Small Town
Hero
O
n the Tuesday when I am to
meet Mayor Pete Buttigieg,
the South Bend Tribune,
his hometown paper, runs
a headline with staggering news: An
Emerson poll of likely Iowa Caucus
voters has put the mayor third among
Democratic prospects, ahead of ev-
erybody except the grizzled veterans
of the race, Bernie Sanders and Joe
Biden. The surge is just the latest in
a series of ascents that began when
Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of
a small Rust Belt city, announced his
exploratory committee for the presi-
dency in January. Since then, his un-
likely climb has energized a scattered
race, and has come as a shock to no
one more than to the candidate him-
self. “All these events that we set up as,
basically, meet-and-greet events end
up being rallies,” he tells me when I
arrive at the riverside white colonnad-
ed house he owns with his husband,
Chasten. “So I’m learning how to
adapt my style.”
In person, Buttigieg’s style is ami-
able and controlled. He speaks, like
a newscaster, in lucid paragraphs,
with a solid baritone and boxed-in
decorum. He seems to live in white
shirts and pressed slacks—it’s his dress
even now, around the house—and
wears his hair in the same tame coif
as Mike Pence, who was elected Indi-
ana’s governor the year he was sworn
in as mayor. Showing me into a living
room where books on display range
from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the
Twenty-First Century to Peanuts: A
Golden Celebration, he takes a seat in
front of a huge resource-and-mineral
map of Afghanistan. A burl-wood
chessboard sits beside a folded-over
copy of The New Yorker; most other
surfaces, including the dining-room
table in the other room, are piled with
work papers and the castoffs of a busy
life. The home is one of the nicest in
the city and serves as a reminder of
South Bend’s distance from the coasts:
The mortgage payment, according to
Buttigieg, is about $450 a month.
Since being elected in 2011, at 29,
the mayor has focused his attentions
on renewing a city that has not re-
gained its footing since the Studebaker
company, which once drove the local
economy, shuttered in the sixties. He
has distinguished himself by refusing
to look backward, instead clearing
abandoned properties and promoting
downtown development, tech, and
public art—often under scrutiny and
worry that his policies were not ben-
efiting all residents equally. To those
who question his age and experience
(the mayorship is the only public office
he has ever won), Buttigieg likes to
point out that he has been a govern-
ment executive longer than President
Trump. He defaults toward a wonky
interiority (he’s at his most animated
talking about policy reform) and lives
with a longtime wunderkind’s self-
minimizing streak: a habit of demurely
Photographed by Ethan James Green
Can a 37 - year-old
Indiana mayor capture
the White House?
Nathan Heller checks
in with Pete Buttigieg’s
suddenly not-so-long-
shot campaign.
THE UNDERDOG
Buttigieg declared his candidacy
in April and has vaulted to the
top tier of the Democratic field.
Grooming, Erin Anderson.
Details, see In This Issue.
Sittings Editor: Alex Harrington.
