from an Afghan rooftop when
he served a seven-month tour of duty in 2014. Fortu-
itously, he also wrote an opinion piece for the Har-
vard Crimson denouncing the Iraq War.
Some on the left have criticized him as an estab-
lishment box-checker, hoovering up credentials as
the world burned around him. The mention of this
criticism is one of only two times in a week on the
trail that I see Buttigieg get remotely defensive. (The
other is a brief grimace when an Iowa questioner
keeps insisting that South Bend is a small city.)
“I was advised to be careful about my profile,”
Buttigieg says. “Once somebody mentioned me being
a Rhodes scholar, and there was this big ovation. It
was a reminder to me that working people want their
kids to have great educational opportunities.”
Buttigieg returned home to South Bend in 2010 at
the age of 28 after three years at McKinsey & Compa-
ny, an international firm that advises companies on
efficiency that sometimes means downsizing, which
is probably why McKinsey is rarely mentioned in his
bio. Since no one else seemed interested, Buttigieg
ran for state treasurer against Richard Mourdock,
who would become infamous two years later during
a Senate run for saying that pregnancy — even from
rape — is something “God intended.” But there was
no gaffe in that election, and Buttigieg lost by a land-
slide. A self- described geek, Buttigieg wasn’t a natu-
ral campaigner but decided to try again in 2011 and
run for mayor of his hometown, the job he probably
wanted all along.
“We’d go to an event, and I’d say, ‘You’re going to
shake every hand in this room, and then you can join
me for dinner,’ ” says Mike Schmul, who managed
Buttigieg’s mayoral bid and now runs his presiden-
tial campaign. Buttigieg got better.
Campaigning, Buttigieg has copied the sleeves-
rolled-up, wade-into-the-crowd style of an RFK. It’s
probably not an accident. He tells me he admires JFK.
“He didn’t pretend to be something he wasn’t,” Butt-
igieg says. This is a slightly Disneyfied take on Ken-
nedy, who secretly womanized, and popped pills
to hide a potentially fatal case of Addison’s disease.
Back in South Bend, Buttigieg jokes that the Ken-
nedy comparisons only go so far.
“You know, definitely by the standards of JFK, I
really am a man of the people,” Buttigieg says with a
smile. “The biggest thing that I have going for me is
that people view me as what you see is what you get.”I
WOULDN’T SAY BUTTIGIEG has choreographed
his every move, but there have been some
dancing lessons. As mayor, he set downtown
revitalization and tearing down abandoned
homes as his two primary goals, both ideas that are
understandable on a national stage. In 2014, The
Washington Post called him “The Most Interesting
Mayor You’ve Never Heard Of.” With no logical office
to run for in blood-red Indiana, Buttigieg launched a
campaign to be national Democratic Party chairmanin 2017, running against the more established Min-
nesota Rep. Keith Ellison and former Labor Secre-
tary Tom Perez, the eventual winner. The DNC-chair
race was a no-lose situation. He was never in danger
of winning, but he achieved much networking with
an eye toward 2020.
But now comes the hard part. Buttigieg won
re-election as mayor with 8,500 votes. That is barely
more than an alderman needs to win a ward in Chi-
cago. Buttigieg has not yet proved he can move his
national support beyond the smart set. This is most
evident in South Carolina. Pete Fever is in its early
stage with Buttigieg and Chasten, a schoolteach-
er, appearing on the cover of Time. Before a North
Charleston town hall, I run into his communica-
tions adviser Lis Smith. She is pure adrenaline. “Pete
thinks the honeymoon is ending,” she says. “It’s not.”
Outside, a line stretches more than a hundred
yards as 600 people wait to slip into North Charles-
ton High School, while Buttigieg blushes backstage as
a photographer asks him to touch his nose, his face
and his hair to get contrast for his picture.
This is all promising, but I count exactly 13 African
Americans in the crowd. (North Charleston is 47 per-
cent black.) Inside, about half of the African Ameri-
cans are placed onstage behind Buttigieg to give the
illusion of diversity. The lack of actual diversity is
the main source of questions from reporters follow-
ing his speech. It continues the next day in rural Or-
angeburg, in front of another almost all-white town
hall. Charles Patton, a black student from South Car-
olina State, asks the first question: “Mayor Pete, are
you for us? If so, what exactly does that entail when
speaking in regards to black and brown lives?”
Buttigieg first responds with policy, ticking off five
things he wants to do for disadvantaged Americans:
home ownership, better health care, criminal-jus-
tice reform, entrepreneurship and improved public
schools. “One of the most important pieces of home-
work for our campaign is to make sure there is no
question in the minds of any minority voters, black
voters, be it in South Carolina or anywhere in the
country, where I stand and what I will do,” he says.
Sensing this isn’t what Patton wants to hear, Buttigieg
gets blunt: “I need help. Out here, people are just get-
ting to know me, and trust, in part, is a function of
quantity time, and we are racing against time.”
I catch up with Patton afterward. “The main issue
is trust,” Patton tells me. “We have been lied to so
many times.” He pauses for a moment. “I like what I
heard. I think I can trust him.”
There are multiple factors working against Butt-
igieg with black voters, beginning with the superfi-
cial. He looks like the youngest member of New Kids
on the Block. Add Cory Booker’s and Kamala Harris’
presence in the race, throw in Biden, Obama’s trusty
Robin, and you’ve got three candidates with viscer-
al ties to the community. There may be another rea-
son for Buttigieg’s nonsupport, the stat that dare not
speak its name: African Americans have been tradi-
tionally less comfortable with gay marriage. While 62
percent of whites support gay marriage, only 51 per-
cent of blacks do, a number undoubtedly lower in the
evangelical South.
Whatever the cause, it has to be fixed. A poll came
out a few days after the Orangeburg town hall show-
ing Buttigieg polling at exactly zero percent among
South Carolina’s black voters. Honeymoon over.PETE BUTTIGIEG
“It m atters what
message comes
out of the Oval
Office. What
we have right
now is something
that basically
gives voice to
bullies. This isn’t
just a policy job,
it’s a moral job.”