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absorbing admiration as a matter of
course. His air is one of quiet, reces-
sive confidence. “I’m actually more
comfortable in front of a large crowd
than in front of a medium-size crowd,”
he tells me. “I’m not sure why—it’s
an instinct.”
Happily, large crowds have come to
be the norm. On April 14, Buttigieg
formally announced his candidacy be-
fore thousands assembled in a vault-
ed former Studebaker factory being
pelted by spring rain. “I ran
for mayor in 2011 knowing
that nothing like Studebak-
er would ever come back,
but that we would, our city
would, if we had the courage
to reimagine our future,” the
mayor said. “That’s why I’m
here today: to tell a different
story than ‘Make America
Great Again.’ ” Earlier that
week, on Ellen, Buttigieg
had sharpened his language
against the LGBTQ stances of Pence,
whom he had previously called “cheer-
leader of the porn-star presidency.”
(“I’m not feuding with the vice presi-
dent, but if he wanted to clear this up,
he could come out today and say he’s
changed his mind, that it shouldn’t be
legal to discriminate against anybody
in this country for who they are,” the
mayor told DeGeneres.) Of President
Trump he has said, “It is hard to look
at this president’s actions and believe
that they are the actions of somebody
who believes in God.” Swarmed with
political reporters at his rally, Buttigieg
elaborated his themes. “It is time to
walk away from the politics of the past,
and toward something totally differ-
ent,” he said. “I’m here to join you to
make a little news,” he continued as a
chant rose (“Pete! Pete! Pete!”). “I’m
a proud son of South Bend, Indiana,
and I am running for president of the
United States.”
The explosive cheers that followed
affirmed the mayor’s arrival as the uni-
corn in this year’s Democratic field.
There’s the improbability of his youth,
the smallness of his demesne (South
Bend’s population is about 100,000),
and the difficulty of his name, which is
easiest to say if you have never seen it
spelled. (It’s Boot-e-jedge—his father
was an immigrant from Malta—but
many South Bend residents simply
call him “Mayor Pete.”) There’s also a
thread of paradox running through his
life. Buttigieg is the Everyman-seeming
child of a forgotten Indiana town who
moved through Harvard, a Rhodes
Scholarship, Beltway jobs, and other
less-than-totally-relatable pursuits.
(It was recently revealed that he had
learned Norwegian for the purpose
of reading untranslated satiric novels
by Erlend Loe; The Onion parodied
his arcane overachiever’s knowl-
edge by quoting him “speaking to
manufacturing robots in fluent bi-
nary. ‘01001001.’ ”) He is a change-
oriented blue candidate who, while
mayor, underwent a seven-month de-
ployment to Afghanistan in the Navy
Reserve. If elected president, he would
be both the first Midwestern Christian
Democrat since Harry Truman and
the first openly gay person in the role;
Chasten (pronounced phonetically:
Chast-en) would be the nation’s first
First Man. Most paradoxically, Butt-
igieg seems to stir keenest excitement
among the tapped-in coastal latte
set. In March, The New York Times
anointed him with an unusually pi-
quant headline: new york buzzes
over a mayor mulling a 2020 bid
(buttigieg, not de blasio). None of
this has ever quite happened before.
B
uttigieg’s supporters hope
that this wave will propel him
from a small-city role to the
White House: After the elec-
tion of Trump, they argue, anything
is possible. Yet the longtime political
analyst Charlie Cook, of the Cook
Political Report, tells me he’d ascribe
any advantage Buttigieg has to a lon-
ger, pre-Trump arc of change. “Think
about the last Democrats elected pres-
ident,” he says. “Jimmy Carter was
a one-term senator and a one-term
governor, and nobody had heard of
him. Bill Clinton was a small-state
governor. Obama announced for
president on February 10, 2007, two
years and seven days after he became
a senator. He just barely got here.” For
the past few decades, in other words,
all successful Democrats have had the
air of arresting outsiders; the ques-
tion, Cook says, is less whether But-
tigieg qualifies by this measure than
whether he has the depth and presence
to hold his place onstage when the
spotlight passes to other novelties,
as it inevitably will. “People
don’t like traditional politi-
cians,” he says. “People with
nontraditional presidential
backgrounds—that’s become
a real asset. Also to have no,
or very little, congressional
voting record to defend.”
In a fractious political mo-
ment, pundits have sought to
pin down Buttigieg’s position
in the increasingly interne-
cine, left-of-center spread—
an exercise at which he bristles. “People
are always trying to situate you on this
line,” he complains. “The ideological
setup feels like it’s from another age,
a period when we would navigate all
politics based on choosing a spot, or
a score, on the left-right spectrum.”
Instead, he sees the political chaos
of the moment as an opportunity for
structural reform. Take the Electoral
College, which he thinks should be
abolished; or statehood for Washing-
ton, D.C., which he supports; or the
Supreme Court nomination process,
which he wants to reform: These are
institutional repairs that citizens of all
stripes can get behind, he thinks, and
their effects would be far-reaching.
He also believes policy challenges
such as the climate, drug-policy re-
form, gun control, and immigration
aren’t nearly as divisive as the pundit
class suggests. “The dark miracle of
this administration is that it’s taken
immigration—a subject on which
basically there’s a consensus on the
part of people about what to do—and
turned it into a wedge,” he says. But-
tigieg describes his own policy vision
as a “grand bargain that includes
pathways to citizenship, reforms
for the lawful-immigration system,
something to do for Dreamers, and
some kind of border-security pack-
age.” Such reforms make Buttigieg
sound more consensus-oriented than
His air is one of quiet, recessive
confidence. “I’m actually more
comfortable in front of a large
crowd than in front of a medium-
size crowd,” he tells me. “I’m not
sure why—it’s an instinct”
